Song 180: “Dazed and Confused” by Led Zeppelin, Part One, The Song Remains the Same

Interactive Transcript

spk_0 A history of rock music in 500 songs.

spk_0 Song 180.

spk_0 Daysden confused by Led Zeppelin.

spk_0 Part 1.

spk_0 The song remains the same.

spk_0 Before we begin, this episode contains some mild mentions of mental health problems,

spk_0 alcohol abuse and violence.

spk_0 If those things are likely to upset you, you may want to check the transcript instead

spk_0 of listening.

spk_0 One of the biggest changes to the way popular music was marketed from the mid-60s onwards,

spk_0 is the new emphasis that was put on performers who also wrote their own material.

spk_0 There had of course always been performers who wrote, particularly in the blues and country

spk_0 genres where the smaller labels that put out records by new artists wanted to copyright

spk_0 in new songs as much as they wanted the rights to recording.

spk_0 But in every genre to at least some extent.

spk_0 And we've looked at plenty of artists in recent episodes who didn't write all their

spk_0 own material.

spk_0 Bands like The Turtles, The Monkeys or The Birds and most of the Motown artists.

spk_0 Or at least there's no interpretation of other people's songs as for writing their own.

spk_0 But it was still the case that, in large part because of the promotion of Lennon and

spk_0 McCartney's songwriters as well as performers, and if Bob Dylan is a performer of his own

spk_0 material, as the 60s drew on, a key signifier of authenticity in popular music.

spk_0 A four concept of the best of times was whether the performer wrote the songs that were performing.

spk_0 And so the grew to be a change in the type of material that charted.

spk_0 Before the mid-60s it was expected that songs would be performed by many different artists

spk_0 who would each do their own version in their own style.

spk_0 Tony Bennett's version of Cold Cold Heart bore little or no relationship to Hank Williams'

spk_0 and nobody expected it to.

spk_0 But as the idea of people performing their own material as a selling point rather than

spk_0 is just something that happened, started to become prominent in the industry.

spk_0 It also linked with another idea, one that was sold less to the public but was nonetheless true.

spk_0 Increasingly, the unit of popular music was the record, not the song.

spk_0 As production was becoming more and more sophisticated, people were constructing sounds in

spk_0 the studio, rather than writing songs that would stand apart from their arrangements and performances.

spk_0 A record like, say, strobed refills forever by the Beatles, is not a record that could easily

spk_0 be covered, though of course people have tried. The song is a lucid, deeply personal,

spk_0 and really only makes sense when sung by John Lennon. While much for the power of the record comes

spk_0 not from the song, great as it is, but from the melodre and the orchestral arrangements and so forth.

spk_0 If you replace them, you lose half of what makes strobed refills worth listening to.

spk_0 And this posed a problem for a whole generation of singers, because the pop singers

spk_0 who had come to prominence in the 30s, 40s and 50s, many of whom were still only in early middle

spk_0 age, had until very recently been having regular hits, and were far from willing to settle back

spk_0 into retirement. They had built their careers on recording their own interpretations of

spk_0 Coven Pop hit, and suddenly most of the biggest hits were not songs you could easily reinterpret.

spk_0 Yet almost all of them, whether from their own desire to keep up with the times or under

spk_0 record company pressure, felt like they had to record material by the new generation of writers.

spk_0 Sometimes they were managed to pull off something really rather special.

spk_0 LFHIT's Gerald, for example, recorded her Ella album, produced by Richard Perry,

spk_0 in which she recorded songs by Smokey Robinson, Randy Newman, and The Beatles.

spk_0 Cool cherry green, my sample top.

spk_0 I feel your face all the time we're apart.

spk_0 We're coping the foot, really blown down the blues.

spk_0 But you have to have your whole pool out, I feel the support of truffle.

spk_0 And turning what may be the definitive version of Harry Nelson's Open Your Window.

spk_0 That's you.

spk_0 Others were more mixed. Peggy Lee, for example, put out some great versions of songs by Randy

spk_0 Newman and Leiborne Stoller, and did a very credible take on, you make me feel like a natural woman.

spk_0 You make me feel, you make me feel, you make me feel, you make me feel like a natural woman.

spk_0 And when my soul was in the lost and found,

spk_0 but sounds frankly lost when attempting everyday people.

spk_0 There is a long hair who doesn't like the short hair,

spk_0 bobeans that are rich, one that will not help the poor one.

spk_0 Your pants don't, but your pants, and so on and so on,

spk_0 as could be the duty to be.

spk_0 But sometimes the mismatch between singer and song could be so painful that it would continue

spk_0 to be a joke more than 50 years later, as with Frank Sinatra, a man who hated rock and roll and

spk_0 the younger generation with every five in his body, and his different interpretation of Simon

spk_0 and Garfunkel's Mrs Robinson.

spk_0 And here's to you Mrs Robinson,

spk_0 the jelly mentioned in Sinatra's altered lyrics is not, as one would expect, a woman.

spk_0 Rather it's a tip of the hat to a man named Ermane Gildo Rizzo, known to everyone as Jilly.

spk_0 Jilly Rizzo was a former bouncer and small-time criminal turned bar owner,

spk_0 and the bar he owned, Jilly's in Manhattan, became the place where Sinatra spent most of his time

spk_0 when he was in New York, and it was there that the two most successful singers named Frank

spk_0 from New Jersey met, sometimes towards the end of the 60s.

spk_0 While Sinatra was born in Hoboken, Frankie Valley was from New York about 12 miles away,

spk_0 and was, like Sinatra, an Italian American, his birth name is Francesco Castelluccio,

spk_0 and he had been inspired to become a singer in large part thanks to being taken by his mother

spk_0 to see a Sinatra show when he was seven years old. Success at Converterly Late for Valley,

spk_0 who had started performing in 1951 and made his first solo record in 1953, and had then struggled

spk_0 for years with a vocal group called The Four Lovers, who had various line-up changes but

spk_0 didn't really come together as a group until they met the royal teens, who had been one hitwonders

spk_0 with short shots.

spk_0 Bob Gordio, the royal teen's keyboard player, had co-written that song, and he joined The Four Lovers,

spk_0 who soon after changed their name to The Four Seasons. Very early on, Valley and Gordio

spk_0 agreed between themselves that the two of them, as lead singer and songwriter respectively,

spk_0 would actually be The Four Seasons legally. Other members came and went over the years,

spk_0 and Gordio stopped touring with the group in 1972, though he remained with them for recordings.

spk_0 But to this day, The Four Seasons' partnership is Frankie Valley, who still tours in his 90s,

spk_0 and Bob Gordio, who was 82 years old. Indeed, that partnership has always been on the honor system.

spk_0 According to Gordio, there has never been a formal contract made up for their partnership,

spk_0 because it encompasses so many different aspects. Performance, only of their master recordings,

spk_0 their publishing company, The Four Seasons' name, and much more besides.

spk_0 Instead, they sealed the agreement with a handshake in 1962, and as Valley pops it, it has

spk_0 lasted longer than any of our marriages, so what can I tell you? Everybody should start a

spk_0 relationship with a handshake and live a couple of states away from each other. And they split

spk_0 everything. Gordio gets an equal royalty for every performance that Valley does,

spk_0 whether that's The Four Seasons or The Solo Artist, and whether he's performing Gordio's

spk_0 material or someone else's. And similarly, Valley gets 50% of Gordio's songwriting money,

spk_0 whether for songs he wrote for The Four Seasons or For Other Artists.

spk_0 After a false start with a single on Gone Records, one of several labels started by George

spk_0 Gold and bought up by Maurice Levy. The Four Seasons had their first hit in 1962 with Sherry,

spk_0 a song by Gordio which reached number one.

spk_0 That record was produced by Bob Crew, who would often co-write with Gordio, and soon there was a

spk_0 whole hit-making team based around The Four Seasons with everyone having a part to play.

spk_0 Valley is lead singer, Bob Crew is producer and sometime lyricist, Bob Crew is

spk_0 principal songwriter and uncredited co-producer and Charles Cullello, a former member of The Four

spk_0 Lovers who Valley had kept in touch with, and who had briefly joined The Four Seasons himself

spk_0 when bass player Nick Massey left before her permanent replacement was found. As of Anger,

spk_0 later joined by the additional songwriting team of Sandy Alinser and Denny Randell,

spk_0 who would write both as a team on their own and with Crew and Gordio.

spk_0 The group had a very distinctive style.

spk_0 Led by Valley's piercing falsetto, the combined harmony is influenced by The Four

spk_0 freshmen, high lows and modern heirs, though never as complex as any of those groups.

spk_0 With a stomping four on the floor beat, very much in the style of the records,

spk_0 Holland Doge and Holland were producing from Motown around the same time.

spk_0 Not everything was a hit, but after Sherry they had three more number one hits in the next two

spk_0 years. Big girls don't cry.

spk_0 Big girls don't cry.

spk_0 Big girls

spk_0 They don't cry.

spk_0 All like the man.

spk_0 All like the man by son.

spk_0 All the fun.

spk_0 All the time on the earth.

spk_0 So all like the man by son.

spk_0 And Wackdoll.

spk_0 In the years from 1962 through 1964, they were the second biggest American band in terms of

spk_0 record sales after the Beach Boys. And while the Beach Boys had more hits overall in that time,

spk_0 they didn't get their first number one until the four seasons had had four.

spk_0 There was a friendly rivalry between the two as a result, with the Beach Boys slipping in a dig at

spk_0 the East Coast group in their album track, Surface Rule.

spk_0 Surface Rule.

spk_0 The surfers are winning.

spk_0 And they say as they're winning, Surface Rule.

spk_0 Surface Rule.

spk_0 Four seasons.

spk_0 You better believe it.

spk_0 Surface Rule.

spk_0 The four seasons suffered more than the Beach Boys from the British invasion.

spk_0 It didn't help their record label, VJ,

spk_0 had picked up the license to the Beatles' first album before Captain of the Released I Want to Hold Your Hand.

spk_0 And VJ, understandably, decided to concentrate on making as much money from the Beatles as they

spk_0 could in 1964. VJ also ended up going bankrupt as a result of a combination of legal action

spk_0 by capital to try to reclaim the rights of that album, and trying to deliver vastly more

spk_0 stocks than they had capacity to produce.

spk_0 Luckily for Valley, Crew and Gordio, they got the rights that they're recordings back in a

spk_0 settlement when VJ collapsed, but the group wouldn't have a number one again until 1975.

spk_0 They did, though, have a run of top 20 and top 10 hits in the mid-60s, records like Big Man in Town.

spk_0 And let's hang on.

spk_0 Let's hang on.

spk_0 They also put out a version of Bob Dylan's Don't Think Twice It's All Right as The Wonder Who.

spk_0 It didn't take much to figure out who they were, though, thanks to Valley's distinctive vocal,

spk_0 and that made number 12.

spk_0 Why?

spk_0 Not only that, but they tried the same trick that had been done with Buddy Holly and The Crickets,

spk_0 releasing some singles under Valley's name as a solo artist,

spk_0 though the tracks were recorded at four seasons sessions with the other seasons on backing vocals.

spk_0 Some of these were hits as well, like the Crew and Gordio song Can't Take My Eyes Off You,

spk_0 which went to number two.

spk_0 And even when songs weren't a huge hit for Valley or The Group,

spk_0 they would still often be a success for someone else.

spk_0 The Trumelos had a big hit in both the US and the UK with the version of Crew and Gordio's

spk_0 Silence as Golden, which had been the best side of Rackdoll.

