No Pain, No Gain

I’ve mentioned before that few of my 45s were double-sided caithiseach hits when I was little. Among the artists I’ve profiled so far, only the Highwaymen single and the Marlin Greene single got equal A/B play in my world. Today’s 45 is a third: I flipped “La Dee Dah (Ha Ha Ha)” by Jerry Jackson and found “You Don’t Wanna Hurt Me” attractive as well.

My modus operandi when I feature both sides of a single on the blog has been to focus on the artist’s history on Wednesday and some other aspect of the 45 on Saturday. I’ve told you what I know about Jerry Jackson, one of the best singers to cross my platter when I was little. And now I get to discuss a couple of his songwriters.

Michael (Mickey) Gentile co-wrote “You Don’t Wanna Hurt Me.” He wrote tunes recorded by Barbara McNair and Marvin Gaye, including “I Wish I Liked You (As Much As I Love You).” He was a frequent collaborator with songwriter Jennie Lee Lambert, who recorded “First Summer of Our Love”/“Hey Mr. Scientist” for the Musicor label in 1961.

Mickey Gentile is credited vaguely with production work for Motown, but short of buying a bunch of CDs just to see the notes, I’m afraid I’m not coming up with much concrete information. There is, however, a Mickey Gentile connection about whom I know a bit more.

Gentile and Lambert co-wrote “Hey Mr. Scientist,” and one singer who covered it was a guy named Jeff Barry. Later, Jeff Barry co-wrote “You Don’t Wanna Hurt Me” with Mickey Gentile.

Now, depending on your depth of musical knowledge, either a billion bells are sounding, or you’re shrugging your shoulders. The rest of this post, and the next two, are for the shoulder-shruggers, but if you think you know Jeff Barry, I can still educate all but one or two of you, and you know who you are.

When I was first playing this Jerry Jackson recording, I couldn’t read the label. I depended on visual memory of each label to know which record I was playing. My parents gave me the name of the artist and the title of the song, and then, from age two on, I pulled the records I wanted to play from the stack almost without error. (I did make two serious mis-associations, but I’ll discuss them in September.)

Three-year-old caithiseach knew the artist and the title of his 45s, but he never asked what the names in parentheses (the songwriters) meant. I figured out their significance as soon as I learned that my uncle’s name was in the parentheses of one 45 I owned, but I left the rest of the little names alone until I could read them myself.

Once I did see that (Barry-Gentile) had written “You Don’t Wanna Hurt Me,” I didn’t connect it with Jeff Barry, who sang next week’s songs. But now, I know this song to be a somewhat early effort from the man who turned out to be the third-most-successful American pop songwriter of the rock era, behind Carole King and Lionel Richie.

Jeff Barry was born April 3, 1938 in Brooklyn. Signed to RCA records in 1958, he had little success as a recording artist for RCA, but he placed some compositions with hitmakers, including “Teenage Sonata” with Sam Cooke (#50, 1960) and “Tell Laura I Love Her” with Ray Peterson (#7, 1960).

While I adored the Jeff Barry songs I’ll feature next week, I also loved a few tunes I didn’t own on 45 but heard on the radio: “Da Doo Ron Ron,” “Be My Baby,” “Baby I Love You,” “Leader of the Pack” and “Chapel of Love.” They, along with “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah” by the Beatles (yes, I DO know the real title now) and “Downtown” by Petula Clark, made up the soundtrack of my life between birth and kindergarten.

And, apart from “Downtown” and “She Loves You,” they were all written by Jeff Barry. I just didn’t know it.

Now you know it, too, and so I ask you to give this song a listen. There is so much more to say about Jeff as his 70th birthday approaches that his career, like Gaul, must be divided into three parts. See you Wednesday and Saturday with more details of Jeff’s career.

Jerry Jackson, You Don’t Wanna Hurt Me

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)