Author Archives: Earl B. McElfresh

Facts and Figures

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My rock & roll novel Sidereal Days carries the subtitle The History of Rock and Roll. This slightly exaggerates the “history” content of the book but the text is alert to real rock and roll characters, issues, places and background.  For example, the birth of the vinyl 45 record as detailed in the book by the record producer Joe Brodie is factually true.  Shellac records were made from the excretions of the lac insect.  When the Japanese conquered the sea lanes and islands of the South Pacific in WW2, the supply of shellac was cut off.  The military used records to send general information to its various commands and a crash program was instituted to find a substitute for shellac.  Vinyl plastic was the result.  It was slightly more expensive than shellac but it was much lighter, much sturdier and provided higher fidelity.  The fortuitous happy result for rock and roll was the 45 single.  As detailed in the book, kids could carry their indestructible 45 to a party, play their favorite song to all their friends, all their friends could hear the song, like it, buy it, and play it for THEIR friends.  The making of many a hit.  And it transformed the music business because that niche market could create a hit and a performer could appeal to that one segment of the population.  And that particular “population” wanted to hear rock and roll music.  Voila!

Also, anytime a specific number is mentioned, a license number, a room number etc. it relates to some specific r&r episode. For example, a hotel room might in fact be the same room that Jerry Lee Lewis stayed in when it was discovered that his wife was a 13 year old relative, or the license number of a vehicle might be the license number of the van the Beatles first travelled toHamburgin. The chauffeur who drives the Sparrows around NYC was in fact the man who drove the Beatles around in February 1964.  The names given to the production staff of the Ed Sullivan Show are, in fact, the same people who produced the Beatles epic first live appearance on American television.

There are lots more. All in good time.

The Beatles. Gear!

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It should be hard to come up with “the one indispensible book” about the Beatles—I have shelves of them—but it’s not.  Most of the biographies are valuable.  Hunter Davies original authorized biography and the up-dated versions are great (esp. the less sanitized additions to the new editions) and Phillip Norman’s bio Shout, is good. Some of the more scholarly books make annoying little errors (John, not Paul, is the falsetto on From Me to You—how do you listen and not hear that?) and the newer gamey accounts don’t bring anything to the Beatle legend that you actually want to know.  Paul could be cheap, George was mean.  Say it ain’t so!  But they do keep coming up with never-before-seen photos and that’s hard to believe when you have Beatle calendars from about 1927.

The current Beatle guru, Bob Spitz, contributed his list of Paul’s best songs to a Time magazine McCartney special.  Spitz says Drive My Car was too raucous to be included on the Rubber Soul album.  But wait … isn’t that song the opening track on the Rubber Soul album?  And Spitz fails to include one of Paul’s and the Beatle’s absolute masterpieces, both lyrically and musically, the one song that had Paul and John out of their chairs and performing joyously together at the nadir of their careers and affections, Two of Us.  And listen to Ringo’s drumming.  And George’s muted but growling guitar riffs on that song.  And somebody should tell biographers and critics (and Paul himself) that Fool on the Hill is the most treacly, overblown, pompous, boring, squirm-in-your-seat, embarrassing song the Beatles ever recorded (how did acerbic John not stamp that one out?)

But enough.  Buy this one book if you don’t own a single Beatles book and buy this one book if you have them all.

Beatles Gear by Andy Babiuk, the revised edition.  Here’s the level of scholarship. John’s first Rickenbacker guitar is photographed as it looks today.  Also, the 1958 invoice from Rickenbacker to German distributor Framous with John’s future purchase (serial # V81) itemized on the invoice.  In addition, a photo of Rickenbacker salesman Jean “Toots” Thielemans at an instrument trade show.  “Toots” played a Rickenbacker guitar in an appearance with George Shearing that inspired John to buy a Rickenbacker guitar in the first place.  Lined up behind “Toots” at the trade show is the actual guitar John eventually bought.

There are a couple other “must have or at least should have” Beatle books:  The Beatles Anthology and Mark Lewisohn’s The Complete Beatles Chronicle but Andy Babiuk’s Beatles Gear is the one literally breathtaking volume.