spk_0 While Crew and Gordio was the sonnate gonna shine anymore,

spk_0 which had been a flop solo single for Valley, not even reaching the Hot 100,

spk_0 made the US Top 20 and UK number one in a cover version by The World of Brothers.

spk_0 Valley and Sinatra met when the four seasons agreed at the last minute to replace the

spk_0 headliner to benefit show Sinatra's motherhood put on, when the headliner became unavailable.

spk_0 Sinatra got Jully to invite Valley to the bar to meet him and thank Valley for doing

spk_0 her favour for his mother. The two became friends and became closer in 1968 when they did some

spk_0 shows together for Hubert Humphrey's unsuccessful presidential campaign. The last time Sinatra

spk_0 would endorse the Democrat. He endorsed Ronald Reagan for Governor of California in 1970,

spk_0 and Humphrey's victorious opponent Richard Nixon in his 1972 re-election campaign.

spk_0 According to Kallello, Valley and Sinatra got talking, and Sinatra asked Valley how he'd

spk_0 managed to have so many hits. Sinatra himself was in something of a career slump,

spk_0 and was worrying about how he could continue to be relevant in a market he didn't understand.

spk_0 Kallello later said, Frankie had a lot of confidence in my ability, and he also had a lot of confidence

spk_0 in Gordio's ability. So he told Sinatra he had all those hit records because Bob Gordio

spk_0 wrote and produced all their songs. And Sinatra said, well could he write some songs for me?

spk_0 He did, but they weren't the kind of songs that the four seasons have become famous with.

spk_0 Oh,

spk_0

spk_0 the water down.

spk_0 Like everyone else in the music business, Bob Gordio had been shaken by the release of

spk_0 Sergeant Pappas-Loni Hard's Club band in 1967. While to modern ears, Pappin no longer sounds like

spk_0 that much of a departure from the music around it. We can hear more clearly how it was a natural

spk_0 response to the music that other artists were making at the time. It seemed like a total break

spk_0 from everything that Papp music had been in 1967. And as a result, over the next year or two,

spk_0 all the Papp acts were having hits in 1964 through 1966, found themselves in the same position as

spk_0 those singers from an earlier age, trying desperately to adapt to the new style. And so just as the

spk_0 crew members were all making my rock and roll record, every beat group and vocal group that didn't

spk_0 just decide to give up and accept up some lessons decided to make our Sergeant Pappa,

spk_0 an orchestral psychedelic album that showed how ambitious they could be. We've heard about these

spk_0 in episodes on the Rolling Stones, whose Sergeant Pappa was of course their satanic majesty's

spk_0 request, and the small faces who did Ogden's not gone flake. But there were many, many more.

spk_0 The best and best known of these is the Zombies Odyssey and Oracle, which now regularly makes

spk_0 less of the greatest albums ever made.

spk_0 But the role so albums like The Bee Gees Odessa.

spk_0 had And Jermyncjes of Cabages and Kings.

spk_0 cast

spk_0 Made sin by

spk_0

spk_0 And Gelendines are released Carnival of Sound.

spk_0 And when Gordio had decided to make the four seasons-owned Sergeant Pepper, he had decided to use a new collaborator he hadn't worked with before.

spk_0 A foky he had seen playing at a Greenwich Village Club. Gordio had seen Jake Holmes singing a song titled Genuine Emutation Life and decided that he would be the perfect livicist to work on the four seasons new socially conscious psychedelic material.

spk_0 Holmes was a very odd character who had had a bizarre career that intersected with many of the stars long before connecting with Gordio.

spk_0 He had actually started out in comedy. He and his then wife had formed a comedy duo that satirized the clean cup folk singers of the time.

spk_0 Calling themselves Alan and Grier, they released one album, it's better to be rich than ethnic. Coincidentally on VJ Records, the same label at the four seasons were right at the time.

spk_0 Holmes was the name she went by. She was daddy's chocolate egg-layer. I recall the memo she typed us.

spk_0 Here she wrote in pursuit of the fox in his lyr.

spk_0 It's better to be rich than ethnic. That's the American way.

spk_0 According to Holmes, Pete Seeger called Alan and Grier the most tasteless folk group ever, and a lot of their material has dated rather badly.

spk_0 The ballad of the camping woodcutters for example, is a parody 17th century ballad that uses a variety of words that have two meanings, but in all cases one of them is a homophobic slur.

spk_0 However, Holmes and his wife split up sometime in the early 60s and obviously the Alan and Grier act ended when the two part had ways.

spk_0 For a while, Holmes performed with Tim Rose, the folk singer we've heard about in several episodes including the ones on San Francisco and Hage O.

spk_0 Playing bass with Rose and rhythm guitarist Rich Hudson in her trio various denoners, the Feldmans and Tim Rose and the Thorns.

spk_0 While that trio does not appear to have made any recordings that I can find, according to Holmes it was with that group that Rose first started performing his slow down arrangement of Hage O.

spk_0 Hage O.

spk_0 Where you going with that money in your hand?

spk_0 Hage O.

spk_0 Where you going with that money in your hand?

spk_0 I'm going downtown, I'm going to buy me a blue steel 44.

spk_0 But Holmes quit that act as well and formed a comedy folk trio.

spk_0 Jim J. Conjone was put together by Holmes as manager Fred Weintraub and was meant to be a satirical comedy answer to Peter Paul and Mary, who had been put together by Weintraub's rival Albert Grossman.

spk_0 The group did a mixture of Alan and Grier material and newer comedy songs, but they were never very successful.

spk_0 As far as I've been able to tell, the only surviving recording of the group is from an ultra low budget feature film, very as he called Hutonania Go Go or once upon a coffee shop.

spk_0 That film apparently only got a single screening at the time, but featured a bunch of similarly unknown artists, including the Goldvires, whose leader Kurt Betcher has also turned up in several episodes.

spk_0 And this performance by the trio.

spk_0 It's divided into two groups, one brushed with crest, the other used another leading denta frist.

spk_0 Betty, would you mind telling us the results of these tests?

spk_0 My group had 79% more cavities.

spk_0 And you were gullible, happy to round users.

spk_0 Now, tell me this, what did you learn from these extensive texts?

spk_0 Had a supper.

spk_0 That group also split up soon, because when they turned up to perform at a rally for Robert F. Kennedy's sanitorial campaign in 1964,

spk_0 Joan insisted on wearing a badge for his republican rival, and Jim decided that the group didn't need her anymore.

spk_0 Jim Cunnell became a minor bit part actor with a handful of credits and shows like Get Smart and The Wild Wild West, usually for unnamed rules.

spk_0 Joan Rivers, though, had slightly more success.

spk_0 And the reason the film is available today is because it's her first credited film appearance.

spk_0 After this, Holmes briefly joined a rock group, but decided that wasn't working and he wanted to be a singer-songwriter in the mold of Jacques Drell.

spk_0 He got together just guitarist Ted Irwin and bass player Rick Randall, and started playing the coffee houses.

spk_0 In 1967, he released his debut album, The Above Drown Sound of Jake Holmes, including the single, Genuine Imitation Life.

spk_0 The album did little, although that song was picked up by Jackie Lomax, a singer and friend of the Beatles, who was managed by Brian Epstein, who released his own solo version as a single.

spk_0 Holmes followed The Above Drown Sound with a second album, again featuring Irwin but no longer featuring Mandel, who had had mental health problems and eventually refused to get on a plane.

spk_0 That one, I'll let it to Catherine De Sember, a collection of songs mostly about the breakdown of Holmes' marriage, is generally considered his greatest, and is very much in the same mold as albums like Astral Weeks, Forever Changes, and The Early Work of Tim Buckley.

spk_0 Combining light orchestration, eccentric folk style melodies, and jazz guitar.

spk_0 Climbing up a waterfall.

spk_0 Neither of these albums did anything much in terms of sales, but Holmes was getting noticed by other musicians.

spk_0 He, Irwin and Mandel, played on the bottom of the build to the Unblut and the Artbirds in late 1967, and two of the Artbirds immediately went out and bought his first album after the show, and Bob Gordio was similarly impressed.

spk_0 Holmes and Gordio wrote an entire album of songs for the first seasons, titled Genuine Imitation Life Gazette, and featuring the first season's own version of Holmes' first solo single as its title track.

spk_0 But never touching eyes.

spk_0 Taking all their masks.

spk_0 Revealing still another guy.

spk_0 That track included a section where they just copied the ending of Hey Jude, hoping and expecting to get sued for it and maybe get some free publicity.

spk_0 But of course, at that time, with one or two exceptions, rock musicians were generally of the opinion that it was okay to steal a little bit of each of the songs. And no action was ever taken.

spk_0 The material Holmes and Gordio came up with was very, very far from anything the four seasons were known for before.

spk_0 Given songs like Big Girls Don't Cry and Cherry, you can understand why people were not expecting a seven minute opening song titled American Crucifixion Resurrection.

spk_0 The head of the snake, the fruits of the peace, is screaming late.

spk_0 The weight of the water and ladies and boys, we cry when they lose their growth, we sleep in through the years of their one way.

spk_0 And by the first single Saturday's father, a slow ballad about a divorced father taking his kids out on the one day a week he has custody, was not a massive commercial success.

spk_0 The album was a masterpiece and it was given an exceptionally imaginative complex package, one that befitted an album of its status.

spk_0 The gatefold cover was designed as a newspaper with a mixture of joking articles about the band, one member marrying the silent film star T.Dabara for example, and articles that were just the lyrics to some of the songs.

spk_0 This cover was later covered, as it were, by both John Lennon and New Yorker O'Hono for their sometime in New York City album.

spk_0 Lennon apparently said the album was a favourite of his and Jettaro told for Thicca's abrik.

spk_0 The album also featured an insert in the style of a colour supplement, including pages of joke adverts and a comics page with parodies of then-current newspaper comic strips, done in the style of the underground comics that were popular at the time.

spk_0 And, sadly, reproducing some of the racist caricatures were popular in that style.

spk_0 The whole thing was one of the most incredibly imaginative records of the late 60s, but sold pitifully compared to other four seasons albums, because their teen pop audience didn't want psychedelic, satirical records with orchestrations that were something like a band-eye parks album, while the audience for that kind of material didn't want it from the four seasons.

spk_0 But it was the teen behind this album, Holmes, Gordio and Aranger Charles Cullello, that Sinatra took on in the hope of revitalising his own career.

spk_0 After the introduction by Valley, who gets a special thanks in the liner notes to the record, and who seems to regard the eventual album as as much a part of his legacy as his own recordings, Gordio became the one who dealt with Sinatra in his team, and he was rather desperate to please him.

spk_0 At one point, during the discussions, Gordio mentioned that he'd just bought a holiday estate, and suggested that Sinatra should come and visit as a pleasantry.

spk_0 Sinatra agreed and said, abring my trunks, causing Gordio to panic, he didn't actually have a swimming pool there.

spk_0 He rushed to get one pot in in a couple of days before Sinatra arrived, and then, depending on which version of the story you believe, either Sinatra cancelled at the last minute just as the pool had been completed, or there was a rainstorm just as it was completed which washed tons of soil into the pool and rendered it unusable.

spk_0 There seems to have been a little miscommunication between Sinatra's camp in terms of Gordio, though it went off and wrote an entire concept album, and only later realised that it had only been expected to get a song or two.

spk_0 But as it happened, Sinatra chose to record the entire album, and it became the most remarkable record of Sinatra's career.

spk_0 The album, titled Watertown, was conceived with the expectation that it would go along with the TV special, which seems to have been planned at one point, and the opening title track works to set the scene.

