The Last Laugh

First, a quick note about last Saturday’s post: I mentioned the Marlin Green website designed by Hideki Watanabe, but the link didn’t transfer to my flash drive, and I was so far from home when I posted I could not fix the matter. So, here is the excellent site devoted to Marlin:

Hideki Watanabe

And now, the new post:

Some songs written for adults were just made to please kids. I don’t even mean songs for kids that have double entendres to attract adults, like that “knick knack paddy whack” thing, which sounds like a double entendre to me. I mean songs like “Da Doo Ron Ron” and “La Dee Dah (Ha Ha Ha),” which are cheery enough and catchy enough to get such cognoscenti as three-year-old caithiseach groovin’.

I won’t discuss the Crystals this year, but the latter song wasn’t a hit, and even now I have trouble believing it flopped. When I was three, it ranked #2 on my playlist, behind next Wednesday’s song. Mind you, there were a couple of hits that got my attention around the time I was three, like “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah” by the Beatles. But that’s another example of a chorus designed to hook kids and make them bug their parents to buy the 45.

I played “La Dee Dah” a lot, and when I had the record player turned off, I sang it a lot. And my mom smiled and sang it with me, bless her heart. My Uncle Tom got the record for a nickel, and it was the second-best investment of a nickel he ever made in music, as far as I am concerned.

The artist is Jerry Jackson, who never charted nationally. I know more about him than some of the other No-Hit Wonders, thanks to excellent liner notes in the Bear Family compilation Jerry Jackson: Shrimp Boats A-Comin’ (BCD 15481). If you don’t know the Bear Family way of remastering music, you should explore the matter.

Jerry Jackson’s voice had the fluid ease of Sam Cooke’s when he approached a song, without the vocal mannerisms that helped you spot Sam a mile away. Jerry handled various pop dialects well, from Brook Benton-styled pop to Drifters R&B, to Motown, to ska.

Why couldn’t such a versatile performer click with the music-buying public? He was forced to handle various pop dialects well. No one let him settle into a style long enough to develop an audience. Most of the approaches were false starts, to be sure, especially the ska versions of “Shrimp Boats” and, if you can believe it, the Irving Berlin standard “Always.”

An overview of his career has Jerry recording singles for Kapp Records from April, 1961 to July, 1963. He was allowed to release eight singles, and he recorded two tracks that would have been his ninth. After his dismissal from Kapp, Jerry recorded three singles in two 1964 sessions for Columbia. Why did such a big label sign a singer who had failed eight times before to chart? Jerry Jackson could sing, and everyone wanted him to succeed.

My personal take on his sound would be that he should have continued in the 1961 “La Dee Dah” vein; this song (and its flip) give the sought-after Brook Benton feel to his work, and eventually Jerry might have gone somewhere with it. Jerry even recorded a tune co-written by Clyde Otis, “If I Had Only Known”; Otis wrote “The Stroll” and produced/composed for Brook Benton.

Instead, by October 1962, Bob Crewe was producing him, recording songs Crewe had written with Bob Gaudio of the Royal Teens and the Four Seasons. In fact, the Four Seasons sang on the four Crewe-produced tracks. A later track, “It Hurts Me,” produced by Allen Stanton, made it into Elvis Presley’s repertoire soon thereafter and reached #29 for Elvis. If you compare the two recordings, you can see where Elvis got his stylings for this cut. So close, and yet so far, for Jerry Jackson.

When Columbia dropped him, Jerry, a Connecticut native, did what he probably wanted to do all along and took up gospel music with his relatives in the Jackson Family, based in Tampa, Florida. Given those other Jacksons, from my hometown of Gary, Indiana, it’s difficult to Google Jerry and get meaningful data about his Jackson Family days. He could easily still be working the circuit. If so, I want to hear him.

Today’s single, my #2 hit from Uncle Tom’s five-cent cutouts, was recorded on October 31, 1961. Bob Johnston produced it. Johnston, apart from writing hits like the spectacular “What’s A Matter Baby,” which was credited to his wife, Joy Byers, eventually produced a couple of solid acts for Columbia: Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Johnny Cash . . .

The song’s writers were Larry Kusik and Don Wolf. Kusik penned nearly 300 songs, including “As If I Didn’t Know” for Adam Wade. Wolf wrote half as many songs, but one of them was a set of lyrics for Santo & Johnny’s “Sleep Walk.”

My copy of the 45, Kapp K-448, is a white-label DJ copy. I know one other person who owned this record, Joe Katz. Finding that he and his children loved this song as much as I did was an amazing experience. Now I’m giving it to you for a listen, and I hope you dig it as well.