1001 Nights to Over Night Success

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The Beatles career exactly matched my teenage years. I was thirteen when they appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in Feb, 1964 and I was 19 when the Beatles performed in person for the last time on the roof of their Apple headquarters on Savile Row in London in Jan. 1969. The Beatles hit absolute dead center with baby boomers of my exact age, the high school class of 1968.

It was interesting therefore in Sidereal Days to write about the arrival of the Beatles on America’s shores from a completely different perspective. An established American rock & roll group would obviously evaluate the Beatles on a very practical basis as professional rivals, musicians and performers. They would also be assessing the Beatles on a more knowledgeable level than a knocked out teenage male fan or a screaming teenage girl.

While teenagers swooned to the Beatles, the fictional Sparrows are dissecting the music. They recognize that the chord structures are more varied, that the Beatles are singing rather complex harmonies, and that Beatles play a more rugged brand of music than anyone else with records in the stores.

The Beatles had an enormous advantage over their predecessors in rock & roll. Elvis could probably step out on a stage and convincingly belt out 15 or 20 rock & roll songs. Ditto for Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Dion and the Belmonts, Gene Vincent, Chuck Berry, the Everly Brothers and the other early stars of the genre. These early practitioners of rock & roll simply had no backlog of appropriate material to work from. They could draw on country music, perhaps jazz, gospel, the blues, Americana and dance music but there was as yet no reservoir of rock & roll tunes.

Then come the Beatles. At their proving grounds, the Indra, the Kaiserkeller, the Top Ten, and the Star Club in Hamburg, Germany, they had to spend four, five and six hours a night on stage entertaining not merely demanding audiences but dangerous ones. By 1962, five or six years into the rock & roll era, they had a fairly significant catalog of material to draw from—and draw they did. The Beatles likely could play 150 different numbers if pressed. They rocked up some old standards like Falling in Love Again and Red Sails in the Sunset, they studied the B sides of records which no one else paid attention to, they covered overlooked numbers like Buddy Holly’s Words of Love, pulled off convincing renditions of nonsense songs like Besame Mucho, and in the desperate search for new material delved into songs like Hippy Hippy Shake and into obscure artists like Arthur Alexander. They modified the lyrics and sang girl group songs like Mr. Postman and Chains.

This familiarity with a massive number and a huge variety of material supplied the Beatles with enough songs to keep their audiences happy through long hard nights in gangster bars. It also supplied John and Paul, the fledging songwriters, with a massive bag of musical tricks to draw from as they began to write and perform their own songs. They nicked little known guitar riffs and progressions from forgotten or overlooked artists. They melded big band conventions into their rock & roll. They soaked up influences from everything and everybody they heard and melded them into their own songs. And they topped all of this off with a hard edged sound that came from a thousand and one nights of playing together in front of audiences that insisted on excitement and expertise.

By the time the Beatles lit into an American TV audience of 73 million people, the cheeky, cheery, squeaky clean over-night success mop tops were probably the most hardened and experienced—in every sense of the word—rock & roll veterans in all the world. It’s no wonder the fictional Sparrows and all the other actual bands, came to gawk and remained to gaze on in spellbound wonder.

By the way in Chapter 78 of Sidereal Days I am the young kid that went into Medley Corner and wanted to buy “the Beatle record”, got confused when I was told there were three Beatle records and left because I only had seventy-five cents.

The Facts Behind the Fiction: “The Sparrows” and Patsy Cline

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The fictional band, the Sparrows, in my novel Sidereal Days, get their first big break when they meet Patsy Cline by chance at a radio station in Middletown, NY in December 1962.  There is a tiny hodgepodge of fact in this particular bit of fiction. Years ago, in a now closed restaurant called Earl’s along Route 16 near Yorkshire Corners, there was a framed letter from Miss Patsy Cline. She had written to a DJ and country & western player named Jimmy Dale. Patsy was writing to Dale to thank him for having her on his show at radio station WALL in Middletown, NY.  The letter caught my attention because 1) I love Patsy Cline, 2) Jimmy Dale and I are both from Olean, NY, and 3) I’d lived for a few years next door to Middletown. That was the trifecta of associations that I took advantage of to have the Sparrows meet Patsy Cline. I needed some plausible lucky break to bounce the Sparrows out of their routine of standing local engagements and small-time circle of venues.  In the book therefore, by chance, the Sparrows are promoting a gig in Middletown at that radio station and meet Patsy Cline.