spk_0 One can imagine the visuals as a camera tracks him from a distant shot of the town itself to Sinatra alone, singing on a railway station platform.

spk_0 The bass figure at the start of the album seems to be, though I've never seen anyone state this definitively,

spk_0 I'm not back to Sinatra's earlier hit Love and Marriage, but if so, it's a bit like I'm on it one, and the album turns the theme of that track on its head.

spk_0 Watertown is an early example of the subjama of records that became popular in the early 70s, records about divorce.

spk_0 Sinatra is in character throughout the record, as an old man whose younger, vibrant wife has left him and their children, and taken off to the big city.

spk_0 After the album's opening, we're introduced to the real premise as Sinatra sings about the break up in the present tense.

spk_0 It's happening now, as if the protagonist is trapped in that moment forever.

spk_0 There is no big explosion, no tempest in the tea, the world that does not stop turning round.

spk_0 Most of the rest of the album consists of songs addressed to the protagonist's wife Elizabeth,

spk_0 seeming to be let as he's writing, either talking about his common life and telling you about their children and how they're growing up, or reminiscing about their past life together.

spk_0 As the album goes on, we start to realise that the protagonist is an unreliable narrator.

spk_0 In his descriptions of his wife, it becomes clear that he never understood her even though he loved her.

spk_0 She was brighter, younger, and more ambitious than him, and seems to have run off with the man who shares more of those qualities.

spk_0 The album is one of the bleakest, most adult records I've ever heard, and is a genuinely difficult listen, which has often reduced me to literal tears.

spk_0 The most devastating song in the context of the story is What's Now Is Now, where our protagonist is so deeply in denial, but also deeply in love.

spk_0 That he thinks the only thing stopping his ex-wife from returning to him is worry about either his reaction or that of the neighbours.

spk_0 That she'll come back if only she knows she's forgiven.

spk_0 What's Now Is Now, and I'll forget what happened then.

spk_0 I know it all, and we can still begin.

spk_0 And the album ends with two songs that between them leave you wondering just how unreliable an narrator, the unnamed protagonist is.

spk_0 And she says we got the news that Elizabeth is returning.

spk_0 The price is high, high as the sky.

spk_0 And she says she says she's coming home.

spk_0 And then in the final song, The Train, we return to that train platform as the protagonist waits and waits and waits, and she doesn't come.

spk_0 The train is slowly moving on, but I can't see you anyway.

spk_0 And I know for sure I'd recognize your fears, and I know for sure I'd recognize your fears.

spk_0 But the real punchline, the part that makes you wonder if you've been understanding what's going on at all, is hidden in the middle of the song when he's still happy and singing about how we'll talk about the part of you and ever understood and I will take good care of you and never let you cry.

spk_0 The letters he's been writing to have just been put in a drawer.

spk_0 He never actually sent them, so what was she replying to?

spk_0 Did he ever receive a reply from her at all?

spk_0 He's been stood on the platform all day.

spk_0 At the start of the album, there's someone standing in the rain waiting for the morning train, but by the last track, the sun has broken through and the kids are coming home from school, so he's not been waiting for a particular train.

spk_0 He's just been stood there.

spk_0 In the rain, all day, waiting for Elizabeth to turn up.

spk_0 Watertown is a devastating, astonishing album, and must have been placed on a different level from almost any record of its type, and one of the few albums of this year have truly liturated and liturary lyrics.

spk_0 Words which take on more meaning and significance than more of attention to your pay to them, rather than dissolving into meaninglessness.

spk_0 And it became St. Actra's worst selling album ever.

spk_0 It's now regarded as one of the best things in his discography, but it took decades to reach that state.

spk_0 It's also one of the very few St. Actra albums to have inspired almost no cover versions.

spk_0 The only notable one is Nina Simone's rather lovely version of For a Wild.

spk_0 With so many other lives to listen to, and some music that I've got to, I forget.

spk_0 The songwriting partnership between Gordio and Holmes soon pleaded out, given that the collaboration seems to have the opposite of the Midas' touch.

spk_0 There were a handful more credits on four seasons records and one for St. Actra, mostly left overs from their earlier collaborations.

spk_0 But the four seasons continued without Holmes.

spk_0 After a few years floundering, they released several more hits in the mid-70s, capitalising on a wave of nostalgia for the late 50s and early 60s, like December 1963 or What a Night.

spk_0 For a Wild, I got a fun at giving what you want.

spk_0 Valley continues performing as the four seasons to this day.

spk_0 Holmes went back to solo recording, but never had much more success as a performer.

spk_0 He did have some successes as a songwriter though.

spk_0 His next solo album, So Close, So Very Far To Go, was the closest he came to having a hit record, the album making number 135 on the album chart, while the lead off single So Close reached number 49 on the charts.

spk_0 There's been some time between us, but I had to stand back so, to get the room to see.

spk_0 That somehow became something of a standard though, being recorded by a bizarre variety of performers, including the British comedian Freddy Star.

spk_0 The whole song is now on the chart now.

spk_0 I'll be staying.

spk_0 I won't go.

spk_0 Don't you cry now.

spk_0 We can't try now.

spk_0 Just take some distance and to know.

spk_0 So Close.

spk_0 Mary Travers, formerly of Peter Polar Mary.

spk_0 And Harry Bollafonte.

spk_0 You could see my eyes were asking, I could feel yours, rolling at my sleeve.

spk_0 Bollafonte, in fact, became a big advocate of Holmes' work, and over the years he recorded many of Holmes' songs.

spk_0 The most of Bollafonte's records after the mid 70s contained at least one home song, often several of them.

spk_0 Bollafonte's last studio album, in fact, 1988's Paradise in Gazan Kulu, is entirely made up of songs co-written by Holmes,

spk_0 who Bollafonte got to collaborate with Black South African musicians to write an album of songs about the evils of the apartheid regime.

spk_0 That's Paradise in Gazan Kulu.

spk_0 What's the heart?

spk_0 What's the pain?

spk_0 If you take it to the promised land.

spk_0 But Bollafonte was the most prominent promoter of Holmes' songwriting.

spk_0 The material Holmes wrote for Bollafonte was far from his most successful, because while Holmes' recording career was never success,

spk_0 he wrote many, many songs that you have definitely heard, especially if you're an American of a certain age.

spk_0 Like this collaboration with Vanden Eumann.

spk_0 All of this.

spk_0 You're reaching deep inside you.

spk_0 Oh, the things you've never known.

spk_0 It's been tough, rough going.

spk_0 What you haven't gone long.

spk_0 We do more before 9am than most people do all day.

spk_0 Hey, for a sergeant.

spk_0 Good morning.

spk_0 All this.

spk_0 The Gillette Atropa system with the loopless moves script for the best a man can get.

spk_0 And of course, there was the song with the impressive Yard Bird so much that they had to go out and buy Holmes' first album after seeing him support them.

spk_0 A song with Thomas Deftyone who has heard the late 60s rock record has heard, though almost none of them knew it was by Holmes.

spk_0 On days didn't get used to it stays it goes.

spk_0 The lobbying shoes, but I'd just like to know.

spk_0 Give me a clue as to where I am at.

spk_0 Feel like a mouse and your act like a cat.

spk_0 Jimmy Page, the man who was credited as the sole writer of the most famous version of that song, started his musical career as a choir boy, something that seems not to fit with Page's later image as the biggest proponent of the occult and black magic in rock and roll music.

spk_0 But it was paradoxically his love of the devil's music that got him involved with the church, as he told the Sunday Times in 2010.

spk_0 In those days it was difficult to access rock and roll music because after all the riots happened in the cinemas where people had rock around the clock in the film Blackboard Jungle, the authorities tried to lock it all down.

spk_0 So you needed to tune into the radio or go to places where you could hear it.

spk_0 It just so happened that in youth clubs there were play records and you'd get to hear Elvis, Geri Lee, Lewis and Mickey Nelson.

spk_0 But you'd have to either go to church or be a member of the choir to go to the youth club.

spk_0 When he was 12 in 1956, Page decided to pick up an acoustic guitar that had been left in his family home by a previous occupier and had gone untouched for a long time.

spk_0 He was inspired by hearing Scotty Moore's playing on Elvis's Baby Let's Play House in particular.

spk_0 Once Upon a Time

spk_0 This is One Thing Baby. Why do I want you to know?

spk_0 Moore would be Page's first guitar hero and he decided that he needed to learn to play like that.

spk_0 He found a friend at school, Rud Wyatt, who showed him a few chords, and then he got

spk_0 hold of Bert Whedon's classic instruction manual playing on the day. He started playing

spk_0 guitar for up to seven hours a day, practicing intently, and only child who was somewhat spoiled

spk_0 by his parents. He was soon able to get a semi-acoustic guitar and an amp and a small tape recorder.

spk_0 While Scottie Moore was his first musical influence, he soon found others, most notably

spk_0 Chuck Berry, who he became obsessed with to the point that in his teens he once hitchhacked

spk_0 50 miles to get to a cinema which was showing the classic documentary about the New Park

spk_0 Jazz Festival, jazz on a summer's day, because there was a performance by Berry of a single

spk_0 song in it. Like every teenager in possession of a guitar in 1957, Paige formed his own

spk_0 Skiffle group, the James Page Skiffle group. Unlike most of them though, Paige even at

spk_0 2013 was ambitious and focused on success. He made his first TV appearance that year,

spk_0 on a children's show presented by Hugh Weldon, playing guitar and also singing on Mamadon

spk_0 to Laugh, the old folk song, and on Hughley Ledbetter's Cottonfield.

spk_0 In the middle of the night, Paige was the first to sing a song in the middle of the night.

spk_0 Interviewed by Weldon between the songs, Paige said that he wanted to go into biological

spk_0 research and find a cure for cancer, but it was very obvious even at that age that

spk_0 he was going to become a musician. The next few years, sorry, and become ever more

spk_0 focused on emulating his guitar heroes. Along with Berry and more, his biggest influences

spk_0 in these early years were Cliff Gallup, the original guitarist for Gene Vincent's Blue

spk_0 Caps.

spk_0 And James Burton, who had gone to play with the wrecking crew in Elvis, but at this point

spk_0 was playing for Ricky Nelson. School friends remember Paige spending a long time trying

spk_0 to replicate Burton's solo on its late.

spk_0 It's late, it's late, we're about to run out of gas, it's late, it's late, we gotta get

spk_0 home fast, can't speak, can't speak, we're in a slow down zone, but baby look at that

spk_0 clock, why can't it be wrong, if we could have left home at a quarter tonight, would

spk_0 have had fun, not plenty of time. Paige left school at 15, but not to become a biological

spk_0 researcher as he'd intended two years earlier, instead he was going to get into the music

spk_0 business and not just as a musician. At the age of 17 he approached local singer Chris

spk_0 Farlow, the leader of an album B group, Chris Farlow and The Thunderbirds. Farlow was a few

spk_0 years older and was starting to be regarded as the best blue singer in London at the time.

spk_0 Paige offered to produce an album for Farlow and The Thunderbirds. He'd put up the money

spk_0 to record it himself and he would supervise but not play on the session. The album didn't

spk_0 get released until 2017, but Paige did finance and produce the record, which was made up of

spk_0 cover versions of contemporary arm and beat tracks, like Bobby Parker's Watch Your Step and

spk_0 Ballot Strong's Money.