A note about the track: Bear Family did an impeccable job of remastering the Jackson masters, but the stereo rendering has Jerry’s vocals in one channel rather than centered. Since I was used to the mono single, I took the track and doubled the drums, then moved the vocals to the center. It’s still in stereo, but if you want the original Bear Family stereo mix, do them (and Jerry) the favor of buying this really superb 24-track collection.

When you listen to the song, be sure to listen to the whole fadeout. It's a fun song to the very last second.

On Saturday, I’ll reach another post I’ve been looking forward to writing. It’s the B side of “La Dee Dah,” but this time, the songwriter is the key to my experience. See you on the flip side!

Jerry Jackson, La Dee Dah (Ha Ha Ha)

You Just Never Know

Versión en español: http://granfusion.blogspot.com/

Version en français: http://grandefusion.blogspot.com/

So far this year, I’ve discussed the recording careers of several people who didn’t quite make it: Titus Turner, the Five Whispers, Danny Kellarney, and Buddy Sheppard. This week, I’ve been writing about another talented singer who never hit the Top 40, Marlin Greene. Though his song “General of Broken Hearts” was my preferred side of his single when I was little, I have come to appreciate the B side, “If It Takes a Fool” (Philips 40103, 1963) as a tight little rocker with a message that foreshadows “(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want to Be Right” in a much less somber way.

As I mentioned on Wednesday, I’ve not found production information for these tracks. I can speculate that Marlin himself may have been the guitarist, for reasons I’ll address in a moment. If he was being considered nothing but a singer in 1963, though, he may have been ushered in to sing against a completed backing track. Bruce Gist wrote this song with David Briggs, who has done some work for television and written the occasional song. Like Gist, he doesn’t seem to have any standards to his credit.

Something about these two sides made Marlin’s record stick with me far longer than most of my pre-Great Meltdown 45s. And for some reason I can’t pin down, about the time I started working regularly as a music journalist, I decided to dig into the career of Marlin Greene. I know one goal was to thank him for cutting a record I could associate so strongly with my mom.

It was 2000 before I got around to doing a serious search for him. First, I came upon a site devoted to Marlin, designed by Hideki Watanabe. There I learned that he had released nine singles between 1957 and 1972, so he was not a One-Cut Wonder, for sure. Two of his singles were on RCA, which shows that he was not completely ignored by the industry. He wrote some of his own material. None of his singles charted nationally.

Marlin earned himself an Elektra recording contract for 1972, and he released an album, Tiptoe Past the Dragon (EKS-75028). The album seemed to have been ignored, but of course I instantly developed a need to own it. However, Elektra didn’t see fit to release it on CD at any point.

Further perusal of Mr. Watanabe’s website showed that Marlin had a parallel career as a recording engineer and a producer, and that’s where I was taken aback.

One song he produced was “When a Man Loves a Woman,” for Percy Sledge. Marlin is the guitarist on that recording.

Everything changed for me then. We’re talking legendary here.

Rick Hall, the owner of Fame Studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, gave his overflow work to Quin Ivy, who opened a recording studio nearby for that purpose. Rick Hall turned down an opportunity to record Percy Sledge, and Ivy borrowed Marlin Greene to co-produce “When a Man Loves a Woman” and play guitar. When Ivy took the results to Rick Hall, I wonder if time stood still: Hall immediately recognized what he held in his hands, and he called Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records. You know the rest.

From there, Percy Sledge recorded some Ivy-Greene compositions, and Marlin continued to produce the singer. Then he got involved with the Alabama State Troupers, as well as a little outfit called the Allman Joys; he had something to do with producing “Take a Letter, Maria” for R.B. Greaves, and he sang on Sailcat’s “Motorcycle Mama.”

If you know the names Eddie Hinton, Don Nix, Jeannie Greene and Dan Penn, you know people whose work was touched significantly by Marlin Greene. He may have been involved in some work Sonny & Cher did in Alabama, but I’m still digging up details of that possibility. Essentially, Marlin was a large part of the Muscle Shoals Sound.

I found an unopened copy of Tiptoe Past the Dragon, and I bought it. It’s a solid collection of songs that Marlin wrote himself. If you can find it, go for it. I think I’ll put up a short track here, the title cut.

Now that I was so impressed with Marlin’s legacy, I really wanted to drop him a note if I could find him. In addition to all the search results for old references to Marlin Greene the musician, there were search-engine hits for another Marlin Greene, who worked in a completely different field. My search didn’t pan out.

Finally, though, I came across one article that mentioned Marlin Greene the musician and the other Marlin Greene—they were the same guy after all. So I wrote to Marlin Greene. It turned out I had gotten into the same field he had, and we talked about collaborating on a software product.