The boys make a nice impression on her and their presence in the studio at her late night radio interview makes the whole affair much easier and much more pleasant for Patsy. The Sparrows interest her in recording a song they’re working on called All The Way To Back Here. This in turn inspires Patsy Cline to ask the Sparrows to possibly open for her sometime in the future.

That opportunity comes when the boys join Patsy Cline on stage at a benefit concert in Kansas City, KS. This concert actually occurred and is pretty accurately described in the book with the obvious exception of the Sparrow’s appearance. It was Patsy Cline’s last public appearance. Patsy and her small party attempted to fly in a small plane in squally weather back home to Nashville and crashed into a Tennessee hilltop. The depiction of Patsy Cline in the book is entirely intuitive yet I can’t help feeling that it’s also pretty accurate and heartfelt.

The scenes in the novel that make up this section – the radio station reception area and Milly, the late night broadcast, the Howard Johnson’s motel room and the portrayal of Patsy Cline – are some of my favorite chapters of the book.

And of course Patsy’s songs, Crazy, Walking After Midnight, I Fall To Pieces and her other classics, masterfully produced by Owen Bradley, are perfume and saw dust, diamonds and stones.  A uniquely American musical concoction.

Crazy was for years, and may still be, the most popular juke box song in America. And it was written for Patsy by a brisk, crisp, gray flannelled, nattily suited up business man named Willie Nelson.

Recollections and Inspirations

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A fictional band from Rochester called The Buicks figures in my novel Sidereal Days, The History of Rock & Roll, A Romance.  The Buicks are modeled after an actual Rochester-based band called The Invictas.  The real Invictas came along a bit later than the band in the storyline and, unlike the fictional Buicks, the Invictas are still a going concern.

Jim Kohler, Mark Blumenfeld, Dave Hickey and Herb Gross were students and fraternity brothers in Phi Sigma Kappa at RIT.  They gained local fame as the bar band at Tiny’s Bengal Inn where they built a devoted fan base and then branched out.  Their song Do the Hump or simply The Hump was a regional hit and they released an eponymous album.  As with the fictional Buicks, the draft hovered in the background of any footloose and fancy-free bunch of guys and service in the National Guard cramped the band’s style a bit.

They traveled to their gigs in a big old Cadillac hearse with “THE INVICTAS” emblazoned on the side.  They appeared at my high school, Olean High School, in January 1965.  Our typical high school dance bands were pretty amateurish, they were high school kids.  Hair: “short back and sides,” with amps the size of a Cracker Jack box.  For our high school dance we went way out on a limb.  We put up a lot of money and with great trepidation hired a professional band.  We hired The Invictas.    The week before the concert an actual recording of their cover of Bo Diddley’s I’m All Right with one of those laconic, beckoning lead guitar openings, was played morning and night on the high school intercom.

Surrounded by admirers from left to right Mark, Jim, Herb and Dave.

A cold January night.  The huge crowd we generated packed close to the band, shocking with their long hair, and they obviously weren’t kids.  The Invictas were men and they were professionals. They had pulled up in their hearse. They wore riding boots.  When the Invictas let loose, the crowd staggered back, almost knocked over, blasted by the power of their playing and the wattage of their amplifiers.  It was quite a night.  To top things off, all the money that was made that night went missing in the fall and was never seen again.

The Invictas have reunited periodically over the years.   In 2006 their longevity and continued local popularity came to the attention of NBC and resulted in a Today Show segment.  The Today Show’s taping included some background coverage and a live performance by the band in front of 5,000 people as the group opened for the Beach Boys. The Invictas have reunited on a regular basis ever since and as recently as late-July 2012.

My fictional band the Sparrows record at Gobi Desert Studio in Buffalo, NY.  The Invictas recorded at Sahara Records in Buffalo.  Several other incidents that befall the fictional Sparrows “on the road” are mostly amusing and are inspired by my cousin Jim Kohler’s (Invictas bass guitarist) recollections and reminiscences.  My own murky recollections of Jim’s learning to play guitar while night clerking at downtown Rochester’s Cadillac Hotel inspired the hotel lobby chapter of Sidereal Days.