spk_0 Farlow remembered that Paige already seemed to have a good understanding of the studio

spk_0 and that he'd suggested recording the guitar by direct injection rather than going through

spk_0 an amp. But while Paige didn't play on that session, it was not because he had given

spk_0 up on playing the guitar. He was spending much of his time playing with a band called

spk_0 Reddy Lewis and the Red Caps, named in honor of Gene Vincent's Blue Caps. And around

spk_0 the same time we produced the Farlow album, he was also introduced to the poet Wojce

spk_0 D'Nellis, who as we heard in the episode on Apache had been performing poetry recitals

spk_0 back by the shadows, but was looking for other musicians to back him in his rocketry

spk_0 performances. Because the shadows were now well on their way to dominating the British

spk_0 charts for the first chunk of the 60s. Ellis initially thought that the Red Caps could

spk_0 be his backing band for Southern dates. He had another band he was working with in the

spk_0 North, but eventually just decided to use Jimmy Paige on his own, including, as we

spk_0 again heard in the Apache episode, for what would be Paige's second TV appearance.

spk_0 The Climps from the flickering screen of a boy and his bird in the stalls, not coddling

spk_0 and kissing right at the back, but slumped in the front row, sharing a basket of fruit,

spk_0 sucking an orange with casual pleasure, then munching an apple and punching his bird with

spk_0 warm understanding and a tender lack of any accepted traditions.

spk_0 While the Red Caps is a group that didn't do much, they did, through their connection

spk_0 with Ellis, in-demet they have a big effect on music history, because, at least according

spk_0 to one biography of Paige I've used as a source for this episode, it was the Red Caps who

spk_0 tore Ellis how you could get some vitamins from an inhaler, a tricky then showed to his

spk_0 northern band, thus introducing the Beatles to drugs for the first time. The Red Caps changed

spk_0 their name to Neil Christian and the Crusaders, and became a moderately successful touring

spk_0 band. They also got signed by Joe Meek, who produced their first single recorded in

spk_0 October 1962, the month for 60s started.

spk_0 A version of that without Meek's orchestral overdose was released a couple of years ago,

spk_0 so you can hear Paige's guitar playing better.

spk_0 However, by the time the single was released, in November 1962, Paige had got tired of life

spk_0 on the road. He was becoming ill on a regular basis, coming down with repeated bouts of

spk_0 Glangelo Fever, what Americans call mono, where she put down to touring in a cramped

spk_0 tour bus with no heating, and the general unglammed-rest lifestyle of the touring musician.

spk_0 Age 18, Jimmy Paige decided he was going to give up on becoming a musician, and become

spk_0 an artist instead. He quit the band and started at art school. Though giving up on the ambition

spk_0 to being a musician didn't stop him from being intensely interested in music. On October

spk_0 22, he travelled all the way to Manchester to see the American Folk Blues Festival, a

spk_0 touring package featuring among others, T-bone Walker, John Lee Hooker, Sonny Terry and

spk_0 Vanity McGay, and a name that would recur later in Paige's life, Willie Dixon, who we can

spk_0 hear here on an earlier show from the same package tour.

spk_0 Paige travelled to Manchester alone on the train, where Gutteliff backed the London with his

spk_0 friend David Williams and three friends of Williamsers, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones.

spk_0 Williams had met those three at Alexis Corners Club, and soon Paige would find himself playing

spk_0 occasional gigs with Cornham and Civil Davis, though only evidence had fell in our art jam.

spk_0 He had no intention of ever going back on the road again. He had also found a new friend

spk_0 through going to art college. His classmate, Annette Beck, told her for the Jeff that she'd found

spk_0 another person as mad about electric guitars as he was, and the two of them would sit around in

spk_0 Paige's family home playing guitar together for hours at a time. But then everything changed for Paige.

spk_0 Glenn Johns, who was then starting his own career in the music business as a tape-op, was from

spk_0 the same area as Paige, and had seen him playing a handful of times. He told Mike Leander,

spk_0 just starting his own career as a producer, to check out Paige's playing.

spk_0 And they underoffered Paige's session, playing on a single by Cartel Lewis and Vassalvinus.

spk_0 Paige's first session gig.

spk_0 Paige would actually very briefly join that band, who would go on to become the Ivy League,

spk_0 and to invite producer Sing on a string of hits for various manufactured bands, including the

spk_0 new Vordville band, the Flowerpotman, White Plains and First Class. But what changed Paige's

spk_0 life was the realisation that you didn't have to be in a band to make money as a musician.

spk_0 He could become a session player and not have to tour all around the country in a transit band.

spk_0 That first recording wasn't hugely successful, but Paige had got the studio bug, and his second

spk_0 session was very successful. As we heard in the episode on Apache, the shadow's bass player,

spk_0 Jeff Harris and drummer Tony Mehen, had both quit what was the most successful group in

spk_0 Vitten at the time, and they'd started their own recording career. On diamonds, written by

spk_0 Jerry Lawden, who wrote Apache, Harris plays the Dwayne Adley-style Baratum guitar, but Paige plays

spk_0 acoustic rhythm behind him.

spk_0 That went to number one, and Paige now had a credit that would open a new Ripple Doors for him as a session

spk_0 player. As did the bass player on that session, who was known then as John Baldwin,

spk_0 who would soon take on the stage name John Paul Jones. Paige quickly became the second

spk_0 call session guitarist in London. The guitarist and new generation of pop producers called first

spk_0 was always Big Jim Sullivan, but a Big Jim couldn't do it, or if you needed a rhythm player as well

spk_0 as lead. You called Jimmy Paige, who was little Jim, partly in contrast to Big Jim, but also as a

spk_0 reference to the character from the Goonshow. Paige was soon playing on multiple sessions a day

spk_0 every day, though when most analysis interviewed him for Channel TV, the tiny ITB franchise that only

spk_0 broadcast to the Channel Islands in June 1963. He still seemed to think of the music as a

spk_0 distraction from art school, rather than a name in itself. What are the big names that you have

spk_0 backed on this? Jed Housen Tony Mean, Eden Kane, Duffy Power? What did it like working with some

spk_0 of the really big names of show business? Disappointing. Why is that? Well, they don't come up to how you

spk_0 expect them to be. Rather disappointing on the whole other thing. See, well, it's probably bad

spk_0 use for some record fans. What's your personal, or your professional ambition? Is it to be a guitarist

spk_0 all the time? Do you want to make your own record? No, not necessarily. I'm very interested in art.

spk_0 I think I'd like to become an accomplished artist. Rather than the guitarist? Yes, possibly. Is

spk_0 it a means to an end for you? Are you hoping to earn enough money through your guitar playing?

spk_0 Yes, I hope it's fine. It's my art by the guitar. But as the British music business picked up in

spk_0 the wake of the Beatles success, Paige soon found himself with more session work than he could handle,

spk_0 especially from the American producers Shell Tell Me and Bert Burns, and from Mickey Most.

spk_0 Sometimes you would just be adding some extra rhythm guitar, thickening the riff on a record otherwise

spk_0 made by a proper band, as in the Housen I can't explain, which also featured his former bandmates

spk_0 from Cartel Lewis in The Souveness, now the Ivy League on backing vocals.

spk_0 I'm really a man, I'm getting fun and dreams again.

spk_0 Or baby please don't go by them, whose guitarist Bobby Harrison was entered the way people

spk_0 laid to credit a page for Harrison's lead part, when Paige was doubling the bass part instead.

spk_0 Please don't go, please don't go, please don't go down and you won't reach you no alone.

spk_0 So please don't go, baby, I'm out of the car.

spk_0 He played on Lulu's version of Here Comes the Night, for juice like The Them Track by Burns.

spk_0 He played with them to Big Jim Sullivan's lead on The Crane Game by Dave Barry.

spk_0 I know all there is to know about The Crane Game.

spk_0 I've let my share of The Crane Game.

spk_0 He's on Downtown by Pitula Clark.

spk_0 That's him doing the sharp stabs in the second verse.

spk_0 The rhythm of a gentle ball, you'll be dancing with them to me for the night is over.

spk_0 I'll be again the lights so much brighter than you can.

spk_0 And he's playing Acoustic with them guitar on Goldfinger by Shelley Bassie.

spk_0 He also played on a lot of less successful records, like a cover of Bobby Blue Blanz,

spk_0 I pitted the fool that Chelle Talmy produced for a group called The Managed Boys,

spk_0 on which Paige did get to play lead for a change.

spk_0 I pitted the fool.

spk_0 Though while that wasn't a hit at the time, the singer would go on to much bigger things

spk_0 after changing his name from David Jones to David Bowie.

spk_0 Similarly, Paige played on a cover version of The Creepy Blues Standard Good Morning Little School Girl.

spk_0 I

spk_0 I can't I come home with you, I can't I come home with you.

spk_0 Say I don't mind but end you papa, I won't smile the school boy and you.

spk_0 Sadly for the singer on that track, whose first single it was, the I Birds released a much

spk_0 poppy version of the song the same month.

spk_0 Neither made the top 40 but the I Birds version was more successful.

spk_0 Though we'll be hearing more from Rod Stewart later.

spk_0 Not long after that, whenever Clapton left the I Birds, they asked Paige if he would be interested in joining the group.

spk_0 But Paige was making far more money as a session player than he could from playing with a pop band that had only one hit so far.

spk_0 And so he suggested his friend Jeff Beck should join them.

spk_0 Sometimes the more obscure records would give Paige the opportunity to shine and away he couldn't on the more tightly arranged sessions for people like Shelley Bassie, like his solo on Leave My Kitten Alone by first gear.

spk_0 A cover version of a little Willie John R&B song released as a B-side by an obscure band whose split up almost straight away afterwards.

spk_0 He also developed a speciality. He had bought a fuzz pedal one of the first on the market.

spk_0 After hearing the ventures track the 2000 pound B.

spk_0 However, he decided that the pedal didn't have enough sustain and had worked with an electrician friend of his to create a more effective version, which he played on records like Ball Tetted Woman by The Who, produced by Shell Tellmey.

spk_0 And Dracula's daughter by screaming Lord Such and the Savages produced by Joe Meek.

spk_0 It was late one night when the moon shone bright I was fast in the summer tady.

spk_0 When I fight on the cheek lefty feelin' weak but where I meant bam, bam, bam, messy.

spk_0 The Average Weekly Wage in 1964 when Paige was working regularly was £12.

spk_0 The pay for a single three hour recording session was £9.

spk_0 And a session musician who was in demand would often play three sessions a day, five days a week, bringing in the equivalent of £2000 a week in current terms.

spk_0 But he also knew that to make the real big money in the music industry you should become a songwriter.

spk_0 Paige's entry into professional songwriting came through someone with whom he was in both a romantic and creative partnership for a while.

spk_0 We've talked about Jackie DeShannon before a little, mostly in the episode on Needles and Pins by The Searchers.

spk_0 DeShannon was a singer and songwriter based in California, who had, after meeting Eddie Cockburn, started a songwriting partnership with Cockburn's most successful girlfriend Sharon Shealey,

spk_0 which had led to the my think-hits like Brenda Lee's heart in hand.

spk_0 DeShannon had, as a performer, recorded the original version of Needles and Pins, a song she always claimed to have co-written but was officially credited to Sonny Bono and Jack Mitchey.

spk_0 Two people I could very easily believe would steal a songwriting credit.

spk_0 It was a face I loved and I knew I had to run away and get down on my music bridge that they go away but still they begin love.

spk_0 Needles and Pins.

spk_0 She had also recorded her own song when you walk in the room.

spk_0 I could feel the excitement on my face.

spk_0 I could feel it's no incensation taking place.