Eventually, in May, 2006, I was in the same city as Marlin, and we met. If you have never sat down and talked to one of your most admired heroes, I recommend the experience, should you be able to manage it without being a complete idiot in the presence of said icon.

Marlin doesn’t do music any more. But here’s what he did in the 1960s: I spoke with Percy Sledge this past summer, and when I brought up Marlin Greene, the gleam in Mr. Sledge’s eye brought tears to mine. He said Marlin “was my backbone, as far as Percy Sledge was concerned. There would never have been a Percy Sledge without Marlin Greene. . . . Without Marlin, it would never have happened.” Marlin also rescued another hit, “Take Time to Know Her,” which was almost scrapped because of racy lyrics.

And so, Marlin Greene didn’t chart on his own, except as a backing vocalist. But he produced a #1 hit, “When a Man Loves a Woman,” and he brought back a #11 hit, “Take Time to Know Her,” from oblivion.

Don’t forget this fact, as related by Percy Sledge regarding the guitar work on “When a Man Loves a Woman”: “Like everybody else, we thought it was the smoothest, sweetest picking that a guitar player ever put in a ballad, an R&B song. Even that guitar part in ‘Rainy Night in Georgia’ doesn’t touch Marlin Greene.”

There’s a legacy-making statement for you.

If you want to learn more about Marlin’s music, a good starting point is the Hideki Watanabe site. There you will see the scans of my 45, credited to “Mr. Sean.” Another site shows those scans, one put together by Terry Gordon to chronicle rockabilly music. Mr. Gordon credits Hideki Watanabe for the scans, since he pulled them from that site, but if you look at the “H” in “Philips,” you will see the telltale handwritten number 88, which guarantees that it’s my 45 on display.

Marlin Greene has been a part of my musical consciousness since I developed one. I’m glad to bring him to yours, if he’s not already there. Thanks for reading. Next time, I’ll bring you a singer who should have been a star, and we’re one track away from another hero of mine. See you Wednesday!

Marlin Greene, If It Takes a Fool

Tiptoe Past the Dragon

If It Takes a Fool label scan

My Military Experience

My three brothers, whom I have not mentioned before, all became military men. Blond Brother stayed in the Army long enough to retire, but he had to be a peacekeeper in Bosnia and do two year-long tours in Iraq before he reached that point. He retired as a colonel, and I suspect he would have stayed in long enough to become a general were it not for all that sand.

Twin of Blond Brother is still in the Navy, and probably will be for life. Why not? He lives on the ocean and has a sweet niche carved out for himself.

SWAT Team Brother was an MP for most of his time in the Army, and now he is a peacekeeper in Texas. You may have seen him on Court TV.

While the two Army brothers worked their way up the ranks, I kept track of where they stood in the overall scheme of military things by referencing two works of art: Gomer Pyle, USMC and today’s song.

Gomer Pyle helped me remember that rank goes up from private to corporal to sergeant to lieutenant. (This was my take on things, not the precise order of real-world military rank.) And today’s song states that “There’d be a colonel and a major and a captain, too, following me.” Once Blond Brother got to lieutenant, I knew what was in store for him, thanks to one of my favorite 45s, “General of Broken Hearts” by Marlin Greene.

This song is fraught with memories, old and new, so many that the discussion of the other side of the single will be longer than a usual Saturday post so I can fit everything in. As I said last time, I have been looking forward to getting to March 19 so I could write this reminiscence.

I’ll start with how the song first impacted me. Neither side of “General of Broken Hearts” (Philips 40103, 1963) charted. My 45 is a regular copy, not a DJ copy, but it is a cutout: note the hole punched in the label. I liked that label. I don’t know what the logo, with its stars and wavy lines, is meant to indicate, but three-year-old caithiseach appreciated the clean layout and the rainbow stripe across the diameter of the label.

In fact, this experience with Philips carried over into vicarious pride when I learned in the early 1980s that Philips was co-developing the compact disc with Sony. That’s why I buy compact discs these days. Well, maybe it’s the music, but I haven’t forgotten the Philips contribution.

Of course, I liked the song, or the label wouldn’t matter to me. The drumming has a martial cadence to it, as one might expect from a song about an army, and that synched up nicely with an album of military music I owned, probably thanks to my dad’s own time in the Navy.

What the drumming in this song did, by the time I turned five, was make me decide I would like to learn to play the drums. And once I started my lessons with Keith Leach at Sparks Music on Broadway in Gary, Indiana, “General of Broken Hearts” was one of the first songs I tried to learn at home.

My hands were so small that Keith found me slim drumsticks, very elegant ones with nylon tips, to use instead of the clunky thick ones that were standard beginner fare. I took them home with my practice pad and played to the music in the book, then tossed my favorite 45s on the record player and played along.

