Yesterday, Oct. 9, 2012, was John Lennon’s 73rd birthday. As usual on a Beatle birthday, I plan a small musical celebration. Five or six numbers which serve to remind me just how great these people are, or were.
I played Twist and Shout, Please, Please Me, Baby It’s You” (when all is said and done, my deserted island Beatle album would be their first British release), You Can’t Do That, I Feel Fine, Help, and Norwegian Wood.
In making my selections, I flipped through John’s solo albums. I realized that there wasn’t a single song from John’s solo career that even came close to making the play list. Imagine crossed my mind but the lyrics are such up-talking prattle that I couldn’t bring myself to listen to it. That was my sad discovery. So much for LSD, Transcendental Meditation, Primal Scream Therapy, reading cards. Read a good book, I think.
I recently attended a showing of The Beatles’ first film, A Hard Day’s Night. The audience was cautioned that the opening of the film might be a bit startling.
That “startling” opening was, of course, the flaring crash of sound that opens the title song of the movie and the movie itself.
This chiming clang of music is described as “the most famous chord in all of rock & roll.” But new research indicates, after all, that it’s not.
And why not? Well…because it’s not a chord.
Rock & Roll raconteur Randy Bachman recently spent time in London’s EMI’s Abbey Road Studio Two, where most of The Beatles recordings were made, with Giles Martin. Giles is the son of George Martin, who produced most of the group’s records. Giles is now the defacto custodian of the Beatles’ masters – the tapes and the individual tracks from which the final records were produced. These were the recorded sounds that were mixed and released to a waiting world.
Giles explained what he had apparently gleaned from the master tapes. That the opening “chord” was in fact played by the entire Beatle “front line,” that is, the guitarists, John, Paul and George. It was not a single chord, which explains why for nearly fifty years Beatle musicologists and other musicians have puzzled and argued over it.
Filming of the Beatle movie was well along and as yet untitled when Ringo commented, as a day’s work turned into evening, that it had been “a hard day’s… night.” The line had appeared in John Lennon’s recently published book In His Own Write, but until Ringo muttered the line on the movie set, its appropriateness for the title of the film was overlooked. With a title finally chosen came the need, and quickly, for a made-to-order song. Something the song writing team of Paul McCartney and John Lennon had never done before.
In these heady days, as the bachelor Beatles were enjoying the extravagances of their extraordinary fame, new husband and father John Lennon was slightly more homebound. It is noticeable that the majority of the thirteen tracks on the British version of the Hard Day’s Night album are John “weighted’ compositions. Paul was probably out and about in London while John soldiered on at home.
So John was likely at home on Saturday, April 11, 1964, coming up with a basic outline of a song, written to order, entitled A Hard Day’s Night. Over the course of the next three days, John and Paul polished up and finished off John’s rough draft of the song.
On Wednesday, April 16, at seven o’clock in the evening, after a day spent filming the scene in which the Beatles are chased by London constables up and down a dreary London cul-de-sac, the seemingly tireless Beatles showed up at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios. John and Paul stood with their acoustic guitars and played a basic, barebones song to producer George Martin, sitting between them on a high stool, listening intently.
The usually tight-knit crew, Norman Smith, Geoff Emerick, George Martin, who presided over Beatle recording sessions were joined by an apparently unwelcome but necessary guest. This was amateur musician and professional director of the Beatles’ movie, American Dick Lester. Lester was there to make sure the title song was appropriately “cinematic.” It was probably Dick Lester who was responsible for the most famous “chord” in rock & roll. He wanted the title song to open the movie and he wanted to open the movie with a bang.