spk_0 I could hear the guitar's playing lovely tune.

spk_0 Every time I hear you.

spk_0 Both of those songs have been covered by the searchers and become massive hits in the UK.

spk_0 So like many of the people with whom Paige was associated at this time, like Shell Tell Me and Bert Burns, DeShannon had relocated from the US to the UK and decided to record here.

spk_0 At her first session at Happy Road, DeShannon wanted the best acoustic guitar session player and she was told that Paige was the one to go for.

spk_0 When she played him the song she'd written for the session. She was astonished at how well this young session player, a couple of years younger than her, handled her rudimentary riff.

spk_0 Incidentally, the weird swimmie sound on Paige's guitar there is not some sort of encoding issue with the file for this episode.

spk_0 It sounds like that on every copy of that track I've heard.

spk_0 After the session, DeShannon invited Paige back to her place to listen to a Bach Dylan album and the two soon became lovers and also songwriting partners.

spk_0 Paige played on a lot of her demo sessions around this time, which leads to him sometimes being a very discredited and having Covid and songs he didn't, like Dreamboy, which is credited to DeShannon alone, although features some very distinctive Paige playing on the demo.

spk_0 Muhammad Voides

spk_0 But the two wrote, I've got my tears to remind me, will he spy Doug Gibbons?

spk_0 In my time of sorrow, an album track from Marianne Pethel.

spk_0 A lot of sources credit page for having Covid in Faithful's Top 10 hit come and stay with me.

spk_0 But that was written by the Shannon Alone.

spk_0 The wrote leaves that come tumbling down for Judy Smith, who appears never to have released another record.

spk_0 And stop that girl for Bob the Lewis.

spk_0 Page also started to get some songwriting credits on songs he played on around this time.

spk_0 Mostly these were studio jams put out as B-sides, but he did get one solo songwriting credits around this time.

spk_0 A single was put out under the name Kenny and Deny, presumably a typo for Denny.

spk_0 A studio duo consisting of Page and Sessions and Good Kenny Row of the Surfpop group Tony Rivers in the Castaways.

spk_0 The A-side, Tritop Against Me, was written by Page Engage Singleton, a presenter of the TV show Ready Study Go, for whom Page produced a US Only single.

spk_0 But the B-side, Little Surf a Girl, was by Page Alone.

spk_0 Page seemed to be thinking about becoming an artist, not only did he release the Kenny and Deny single.

spk_0 Around that time he also released his only record as a lead vocalist, encouraged by the Shannon.

spk_0 She just satisfied was co-written by Page and Barry Mann, and Page plays every instrument except the drums played by Bobby Graham, while the Shannon adds some backing vocals.

spk_0 Page also made his first trip to America with the Shannon, visiting both hosts and hop-napping with people in the American music business.

spk_0 He stayed with his old friend, Bird Burns, in New York, then travelled over to the Shannon's hometown of LA.

spk_0 According to many sources, while he was over there he also played on the Shannon's big hit version of Backer Racking David, what the world needs now as love.

spk_0 I say according to many sources, because some say he only played on the B-side, recorded in England, because he wasn't a member of the American Federation musicians.

spk_0 Without access to the session documentation, there's no way to know for sure, and as with many things to do with Page, the credits are very murky.

spk_0 According to many people, including both Marianne Faithful and Kim Fowley, it was the relationship with the Shannon that made Page come out of his challenge to stop being an introvert and start becoming much more experimental in his personal life.

spk_0 Their relationship didn't last much longer though. According to the Shannon, he wanted to split from the music world because he was getting disillusioned, Jimmy wanted to go to Cornwall or the Channel Islands and sell pottery.

spk_0 He couldn't stand in the business to the string in, and I couldn't stand his dream of quietness, so he split.

spk_0 As Page was not able to cope with Jackie De Shannon's wild rock and roll lifestyle, he returned to the UK and went back to his session work.

spk_0 In particular, he was working a lot with Andrew Oldam, who liked Mickey Most, would usually hire Page on guitar.

spk_0 Oldam was, at the time, looking for a new Marianne Faithful, and Page played on several sessions for Oldam that were intended to replicate the success he'd had with Faithful, like Vashdie Bunyans version of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards' somethings just stick in your mind.

spk_0 Just as both Oldam and Most would try to get Page whenever they could, they would also offer book bass player John Paul Jones.

spk_0 Jones had played on a lot of the same records as Page over the years, and indeed the two had oddly parallel careers even before they got to know each other.

spk_0 Jones had started out as a church organist in Quiremaster as a teenager, and of course they both had their big break playing for Jet Harris and Tony Mean.

spk_0 The big difference was that Jones's pounds had been in show business, with his dad being a professional pianist who played frambozen as orchestra, one of the most successful dance bands of the 20s through the 40s.

spk_0 And so Jones had had far more formal musical training than Page, and was able to write orchestral charts, which meant he was often booked as an arranger, as well as a performer.

spk_0 Jones wasn't his birth name, he had been jumbled when, until Oldam had suggested changing his name, when he had released his only solo single, produced by Oldam, a version of the Lee Hazelwood Surf instrumental, Baja.

spk_0 As with so many of the credits in this episode, there's a dispute as to who played on what?

spk_0 But according to most of the sources I've read, both Jones and Page play on and not saying, by another of Oldam's attempts at a new Maryam faithful, Nico.

spk_0 Certainly at least Page definitely plays on the B side, as the last mile is credited to Page and Oldam as writers, and to Page as producer.

spk_0 Most sources say it's Page and Brian Jones playing the two guitars on the track, though Page himself claims he's playing both.

spk_0 Rivers were made for flowing, so why not let them flow?

spk_0 That was one of the three singles released as the debuts for Oldam's new label, starting with Tony Kolder, immediate records.

spk_0 And both Page and Jumpull Jones would be regular players on immediate sessions, especially Page who was made an in-house producer for the label.

spk_0 The first three releases on the label were, I'm not saying, hang on to loop you by the McCoy's, licensed from the US through a partnership with Page's old friend, Bird Burns, and The Bells of Rimny by the Fifth Avenue, a studio group that Page put together.

spk_0 The Fifth Avenue record is almost as sound like copy of the Bird's version of the song, apart from some beach boys inspired harmonies at the end, and Page's guitar solo.

spk_0 Of those three, only hang on to loop you as a hit, but Page would spend much of the next year producing and playing on sessions for immediate, almost always with Jones on bass.

spk_0 Records they played on for immediate included a single that Jagger and Richards wrote for the comedian Jimmy Tarbok.

spk_0 The fourth of the world, go away, come every day, we're just wasting time.

spk_0 And a single by Glenn Johns, the man who had discovered Jimmy Page, who was in his brief period of trying to be a performer rather than an engineer and producer.

spk_0 The track was something of a reunion for most of the people involved. Not only was John the man who had discovered Page, but the track was produced by Tony Minne and written by Jerry Lordham, the man who had been a singer.

spk_0 However, novelty is like that aside, immediate also released many truly excellent and important records.

spk_0 One of Page's first productions for the label was John Maill's Blue Breakers version of Amiawitch Doctor, the first recording of former Yard Bird Eric Clapton with his new band.

spk_0 At the mid-night, go till you burn it, like passion prouder.

spk_0 A palently Page had to have strong arguments with the engineer on that session to convince him that it was okay to allow something that distorted to go on the tape.

spk_0 Page and Clapton were funnily at the time, but as we heard in the episode on Creme, they fell out when Page's home tape recordings of the two jamming blues instruments together, were overdubbed with extra instruments by members of the Rolling Stones and stuck out by Amiawitch on blues compilations.

spk_0 Page played on pretty much everything that came out of Amiawitch in 1965 and 1966, from records by the Manchester-based Beach Boys Soundlike Act, the fact totems.

spk_0 One of several Beach Boys sound like groups that hold them sound to cook covers of Brian Wilson's songs for which he owned the UK Publishing Rites, to Out of Time, the number one single by Page's old friend Chris Farlow, written by Jagger and Richards and produced by Jagger.

spk_0 Or at least the production is credited to Jagger.

spk_0 After Green Slade, the arranger on the session, said that Jagger had been unable to get a decent vocal takeout of Farlow, who, according to Green Slade, couldn't sing his way out of a paper bag, and that olden had later gone in and got Farlow to re-record the lead, line by line and pieced it together.

spk_0 But there was one session in particular in 1966, not for immediate, though it would point the way to Jimmy Page's future. His friend Jeff Beck had, after joining the Art Birds, played on a string of hits which for many people seemed to redefine what rock guitar could be.

spk_0 While there were five people in the Art Birds and all made musical contributions, especially Paul Samuel Smith, the group's bass player, who was the de facto producer of a lot of their records.

spk_0 As far as the casual audience was concerned, there were really only two people who mattered. One was Keith Ralph, the group's lead singer, who was never known as a particularly strong vocalist, but who did have a stage presence.

spk_0 While the other was Beck. So a plan had been hatched that each year Art Bird would release a solo single to let the different members of the group show their individual personalities and hopefully give them more of a profile with the public.

spk_0 The plan was quickly abandoned with only Keith Ralph's Mr. Zero getting released, but Jeff Beck's solo track, Beck's Balerro, was eventually released as a B-side.

spk_0 Everything about that track is contentious. One of the few things everyone agrees about is that Mickey Most, the track's credited producer, had nothing to do with the track.

spk_0 He got production credit as part of a deal later made by the Art Birds manager Simon Napier Bell. Napier Bell always claims he produced it, but Paige has always said it was him.

spk_0 There has always been bad blood between Napier Bell and Paige. Napier Bell would employ Paige sometimes as a session player when he was working as a music supervisor for films before going into pop management, though Paige was always the second choice. Big Jim Sullivan was first choice, but he said later,

spk_0 I knew he was a brilliant technician and admired by others, but I never really liked Jimmy Paige. He had a sneer about him. At school the people who bullied me had this terrible fighting sneer and Jimmy Paige reminded me of those people.

spk_0 Similarly, there were arguments between Paige and Beck as to who wrote the piece. Paige has always claimed to have written it himself, but not gone into much detail. Beck, on the other hand, has described the writing as follows.

spk_0 I don't care what he says, I invented that melody. He hit those A major 7 chords and the E minor 7 chords, and I just started playing over the top of it. He was playing the baller over them, and I played the melody on top of it, but then I said, Jim, you've got to break away from the baller over a beat. You can't go on like that forever.

spk_0 So he stopped it dead in the middle of the song, like the Art Birds were doing for your love. Then we stuck that riff into the middle, and I went home and worked out the other bit.

spk_0 While the track was intended, as far as Napier Bell was concerned, as a way to showcase Beck as a member of the Art Birds, Beck himself had other ideas.

spk_0 There was work going around the Teryl Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker were planning to form a supergroup, and Beck was thinking along the same lines.

spk_0 Uncomfortable with the Art Birds musicianship, he wanted to form a band with the best players in London, and he wanted Jimmy Paige to be the rhythm guitarist.

spk_0 On vocals, the two of them wanted to get in the Steve Marriott of the Small Faces, or Steve Wimwood of the Spencer Davis group.

spk_0 They sounded out Marriott, but got the response from Don Arden, the Small Faces Gangster-ish manager. How would you like to have a group with no fingers?

spk_0 They decided the session where they tested these musicians out, were Bearings to Mental One.

spk_0 On keyboards that brought in Nikki Hopkins, the top session keyboard player in the UK, well known enough for this that the Kinks would, a few months later, release a track titled Session Man as a tribute of sorts to Hopkins.