I remembered just now that, before I started playing the drums, I used to ride a rocking horse I had in time to the music. Depending on the song that was playing, the horse bouncing against the floor could make as much noise as my drumming, so it was pretty much an even trade noise-wise when I started using those sticks.

When I thought I had figured out “General of Broken Hearts,” I asked my mom to come to listen to me play along with the record. By then I had received for Christmas a real stereo with a Garrard automatic changer. I turned on the stereo and sat beside her on my bed. I played the song, and she nodded approvingly.

About three years later, my mother died, and in the chaos leading up to her death, my drum lessons fell by the wayside. But this first foray into public performance, with an audience of one, and one I thought I could count on for a good review at that, flows back into my conscious mind instantly, 40 years later. Marlin Greene’s voice woven into the rolls on the snare drum, matched by my thumps on the rubber practice pad, my mom’s patient smile, her hand tapping the beat on her knee.

If she were still around, this memory might not be so significant to me.

The song was written by Bruce Gist. He has registered a respectable 123 compositions with BMI, but none shows signs of having been a huge hit. There is no production credit listed on the 45, and since no one has seen fit to reissue the Philips sides on CD, I don’t have any liner notes to work from. Thus, one of my favorite 45s, a true Survivor that escaped the fate of being Ground to Dust because I played it mostly on a good turntable, is keeping as many secrets as it reveals.

And yet, I haven’t mentioned the singer, Marlin Greene. I’ll tell you that I love his voice, and I love the album he released in 1972. But there’s so much to say about Marlin that I’m going to hold it back for Saturday. For now, enjoy this tune and this voice, and forgive my decision to split the story into two parts. See you Saturday on the flip side!

Marlin Greene, General of Broken Hearts

General of Broken Hearts label scan

Another One That Almost Got Away

As much as I liked my 45s when I was a kid, I had my favorite side for each disc, and I rarely played the other side. I didn’t base my choice of songs on the label’s suggested A side; I just played what I liked. Without looking, I can’t tell you what was on the other side of “Mama from the Train” or “People Sure Act Funny.”

“Land of Beauty” was one flip side I played frequently, which made “The Stroll” a two-sided smash on the caithiseach record player. Both “The Gypsy Rover” and “Cotton Fields” wound up Ground to Dust, and “Why Wait”/“Patricia” got my attention on both sides, though “Why Wait” was easily the song I played most of everything I owned. Apart from these pairings, I adopted one song per chunk of vinyl as my own and mostly ignored the other.

By the way, if my offhand references to the aforementioned songs don’t ring a bell, either you’re new to the blog or you missed some posts. Check the archives.

I learned a lesson from today’s song. It must have been winter when I pulled “That Background Sound” from the much-reduced collection I still had after the Great Meltdown. I know that because I would have run through a lot of 45s in one day before I would bother playing a song I had ignored for eight or nine years. So I am guessing we were having a snow day. From that point, of course, the newly discovered good song got a lot of airtime. And I took it upon myself to check out the flip side right away, since it could be an undiscovered gem as well.

I was pleased to see that not all 45s had flip sides that were mere filler. I really liked “Now It’s All Over” by Buddy Sheppard and the Holidays. Fred Milano and Angelo D’Aleo, both Belmonts, wrote the tune, and Bernie Lawrence produced it.

Three-year-old caithiseach might have decided not to play this song again, but 12-year-old Seán was fine with it. A slow doo-wop number, “Now It’s All Over” (Sabina 510, 1963) sounded like something Dion might have sung. No real shock there, since the Holidays were actually the Belmonts. I’m not claiming that I picked out the vocal resemblance before I read that the Belmonts recorded as the Holidays, but I am saying they sounded like typical doo-wop artists of their time.

When I learned the lesson that there were still good flip sides to be found, I took time once in awhile to check out the non-played side of 45s, both new and old. In the winter of 1974, I learned that the B side of “Waterloo” by ABBA, a tune called “Watch Out,” was surprisingly different from the hit side. The stylistic range that song showed appealed to my listen-to-everything nature, and I wound up buying the LP Waterloo as a result.

Buddy Sheppard and the Holidays, apart from teaching me not to judge a song by its title, taught me that you always have to check the B side of a 45 for a surprise favorite. When I developed that habit, I made the leap of logic that led me to buy some albums that were not Greatest Hits packages. Even when an album didn’t have ten good songs, it almost always had more than two, and that made me happy. I would have to say that the conscious decision to be a more experimental music listener resulted from pulling “That Background Sound”/“Now It’s All Over” out of the box and checking out both sides.

Thanks, Buddy.

Next week I’ll be talking about one of my true musical heroes. I’ve been waiting for weeks. See you Wednesday!

Buddy Sheppard and the Holidays, Now It’s All Over