John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison stood around their carefully miked amps (two Vox AC-50 and Paul’s AC-100 bass) and experiment with notes and chords looking for what George Martin and Richard Lester wanted – a strident beginning to the song – a strident beginning that would also open the film. George was playing his brand new twelve string 360 Rickenbacker guitar, a gift from the Rickenbacker Company, presented to George in New York in February on the group’s first visit to the U.S. The twelve string had the top two strings simply doubled up, while the lower four strings were matched with higher octave strings. The unique sound of this guitar was the Beatles’ secret weapon, at least until the movie came out. John was playing his Rickenbacker 325, a standard six string electric guitar known as a “short arm” Rickenbacker because the guitar neck was shortened so the frets on the neck were closer together. Paul was holding his light, inexpensive (fifty-two guineas he claimed) Hofner “violin” bass guitar, designed for a left-handed player…a four string guitar, with much heavier strings set in the lowest range of the guitar. The three of them were poised to play the strident opening their record producer and their movie director were looking for.
Ringo, sitting behind a new Ludwig drum kit with a new and slightly altered THE BEATLES logo on his twenty inch bass drum head, provided his steady, percussive backbeat.
The Beatles recorded nine takes of their brand new song. Over the course of three hours John and Paul altered the lyrics slightly, smoothed out and tightened up their delivery, while the Georges, Harrison and Martin, worked out a lead guitar break. At some point in those three hours, they all experimented with and settled on the “cinematic, strident” opening that George Martin and Richard Lester were looking for.
Of the nine takes that evening, take nine is the one you hear in the movie and on the record.
On what might be take number one or two, John Lennon muttered one of his usual goofy, oafish “one, two, three, four” count ins, followed immediately by a dissonant clang of guitars, then silence. John mutters “That’s not the one. I’m still doing This Boy.” John repeats the count in, there’s a stuttered clang and again John stops and mutters “I missed the beat…” A third try, the same joking growl of a count in and the famous, unmistakable Hard Day’s Night guitar opening chimes out in all its glory. They had got it.
What “it” was, according to Giles Martin and passed along by Randy Bachman after studying the source tapes preserved on a computer at Abbey Road Studios, “it” was George on his 12 string playing a modified F chord, with a G note on top, a G on the bottom and a C note next to the G. John playing (eventually) a modified D chord with a suspended fourth with a G note. And Paul plucks his third string, a bass D.
Later on, the song was touched up with John adding an acoustic guitar backing on George’s J-160E Gibson and a bongo track, courtesy of Ringo Starr.
And the world was a better place.
Thanks to Geoff Emerick’s Here, There and Everywhere, Andy Bobiak’s The Beatles Gear, Mark Lewisohn’s, The Beatles Recording Sessions and Randy Bachman’s Vinyl Tap radio program on CBC.
Note: Most of the material contained in the following Blog was derived from the book All Roots Lead to Rock edited by Colin Escott specifically Chapter 12 by Colin Escott and Hank Davis, entitled “I Heard You Died in ’64”
Rock & roll and Buffalo are not strangers. The Goo Goo Dolls, Annie DiFranco, Rick James, have shown brightly in the rock & roll firmament. Buffalo radio stations and DJ’s have been fervent purveyors of the culture and sounds of rock & roll.
But lurking in the footnotes of Buffalo’s rock & roll history is one of the great might-have-beens, one of the most intriguing and most engaging of rock’s lost souls. The one who never got what every hustling performer wanted, the thing even the one-hit-wonders got – the thing our rocker did not. No Cadillac for Ben Hewitt. However Ben Hewitt does get some serious attention in my e-book Sidereal Days The History of Rock and Roll A Romance. He looms as a Buffalo and Western NY performing legend to the fictional producer at Gobi Desert Records.
He was born September 11, 1935 in a log cabin on the Tuscarora Indian Reservation. Things went smoothly for him until about 1948 when a $12.50 Stella guitar appeared in his life. A few years later, in a Buffalo venue called the Zanzibar Club, Ben Hewitt came down with a fever he never got over. Little Richard and his band played the Zanzibar for a week. Ben caught every show as well as the aforementioned fever.
The next thing. Ben had his own show and took it on the road. He’d put a little band together. They were playing a bar called DeFazio’s in Niagara Falls. Ben, as he described it, was “shakin’, carryin’ on, doing flip-flops.” Though he was doing his idol Little Richard, he was coming across as Elvis. Up comes a gent who looks remarkably like the notorious Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’s manager. This gent writes songs and wants someone to help him. He wants to make a demo record so he can shop his songs around. Ben agrees to make the demo with a couple of stipulations. This, that and the other thing and “You supply the booze.” Perhaps not the most astute career move.