The Cost of Doing Business

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One of the challenges in writing a novel such as Sidereal Days that’s set in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s is getting the costs of things and monetary issues correct.  For example, how much do you have a high school band get paid for playing at a dance? How much do you charge them for a meal or for a hamburger and fries? Or for a tank of gas when they fill up their van?

There’s a scene in Book 1 when Orlando P. Jones is negotiating with the owner of Airway Motors to play in the dealer’s parking lot on a Saturday afternoon. Orlando mentions a figure of $50.00 and comments how differently the words “fifty dollars” sound when he says them compared to the way the shocked dealer says “fifty dollars!!!”

As it turns out, a fairly reliable guide to comparative prices is to divide modern prices by 10 or 11 to get an accurate sense of the price of things in the late 50’s/early 60’s. It works out pretty well in most cases. The exceptions to this general rule, and the most volatile commodities seem to be gas prices (relatively speaking much higher now by comparison with the average cost in 1962 of 29 cents per gallon), milk (much cheaper now comparatively), and college tuition (much higher now comparatively). Interestingly enough, music was more expensive comparatively in the Sparrow’s time.  45 singles at $.87 and albums at $3.67 would equate now to about  $9.00 and nearly $40.00 respectively.

So Orlando P. Jones was asking the car dealer to pay his high school band, with one single gig to their name, approximately $550. And when the Sparrows spend $3.50 at Bruce Johnson’s Phillips 66 gas station, they’ve topped off their tank with 12 gallons of gas. And the Sears Roebuck Silvertone 1300 guitar that Orlando and Rudy essentially cheat their classmate out of for $10 would be $110 in today’s prices–and they would really be cheating their classmate nowadays. That particular guitar was actually an excellent instrument and is a very desirable vintage guitar. In good condition it can sell for more than $500.

Shorty Black Raincoats

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In the 4th book of my novel Sidereal Days, the fictional band the Sparrows land late in the evening at London Airport in October 1964 for a month-long tour of England. They are met late at night at the airport by an unlikely duo–two Englishmen in “shorty black raincoats.” They are none other than George Harrison and John Lennon, who welcome their fellow rock & rollers to Britain.

I was contacted by a reader who thought this scenario was preposterous. Why would George and John, certainly not known as nature’s noblemen, go out of their way to welcome a middling American rock & roll band in the middle of the night to London Airport and England. It’s a fair question and one I can only answer by saying, I don’t know why exactly except that the two actually did this very thing. The timing was a little different but when America’s greatest little band of all time, the Lovin’ Spoonful, flew to Britain in 1966, there to greet them were John and George. The meeting was captured by a photographer and the photograph appeared in the great teen magazine of the day, 16 Magazine. The little gathering of musicians are huddled in a circle and appear for all the world like hip heads of state conferring about the issues of the day. The first issue was likely, “Were yellow Sun records actually from Nashville or was it Memphis?” Or perhaps John Lennon was asking John Sebastian where he got the wire rim glasses he was wearing – a question that within a year or two would revolutionize the optometry business.

It’s well-known that the Beatles were immense fans of American rock & roll and always felt that the Brits did a version of rock & roll but that the Americans were the actual authentic fountain. And the Beatles were always willing to pay homage to the original source. John Lennon was later to say that the Beatles never did anything to compare with Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On. But of course John Lennon said an awful lot of things.

Recording Peggy Sue

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A favorite of the fictional Sparrows, Buddy Holly was a favorite of a pretty wide spectrum of people. John Lennon had a Buddy Holly poster in his bedroom at Mendips in Liverpool. British Prime Minister (and successor to Margaret Thatcher) John Major wore heavy black rim glasses in honor of the Lubbock flash. Cream covered Well…All Right. The Beatles mirrored the line up of Buddy Holly’s band The Crickets and became pretty much the second members of a band in rock and roll history to have individual identities.