spk_0 A million sessions that go insane, he's a Session Man, a quad refreshing, a top musician.

spk_0 For the rhythm section, Beck had heard rumors that the Who's Bass player and drummer were thinking of quitting their band, and he invited the two of them to the session.

spk_0 Keith Moon came, though he came in disguise to stop people realizing he was thinking of quitting the Who, but John Antwistle never showed up, so they quickly called in John Paul Jones because he was used to play with Paige, and Napier Bell also thought highly of him.

spk_0 There were various versions of what happened next, but the general consensus version is that when one of them suggested making this lineup of musicians a permanent one, Keith Moon said, that would go down like a Led Zeppelin.

spk_0 But soon after that session, Beck at least got his wish to play more with his old friend Jimmy Page.

spk_0 The Are Birds by early 1966 were becoming more popular in the US than they were in the UK.

spk_0 We heard last time how they were hugely influential on the MC5, but almost every garage rock band in the country in the mid-60s was more influenced by the Are Birds, and in particular by Jeff Beck's guitar playing than any other band.

spk_0 In the UK, there was something of an arms race between Eric Clapton, Beck, Pete Townsend, Peter Green and Dave Davis, to see who could be the most impressive blues based electric guitarist, who could use feedback most creatively, and who could wow everyone else the most.

spk_0 That competition would die down in 1967, when Jimmy Hendrix hit London, and the rest of the pack realised they couldn't compete with him on his own terms.

spk_0 And most of the innovation in British guitar playing for the few years after that would come from the acoustic side, with people incorporating finger picking techniques learned from the guitarist at Las Cousins, which Page would frequent and which was the home with British folk-broom guitar.

spk_0 But in 1966, Beck was the only one of these musicians who had a profile in the US.

spk_0 Clapton, after quitting the Are Birds, had resolutely decided to avoid making pop singles and was developing a reputation both as a great guitarist and as someone who would drop out of bands straight away.

spk_0 Pete Green, like Clapton, was mostly known for playing with John Maill, who had no presence in the US.

spk_0 The kinks had been banned from playing the US because of a musician's union disagreement, and the who wouldn't break through until Monterey.

spk_0 That left the Are Birds as the only British band with the guitar hero of that kind to have any presence in the US.

spk_0 In May of 1966, the same month as the Bex Bolero sessions, Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys, who was in the UK to promote pet sounds, told the record member about an occasion when the Are Birds supporting them, had had to borrow the Beach Boys equipment.

spk_0 An anecdote which shows just how different the Are Birds were from any other group to play America up to that point, saying,

spk_0 Dennis plays drums so he doesn't understand amps, and makes your sing so he doesn't understand what's going on with amps either.

spk_0 Jeff Beck turns his guitar towards the amps to get feedback, and Dennis and Mike were going to pull the plugs out.

spk_0 They thought the Are Birds were harming the equipment. I had to stop them and explain what was happening they were getting really mad.

spk_0 That month also saw the release of two singles. Both co-produced by Sam and Napier Bell and Paul Sammol Smith after Napier Bell had taken over the Are Birds management from George Ogamelski, who, as his settlement, got all the rights to their recordings up to that point, meaning the group would never see any future royalties from their early recordings which had been repackaged added for an item by a free budget label in existence.

spk_0 The first was Keith Welfth solo single, part of the same push for the band members to record solo that had liked to backspel Aero, a version of the Bob Lin song Mr. Zero.

spk_0 Sadly for Ralph though, Gamelski had been aware of his plan to record the song and produced a version by another singer Susie Clee, which was released the same week.

spk_0 Neither made the top 40 part the as a result of the competition. The Aero, the Are Birds related single, the least in May 1966, was over on the sideways down, which made the top 10.

spk_0 That would also turn out to be their last UK hit single. That record was also notable because Jeff Beck played everything but the drums on the session.

spk_0 Chris Dreyer, the group's rhythm guitarist, only did backing vocals, while Paul Samwell Smith was in the control room by this point more interested in being a producer than in performing.

spk_0 Over on the sideways down was the single from the group's only UK studio album, titled Just Yard Birds, but usually known as Roger the Engineer, after the caricature of engineer Roger Cameron by Chris Dreyer on the cover.

spk_0 For half of that album, which Samwell Smith co-produced and which took only five days to record, Samwell Smith didn't play at all, being replaced by a bass player named Mick Fitzpatrick, who played with Sam and Trangle, a backing band that Napier Bell had put together to back the duo of Diane Farras and Nikki Scott, who he had been managing before the Are Birds.

spk_0 As the album was recorded so quickly, even though it was made up entirely of supposed originals, most of these were jams on blues and R&B standards like Dostnabrum given different lyrics.

spk_0 So for example, What Do You Want is very obviously the derivative of Bo Deadly's Who Do You Love.

spk_0 What Do You Want is what do you want.

spk_0 The album was decent enough, but it was released in July 1966. Right in the middle of the eight-week period that saw pet sounds, blonde on blonde, freak out, the first incredible string band album,

spk_0 The Birds Fifth I mentioned, Blues breakers with Eric Clapton, and then along comes the association and Rivalva, or the least.

spk_0 Decent enough was not really going to do it when up against competition like that, although the album did make the UK top 20.

spk_0 Given the lack of interest on Samwell Smith's part in playing bass anymore, and the disinterest in touring in general which was getting him down,

spk_0 it was unsurprising when after a gig where Keith Ralf had gotten increasingly drunk, insulted the audience, and fallen into the drum kit.

spk_0 Samwell Smith decided he'd had enough of this pop star like it was going to quit the band and just become a record producer.

spk_0 And Ali, Bexfran, Jimmy Page, was also at that gig. And unlike the rest of the band, he had thought that Ralph's drunk in antics were great.

spk_0 He agreed to join the band on bass as a permanent replacement for Samwell Smith, who went on to a very successful career producing records mostly in the sensitive singer's songwriter vein.

spk_0 Samwell Smith produced almost all Kat Stevens' big hit, and records for Carly Simon, Christopher Berg, Paul Simon, and Renee Sons among many others.

spk_0 Page joined on bass even though that wasn't his instrument, but that wasn't the main problem with his join in the group.

spk_0 That was, rather, the enmity between him and Sam and Napier Bell.

spk_0 Napier Bell later described the meeting that he had to have to page join the group, saying,

spk_0 when he ever had if he had an enormous swollen lip, nobody knew who'd done it, he said some people had stopped him in the street and hit him.

spk_0 I remember thinking that if your Jimmy Page that could happen to you because of your sneering.

spk_0 Jimmy's super-ciliusness was hard to take. When Jimmy Page looked as nice as he does, maybe he thought he could get away with it.

spk_0 He came into the group, I said, we don't really get on, you're my manager, I want to see the contract, he said.

spk_0 I said you won't. I'll take my percentage of $450 of the money and I won't manage you, because I knew he would want to pull a stunt and say the contract was terrible.

spk_0 As I've said before about Napier Bell, he's someone who has more of a vac on tour than a trustworthy source.

spk_0 But it does seem likely both that Page and Napier Bell didn't get on from the start, and that Page,

spk_0 who had vastly more experience of the music business from the business side than the other yardbirds,

spk_0 would have found entirely reasonable fault with whatever contract Napier Bell had them under.

spk_0 Page seems largely to have given up on session work after joining the yardbird, though it's difficult to know for sure because some tracks he recorded earlier were released afterwards.

spk_0 For example, Sunshine Superman by Donovan, on which Page played league guitar and an arrangement by John Paul Jones produced by Mickey Most,

spk_0 was not released until December 1966, though it was recorded a year earlier.

spk_0 There's also some question over exactly which sessions by which performers Page played on.

spk_0 Page himself, for example, always claimed to have played on Donovan's Hurdy Gerdemann from 1968, and Donovan has sometimes backed him up on that.

spk_0 But apparently the session logs for that track don't have him there, and Jones, who was on that session as well, says it was Alan Parker.

spk_0 And he would occasionally turn up for the odd session just to keep his hand in, for example it's definitely Page doing some relatively rare session lead work,

spk_0 and Joe Cocker's hit version of With a Little Help from my Friends from 1968.

spk_0 But in general, Page was now putting session work behind him, and going back out on the road with the band, just like in the old days with Neil Christian.

spk_0 Some have suggested that Page's sudden changing career might have been caused by trauma.

spk_0 Around this time his parents split when it turned out that his father had the years been keeping a second family in secret, and certainly Page seems rather quickly to have turned from being a polite introvert to being the kind of provocateur who wore an Iron Cross on stage, as did back around the same time.

spk_0 And here it's possibly worth noting that Chris Farlow, Page's long-time friend, ran a stall that sold Nazi memorabilia and only Nazi memorabilia, as a sideline from his stage of as a pop star.

spk_0 It's likely though that even though he was no longer a session player, Page was still keeping up with the records that were being released.

spk_0 He had been unusual among session players for doing that while he was one.

spk_0 He would say that one of his selling points to record producers was that as he was younger than many players, he knew how to get the sounds on the records that teenagers were listening to, in a way that men in their 30s didn't.

spk_0 But even among other players of his generation, someone like John Paul Jones would say later that at the end of the 60s, he owned two rock albums, pet sounds and revolver, with the rest of his listening being to soul and jazz.

spk_0 Page almost certainly, for example, listened to Making Time by the Creation, produced by his old friend, Shell Talmy, which featured Eddie Phillips playing his guitar with a violin bow.

spk_0 Page soon started doing the same himself, though he always claimed that he had got the idea, not from the creation.

spk_0 But from David McCallum's senior, the violinist father of the man from Uncle Star.

spk_0 Apart from a handful of gigs, Page's first major work with the Artbirds was on their next single.

spk_0 There's some confusion about exactly when the basic track for Happening's 10 Years Time ago was recorded.

spk_0 But the most likely date is sometime between the 26th of July 1966 and the 3rd of August, when the group went on their first US tour with Page on Base.

spk_0 But Page wasn't on base for the session.

spk_0 Chris Dreyer had largely stopped playing guitar in the studio by this point, used to having Beck play both parts, and he is not on the track at all.

spk_0 The initial sessions consisted of Keith Welfren Jim McCarty, who, according to most accounts, wrote the song, though it's credited to all five band members and Beck later sometimes said it was mostly his work.

spk_0 Unlead vocals and drums and harmonies respectively, with Page on guitar and Page's session player friend John Paul Jones on base.

spk_0 Beck wasn't at this initial session because he was ill with tonsillitis, and illness had also led the group to pull out of a festival appearance.

spk_0 The same festival work cream, with the Artbirds former guitarist Clapton made their debut, and this was widely seen as the Artbirds being scared of the competition.

spk_0 Some well-smetted Napier Bell produced, and Beck had a guitar and spoken word mutthings under his solo after the group returned from their tour, and the result is often considered the group's greatest single, and one of the classics of British Psychedelia.

spk_0 One possible influence the track may have had that have not seen anyone else suggest, is the start of Jeff Beck's guitar solo, where he imitates a police siren.

spk_0 A year later John Lennon would base the melody of Iron the War of Us around a similar siren imitation, and while it's entirely plausible that he was independently inspired, I can't help wondering if he had this track in the back of his mind.

spk_0 The

spk_0 Happening's 10 years time ago doesn't sound revolutionary now, but that's because we're hearing it out of the context of the time.

spk_0 It sounds exactly like a lot of singles released in 1967, but it was released in late 1966, several months ahead of its time.