Although Words of Love was #1 in the hearts of the Sparrows, #2 would be Peggy Sue. The story of the song is fairly well-known. Buddy wrote it as “Cindy Lou” and visualized the appropriate drum beat as being what is known as paradiddles. It’s a drumming pattern that a drummer taking lessons would learn early on. Jerry Allison, the Crickets’ stellar drummer, was embarrassed to play such an elementary beat and only agreed to when Buddy changed the name of the song to Peggy Sue, Allison’s steady girlfriend. Norman Petty, the band’s producer, suggested the song needed a chorus and came up with the absurdly simple yet incomparable “pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty Peggy Sue” based around an F chord smack in the middle of a A,D,E song.(The Rolling Stones went two “prettys” farther in 1979’s Beast of Burden.)   And Petty didn’t stop there. He close-miked Buddy’s steady, down, down, down strum on the Fender Stratocaster guitar so it shows up on the recording as an intimate purring, so the recording becomes in and of itself an indelible part of the performance. (Another amazing coincidence…the fictional Sparrows’s fictional producers do the same darn thing!)  Petty set it up so Allison was playing in a separate room, away from the vocals and guitars. Then he modulated the drumming, bringing it in and out of the mix, so the drums roll through the song like waves washing up on a beach. But the effect in the song was mysterious and theatrical.   It was like waves on a beach at night or rain spattering on a windshield. Buddy’s normal west Texas panhandle singing voice gets tinny and effeminate on two of the verses, namely the two verses that end with his elongated enunciation of “Peggy Sue.” He draws out Peggy Sue, stretching out the three syllables in the name to twelve hicuppy syllables. Maybe thirteen. It only happens twice. Nobody else does it quite like Buddy.

In any hit parade, this song is marching just behind the flags.

Words of Love

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In my book Sidereal Days, the fictional Sparrows, to a man, are fans of Buddy Holly. The common bond that unites all of them when they make their first tentative efforts to form a band is that they all love Holly’s song Words of Love. I also think this very early Holly song is one of the greatest songs in rock & roll’s repertoire.

In the novel, the Sparrows perform a version of the song but it’s described as being a less jangley, twangy version of the song than the one Buddy Holly recorded and released with his band, the Crickets.The fictional version of the song, as described in the book, is actually based on the version recorded and released by another band a bit later, too late for the Sparrows, in the sequence of the novel, to have heard or been aware of. The other band members were also, to a man, huge Buddy Holly fans.

It was October 18, 1964. In a residential suburb in London located near the northwest corner of Regents Park, the Beatles had already recorded I Feel Fine and Chuck Berry’s Rock & Roll Music and a number of other songs. John Lennon and George Harrison were playing 12 string Rickenbacker guitars, Paul was playing his Hofner bass and Ringo was playing on a guitar case. They were finishing up the days work at close to midnight.

The Beatles had played Words of Love as part of their live performances since 1958. Holly had sung both lines of the song’s two-part harmony on his recording, double tracking his voice, an innovation developed by the venerable Les Paul. When the Beatles performed the song in their live appearances, the harmonized vocals were shared by John and George. On this night, three Beatles, John, Paul and George, gathered around a single microphone in Abbey Road Studio number 2 and in three takes finished off the only Buddy Holly song they ever formally recorded and released. The 12 string guitars created much more of a chiming rendition than Buddy Holly’s gritty west Texas version and the Beatles, with John’s dominant, breathy voice, produced a much more romantic and more “mature” version than Holly’s, if that’s the right word for a song that’s more sensual, soaring and romantic. More like the version that the fictional Sparrows perform in concert. Such a coincidence!

Jerry Lee

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We sent out postcards announcing the e-publication and availability of our first title, Sidereal Days, The History of Rock & Roll, A Romance. The postcard hoped to pique recipient’s interest by posing a few esoteric/obscure r&r trivia questions. The answers to all questions are of course embedded into the novel itself.

In the mean time here are some answers…..

Jerry Lee Lewis heard Elvis’s first recordings and saw the Sun Records label and determined to travel to Memphis and showcase his song to producer Sam Phillips at Sun. Jerry Lee was apparently completely broke at the time but he was a man in a hurry. So he hustled around, managed to sell 13 dozen eggs, pocketed the money and made his way to Memphis. Phillips, luckily for the future of r&r, was an accomodating and accessible guy and invited Jerry Lee to pull up a piano and show what he had. Ten seconds of Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On was enough to convince Sam Phillips that it would be a hit. Right again.