spk_0 Possibly too much ahead of its time, it didn't make the top 40 in the UK, and it was only a moderate hit in the US, though its influence has been cited by hundreds of bands since.

spk_0 In between recording the basic track and the guitar overdubs, the group toured the US.

spk_0 Beck's health problems kept recurring, supposedly he had his tonsils out at one point on the tour, though in later years he admitted that along with the actual physical illness he was also dealing with mental health problems, and a general whiviness with being in the band.

spk_0 With Dreyer clearly not able to fill in for the band's resident guitar guard, and with audiences primed to expect feedback based musical parat techniques.

spk_0 The only solution when Beck was too ill to play many dates, he ended up flying home with 12 shows still to go on the tour, was for Paige to switch to lead guitar and play Beck's lead part, and for Dreyer to switch to bass on those dates.

spk_0 Soon that became the band's standard lineup, and on the dates when Beck could play, rather than Paige playing with him guitar, the two played the lead lines in stereo and then played dueling solos.

spk_0 Very few recordings of this dual lead version of the band exist, but one that does is one of the group's most famous, and it exists because of a trick Simon Napier Bell played on a friend.

spk_0 Michelangelo Antonio Nye wanted to include footage of the who performing live in his film set in Swinging London, Blowup, and particularly wanted Pete Townsend smashing his guitar to be included in the film.

spk_0 But Napier Bell was friends with the whose co-manager, Kit Lambert, and told Lambert to ask for a ridiculously large fee, and for the band's management to have control over the editing of their section of the film.

spk_0 Antonio only of course refused, and then Napier Bell offered his own band as a cut-fised rate to get them this valuable exposure. Beck objected to having to smash a guitar, partly because that was Townsend's stick, and partly because he was someone who cared a great deal about his instruments, but he eventually did it for the film.

spk_0 And once he did, it became a regular part of the act for a while.

spk_0 The song recorded for the film was titled Stroll Long, and the songwriting was credited to the art birds, but is just their cover of the Johnny Burnett Rock and Roll Trio's version of Train Capture All In, with the lyrics altered so they could claim the credit for themselves.

spk_0 To promote the release of the Happlings 10 Years Tamago single, the group went on a brief tour of the UK.

spk_0 Unfortunately for them, the bullower umpothed them between the Rolling Stones, as Headliners, and the I-Continue Turner review, possibly the most exciting act they're performing.

spk_0 They were never going to go down well in that position, and according to Andrew Holdham that was deliberate, as we heard in the sympathy for the Devil episodes, Holdham said,

spk_0 Mick Keith and I had decided there were cocky little upstart that had one more hit than they deserved, and this sandwiching between the Headliners should put paid to their career.

spk_0 It didn't help that the groups performance in London at the Albert Hall, which had legend-evaly bad acoustics for certain types of music.

spk_0 There's an old joke that hits the only venue where a composer could be guaranteed to hear their work twice.

spk_0 It was both the one that got reviewed, and the one that was by all accounts the worst of the tour.

spk_0 The art birds were, by the consensus of the British press, yesterday's news.

spk_0 Happlings 10 Years Tamago was them trying to hop on this new psychedelic bandwagon that was so fashionable, but was clearly just a novelty record.

spk_0 After that they went on another American tour, this time mostly as part of a Dick Clark Package tour, with a bunch of ill-matched acts including Brian Highland and Sam Lasham and the Ferro's.

spk_0 They did though also play some shows outside of the package tour, including one notable one in early November when they were supported by the Velvet Underground with Paige's older acquaintance Nico.

spk_0 The group were particularly fascinated by the song that I'm waiting for the man, and depending on which version of the story you read, they either got hold of the band's debut album as soon as it came out, or actually asked to read for the chords and lyrics, and were soon incorporating it into their live sets,

spk_0 often as part of extended versions of I'm a Man or Smokes that like me.

spk_0 Before the tour had been going along, Beck's illness returned, and on top of that he was sick of touring for little money, and he was increasingly resenting Jimmy Paige's playing.

spk_0 At first Beck had wanted to play with another guitarist of equal skill, but now he was finally able to be the sole star of the group.

spk_0 He once again pulled out of the tour and went off to rest, and this time the rest of the group decided it had enough and sacked him.

spk_0 This meant also losing their management, Napier Bell decided that Jeff Beck was the only one of the band he actually got along with, and also the real talent.

spk_0 He kept Beck on as a client, and handed the rest of the group over to Mickey Mouse's organisation to manage.

spk_0 At first it seemed like Napier Bell had made the correct decision, most became Beck's producer too.

spk_0 Most was a proven hitmaker having produced hits for Dunnevin, Herman Termits, the animals and many others.

spk_0 Beck had some trouble putting his own bands line up together.

spk_0 It would change quite often over the next few months, but as far as most was concerned, if you made a record you just took the star and put him in front of a bunch of session musicians, and gave them a song by a hit songwriter.

spk_0 So the first single by the Jeff Beck group, which used Beck's Polaro as its beside, had Beck with John Paul Jones on bass and string arrangements, and Clem Coutini, the former drummer with the tornado's turn-top session drummer.

spk_0 Beck wasn't a singer, his new band had a lead singer in fact, but most didn't care.

spk_0 If the single said Jeff Beck on the label, Jeff Beck was going to be the singer, no matter how badly he sang, and his lead singer could just add backing vocals.

spk_0 Most commercial instincts worked, high-ho-silver lining made the top 20.

spk_0 The Jeff Beck group would go and have three more hit singles, one more with Beck on lead vocals, an instrumental, and Goo Goo Barabajagal Love His Heart, credited to Dunnevin and the Jeff Beck group, with Dunnevin on lead vocals.

spk_0 Rodsduet would get to sing lead on album tracks, but he'd never get to sing lead on a Jeff Beck group single.

spk_0 By that point though, Napier Bell had stopped managing Beck too.

spk_0 He said later, what they hadn't allowed for was that Jeff didn't really rehearse his first group properly.

spk_0 He formed a group with Rodsduet and running wood, and I thought they couldn't go wrong.

spk_0 They opened up for the small faces on tour with the Astoria and Finnsbury Park, and it all went wrong.

spk_0 Rods came on stage with his fly's undone, and the curtain fell on top of the guitarist, and then somebody from the small faces pulled the plugs out to the power went off.

spk_0 It was a dismal concert and I couldn't snap my fingers and come up with a solution.

spk_0 The real problem was they hadn't rehearsed. The trouble was, I was the same age as them and felt too intimidated by them to tell them what to do.

spk_0 Napier Bell decided to get out of the management business altogether.

spk_0 Most's organisation therefore ended up with both the Rbirds and the Jeff Beck group, but while he produced their recordings for management he put someone else in charge, his colleague Peter Grant.

spk_0 Grant had known most since the tour them had worked with the two eyes back in the 1950s.

spk_0 The two eyes had been the hotbed of the early British rock and roll scene, and most of the first wave of British rock stars had been discovered there, most had been working as a waiter and Grant as a bouncer,

spk_0 before most moved to South Africa and became a pop star there before returning to Britain as a producer.

spk_0 In the meantime, Grant, a very large physically imposing man, had had a brief career as a professional wrestler, including some televised bout,

spk_0 and had tried to get into acting but had never got much beyond bit parts.

spk_0 A couple of lines in the same toward Dixon of Duck Green, a tiny roll in Cleopatra, a job working as Robert Mollie stand in.

spk_0 But he used the earnings from these jobs and his showbiz connections to get a lot of old in the industry.

spk_0 He bought him in Ibos and started driving people at the shadows, or the comedians making Bernie Winters to their gigs.

spk_0 From this he got a job as a tour manager with Don Arden, the gangster who was one of Britain's biggest managers and promoters.

spk_0 Grant's job was to drive American stars touring the UK to their gigs, keep them sober enough to go on stage, and get the money from the venues, with violence if necessary.

spk_0 Sometimes this required a certain amount of imagination.

spk_0 Gene Vincent, in particular, was by this time totally out of control.

spk_0 Grant later said he used to drive cars at me, and he was well known for threatening people with knives and guns.

spk_0 He would dub racist graffiti on addressing room doors of black acts on the same bill, and he was badly alcoholic.

spk_0 One show he also heard his one good leg and couldn't stand up, but Grant knew that the contract said that he had to go on stage and sing.

spk_0 So at showtime the curtain drew back, and there was Gene Vincent singing his opening song, Bebopalula.

spk_0 Except he only got that far, then swarve and collapsed, falling onto his face and being carried off unconscious by roadies.

spk_0 Grant had propped him up by sticking your mag stand up his jacket. They got their money.

spk_0 But while Grant sometimes resorted to these measures, less difficult acts in turn found him a pleasure to work with.

spk_0 The Everly Brothers, for example, said in the 90s that he was the best road manager we ever had, and he would be fiercely loyal to his acts.

spk_0 Soon he branched out, he started working with Mike Jeffries and Mickey Most on the animals career, becoming effectively their co-marriageer.

spk_0 He taught the US with the animals and with Herman's Hermit, another of Most Sacked.

spk_0 He also became sole manager of a handful of acts, like the Sheet Trinity, one of the first all female rock groups to play their own instruments.

spk_0 Accessually, the new Portable band, who started after the studio creation of Jeff Stevens, with John Carter of Carter Lewis in the southerners singing lead.

spk_0 But then had a touring band with a different lead singer assembled by Grant, after their single Winchester Cathedral became a massive world-wide hit.

spk_0 The new Portable band were briefly an international phenomenon.

spk_0 Famously Winchester Cathedral won the best contemporary rock and roll recording Grammy, beating out the other short-list of entrants last 20 Clagsville, LNWICB, Good Vibrations, Monday Monday and Cherish.

spk_0 For a while, the band were touring America enough that Grant had to take on an assistant, Richard Cole, specifically to manage US touring operations.

spk_0 Eventually, most in Grant had decided to pull their resources and form a management and production company, RAK, which wasn't really much of a company.

spk_0 It was a shared office space which the two men both used to work on different acts, on the top floor of her building in Oxford Street in London.

spk_0 On the bottom floor were shops, then on the first floor was Quisteless Records, whose publicist, John Lennon's old friend Bill Harry,

spk_0 would also become RAK's publicist simply because he was working at the same building and they were in and out of each other's offices so often.

spk_0 And on the second floor was Allen Records. As Grant made to describe it, RAK Music Management was the name of the company, but names are not important in this business.

spk_0 People don't say, let's get in touch with RAK, they say, let's go see Peter Grant, it's the personal bit that matters.

spk_0 At one point just Mickey Most, myself and three girls worked in those offices and yet we had four LPs in the top 20.

spk_0 As most was far more interested in the production side of things than management, Peter Grant now became the de facto manager of the Artbirds, as was of Jeff Beck.

spk_0 Where Page had been Napier Bell's least favourite member of the group. For Grant, he was the one who really mattered, the obvious leader of this line up of the band.

spk_0 Most's first priority was for the group to record a new single to get them back on the charts, or at least for Jimmy Page and Keith Ralph II.

spk_0 Most technique was to get the records made as quickly as possible, with the stars performing material that most had picked for them.

spk_0 They could choose the B sides themselves if they behaved. And so the first single he produced for them, Little Games, was a song written by two songwriters for hire at the start of their career.

spk_0 Havill Spirrow went on to co-write hits such as Long Live Love and Nice One Civil, while Phil Wainman would later go on to produce hits for the bass-city rollers among others.

spk_0 But their other most prominent credited 1967 was two songs for Children's Alden by Mike and Bernie Winters. Only Ralph, as the lead vocalist, and Page with a session experience which rusted to play on the single.

spk_0 Rather than Dreyer and Macarty, the rhythm section was Duckey Might, the former drummer from the John Barry VII, and on bass the man who was at the time working his most musical director, session player John Paul Jones, who also wrote the arrangement for the Chalos on the track.

spk_0 Error planes, motor cars, cold fish, and old jam jars, I just don't play these games no more. Little Games are for little boys, loving games are for bigger boys.

spk_0 Parties in Chelsea flats mixing with King Key cats are games I've been playing for.

spk_0 Most hopes for a new chart success were in vain though. It didn't hit the top 40 in the UK or US. Though it and subsequent singles hit the lower reaches of the charts in some other countries.

spk_0 This and the lack of success of their subsequent singles would shape Peter Grant's thoughts about how to run a band.

spk_0 According to Napier Bell, who remained in touch with Grant and asked him occasionally how his old charges were doing, the funny thing was with making most chart success with singles was all important.

spk_0 Yet Peter thought that if you put a single out you were competing to get into the chart, and if you don't get into the chart you are then a failure.

spk_0 If you don't put a single out you can't be a failure. Maybe working with Mickey had made him think about this because charts ruled Mickey most life, or perhaps Jimmy Page had given him the idea.

spk_0 Either way he and Jimmy worked very well together. Peter always thanked me for giving him Jimmy Page and earning him £200m. After the little game single was released, but before it became obvious that it was not going to be a commercial success.

spk_0 Most took the group into the studio to record their second and final studio album. Little Games the album was recorded in three days, and this time the group were allowed to play on their own record, as most didn't care at all about albums.

spk_0 As far as he was concerned, albums didn't matter, and singles were the only things pop bands were good for.

spk_0 Almost all the tracks on the album have the songwriting credited to some more of all of the band members. Almost none of them are actually written by the band members.

spk_0 Compare for example, Muddy Waters version of the blue standard Rowling and Tumbling.

spk_0 To Drinking Muddy Water credited to Macarty, Dreyer, Page and Ralph.

spk_0 Compared to David Graham's radical rearrangements of the traditional song she moved through the fair, titled in his version, She moved through the Bazaar Slash Blue Raga.

spk_0 With the instrumental white summer, credited solely to Page, and featuring no other yardbirds on the track, though it also features an uncredited overplayer.

spk_0 The percussion is played not by Macarty, but by Dudley Moore's drummer Chris Karen.

spk_0 And so on. It's particularly fitting that one of the tracks credited to the yardbirds as songwriters, a recording of an old Memphis drug band song, is titled Stealing Stealing.

spk_0 Little Games is both the strongest of the yardbirds small number of albums, and one that the group themselves always dismissed.

spk_0 Page, who had always been happy working with most in his session days, felt differently about him as a producer when Page was one of the credited artists.

spk_0 Suddenly, most habits of just cutting one take of a track and declaring it good enough was less enjoyable.

spk_0 Most attention to detail and album tracks led to things like the last track of the album, Little Soldier Boy, featuring not the trumpet solo that was planned, but Keith Rolf's scatting an idea for the part that the trumpet player was meant to overdope.

spk_0 The record company decided not to even bother releasing the album in the UK, because as far as they were concerned the yardbirds, who a year earlier had been having regular top 10 hits, were now past it.

spk_0 It was released in the US where the band still had a reputation, but it went no higher than number 80 on the album charts.

spk_0 Jeff Beck, with his recent top 20 hit, was interviewed by Hip-Per-Aidermen said,

spk_0 With all the good groups that they are about now, you've got to make them move one step ahead rather than sticking your house and going down with a sinking ship.

spk_0 And that for me is what the yardbirds are. It's really amazing to think that only a year ago all the seconding DJs and writers were raving about the fantastic yardbird sound.

spk_0 It was all Jeff Beck this and Keith Rolf's great heart playing that, and then it just goes zonk, right down the drain.

spk_0 Undeterred, the group went on tour in the US again, and on one show, they were supported by Jake Holmes, who closed his set with his song Days and Confused.

spk_0 A song about which he later said, I didn't think it was that special, but it went over really well, it was our set closer. The kids loved it.

spk_0 As did the yardbirds I guess.

spk_0 I'll be in shoes, but I'd just like to know, oh, give me a clue as to where I am at.

spk_0 I feel like a mouse and you act like I chat.

spk_0 I'm dazed and confused, hanging on by a thread.

spk_0 Jim McCarty was impressed enough by the track, which Holmes had released as a single the month before the gigging question, but he and Jimny Page both went out and bought copies of Holmes' album.

spk_0 The song was soon added to the yardbird's live set and became a highlight of it.

spk_0 I feel like a mouse and you act like I chat.

spk_0 But by now there was a split between the yardbirds on record, a Mickey Most Pop band and the yardbirds on stage, who were stretching out more, inspired by West Coast records I'd love to capo.

spk_0 An album Melfraved About Him, which was itself very obvious influence by the yardbirds themselves.

spk_0 There was also, though, a growing split between Melf and McCarty, who were becoming increasingly influenced by softer music like salmon and golf and cool, and who are both big users of cannabis and LSD, especially Valve, and Page and Dreyer, who didn't use any drugs at this time, and were more interested in making louder, heavier music, adapting the yardbirds old freak-out style to the new world of power trios and louder amplification.

spk_0 Music

spk_0 The yardbirds didn't record another album, though there were various attempts at sessions over the next year or so.

spk_0 Melf said of this period, in the end we were just a group being sent out from our Mickey Most records, and there were sometimes not even Mickey Most records.

spk_0 The group's next single was a cover of Manfit Man's Hit, Ha Ha said The Clown, which had been a hit in the UK, so the yardbirds version was only released in countries where that hadn't been released.

spk_0 Valve was the only member of the group to appear on the record. The backing track for which was actually recorded by session musicians in New York at the end of a session for the circle.

spk_0 The group best known for Red Rubber Ball. The keyboard player on the track is supposedly Rick Nielsen, later of cheap trick.

spk_0 Throughout the time Nielsen was based in Chicago while the track was caught in New York, so it seems likely it's another musician of the same name.

spk_0 That backing track was left over from the circle session, and the producer sent it over to Mickey Most, who overed a Ralph's voice on it and stuck it out as a yardbird single.

spk_0 The producer in question was Charles Calalo. The group's third single of 1967 was a most production, and at least had two yardbirds on it.

spk_0 Their version of Harry Nielsen's Ten Little Indians, a rewrite of the old nursery song with lyrics based on the Ten Commandments, featured page on guitar,

spk_0 Rellphone vocals, Clem Cattini on drums, and John Paul Jones on bass and orchestral arrangements.

spk_0 That was another one that didn't get a UK release, and once again didn't chart in the US.

spk_0 The group returned to the US yet again to tour to promote the single, but McCarty had a breakdown and couldn't take going on tour again.

spk_0 The group cancelled the gig, got in a substitute room after a few more, and then McCarty flew over what was soon hospitalized.

spk_0 By that point the group had pretty much decided to give up.

spk_0 McCarty and Ralph wanted to make gentle music like Simon and Garfam Kull.

spk_0 Rellth was increasingly annoyed with page, none of them wanted to continue working with Mickey Most, but they were contractual obligations to fulfill.

spk_0 The group put out one final single, Good Night Sweet Josephine, a song about a sex worker by the same writers as Ha Ha said the clown, with Ralph singing and page,

spk_0 John Paul Jones, Clem Cattini, and piano player Nikki Hopkins providing the backing.

spk_0 That was once again a flop, but the group once again went on a US tour to promote it.

spk_0 Knowing that this was likely to be the group's last tour, the record label arranged for a recording of one of the final shows, for a prospective live album.

spk_0 The group refused to allow it to be released, but it eventually came out on Page's own record label in 2017.

spk_0 After that tour there were some desultry attempts at recording something to replace the live album.

spk_0 The record as a handful of tracks included on that 2017 release with Page producing, but no more complete.

spk_0 Interestingly there was one song, knowing that I'm losing you, for which the 2017 release didn't contain any vocals, which is very hard because there definitely was a lead vocal recorded for that track with a full limit.

spk_0 While much drier, Macarty and Keith Ralph's sister Jane all say that Ralph and not anybody else definitely wrote.

spk_0 Luckily for us, there were versions of that track with the vocal uploaded on YouTube.

spk_0 But while the art birds were trying to figure out how, or even if, they could make their live style work in the studio, their thunder had essentially been stolen by the little guitarist, whose first album came out and made the top 20.

spk_0 Truth was produced by Mickey Most and featured Bex Belaro and a few nods to Bex Pass with the art birds, starting out with the remake of Shapes of Things.

spk_0 It also featured Page's older players Cartel Lewis on One Track and several tracks featured John Paul Jones on Ogan, like this cover of a Willy Dixon song.

spk_0 Backed proven the commercial viability of Page's vision of what the art birds should be, but he'd also got there first.

spk_0 The groups bled into two halves, Ralph and Macarty formed a duo, together recording a couple of singles in their gentle music style produced by Samwell Smith.

spk_0 They then went on to form the progressive rock band Renaissance, along with Ralph's sister Jane, with Samwell Smith again producing their first album.

spk_0 Both quit that band during the recording with Second Album, though.

spk_0 They went on to various other projects, with Macarty eventually joining a semi-reformed yardbirds in the 80s, which he continues with to this day as the only remaining original member.

spk_0 Ralph sadly died in 1976, getting electrocuted by an improperly grounded guitar, but with Ralph and Macarty gone, Page and Dreyer, and their major Peter Grant, who saw Page as the real talent of the group.

spk_0 We'll left with the art birds name, Page's vision for a heavier rock band, and crucially, a bunch of gigs had already been booked to play. There was only one thing for it.

spk_0 Page and Dreyer were going to have to form a new yardbirds.

spk_0 A history of rock music, in 500 songs, is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon.

spk_0 Each week, Patreon backers will get a 10 minute bonus podcast. This week's is on Boom Bang a Bang by Lulu.

spk_0 Visit patreon.com slash Andrew Hickey to sign up for as little as a dollar a month.

spk_0 A book based on the first 50 episodes of the podcast, from Savoy Swingers to Clock Rockers, is now available.

spk_0 Search Andrew Hickey 500 Songs on your favorite online bookstore, or visit the links in the show notes.

spk_0 This podcast is written and narrated by me Andrew Hickey, and produced by me and tilt a riser.

spk_0 Visit 500 Songs.com. That's 50000, the numbers songs.com.

spk_0 To read transcripts and liner notes, and get links to hear the full versions of songs accepted here.

spk_0 If you've enjoyed the show, and feel it's worth reviewing, please do leave a review wherever you get your podcasts.

spk_0 But more importantly, tell just one person that you liked this podcast.

spk_0 Word of Mouth, more than any other form of promotion, is how creative works get noticed and sustain themselves.

spk_0 Thank you very much for listening.

Song 180: &#8220;Dazed and Confused&#8221; by Led Zeppelin, Part One, The Song Remains the Same

Interactive Transcript

Topics Covered

Related Episodes

Yusuf/ Cat Stevens' "Tea for the Tillerman"

Where To Get Royalty-Free Podcast Music

What’s Going on With the New U.S. Sunscreen Filter? Plus: Selena’s Wedding and an Update on That Bubble Campaign

Welcome to the Slumber Party — V/H/S/Halloween

Share Episode

Song 180: “Dazed and Confused” by Led Zeppelin, Part One, The Song Remains the Same