According to Ben, this Colonel Parker look-alike writes a bunch of different songs but all of them sound the same. At the end of the demo tape, Ben adds his own self-penned song, You Break Me Up.
Wonder of wonders and within about a week, Ben’s songwriting friend has Ben Hewitt and Ben’s remarkable guitarist Ray Ethier in the recording studios of Mercury Records in New York City. Unfortunately, Ben has already signed a contract that ties him up in legal knots. And Mercury Records isn’t interested in any of the quote unquote “songwriters” material. They like Ben Hewitt’s song. They like You Break Me Up.
Then Ray Ethier called it quits. The chance of a profitable career in New York City as a session guitarist didn’t mean a thing to Ray. His reason was as simple as the excuse he gave to Ben Hewitt. “I don’t know anybody here.” That was that. Ray headed back to the Buffalo area. He had to choose between his guitar and his girl. He wanted to get married and he couldn’t marry that guitar.
So Ben Hewitt was off and on his own. Nicknames proliferated but the name “Smoky” caught on and Ben kept it. Unfortunately Ben’s music never really caught on. He had a checkered and luckless recording career. He signed with one record company and a lawsuit laid them low. A postal strike in Canada killed off an ambitious promotional campaign. A case of mistaken identity irreparably soured his relations with Mercury Records. The ultimate career killer was the fact that Ben was legally handcuffed to the Colonel Tom Parker look-a-like. Opportunities to sign with Musicor, Capitol Records, United Artists, fell through because of it.
Ben’s relationship with DeFazio’s kept him going as a performer and a musician. “Smoky,” in his one smart contractual decision, deliberately excluded DeFazio’s from any deals he made. It was the only gig he kept to himself. For thirteen years he played there and no matter where else he ever played, as far afield as Okinawa, someone in the crowd recognized him as “Smoky” from DeFazio’s. Some of them were surprised to find him still with us.
But alive he was. And there’s a grainy video proving that he had what it took to wrangle a crowd. He was still rock & rolling in his late fifties, doing the great old hustle-bustle for the hundred millionth time. Hewitt still had it, he was still kicking up the dust.
Ben “Smoky” Hewitt took the big bow December 8, 1996. He was sixty one.
Ben Hewitt’s recordings are characterized by his methodical, prominent, rhythm guitar playing. Some of the most interesting samples of his work:
Whirlwind Blues is, all considered, not bad, with a nice little lead crescendo, by, I assume, Ray Ethier.
You Break Me Up vocally channels Ricky Nelson through Elvis Presley with some tasty lead guitar work, presumably by Ray Ethier, and the very pleasant, steady chug of Hewitt’s rhythm guitar.
I Ain’t Given Up Nothin’ is well recorded, a good song, with strong echoes of Elvis’s recording,Kiss Me Twice.
I Need Your Kind of Love is the best Ben Hewitt recording I’m aware of. A spare recording, no percussion, almost a folk song approach, with an Elvis inspired vocal performance, a decent set of lyrics and a compelling rhythm guitar accompaniment.
Check on-line retailers for his CD “You Got Me Shook” containing all of Ben Hewitt’s Mercury recordings or go to the website of Bear Family Records www.bear-family.de.
Our son was being interviewed for college and happened to mention that his father was a cartographer and Civil War map historian. The interviewer was a young guy just entering on a professional career and he had a bit of time on his hands for the first time since graduate school began. He had an interest in American history and asked me if I could make some suggestions about things to read. I told him I’d sit down and come up with a reading list of ten books to start with. This is what I sent him…
This was hard! I restricted myself to American history and being essentially military history oriented, esp. Civil War, the list is a bit top heavy with those topics. These are all books that I loved to read, have read more than once, and plan to live long enough to read again.There is no ranking within the list itself. So here goes:
The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan (popular but gripping account of D-Day)
Son of the Morning Star by Evan S. Connell (a rambling but fascinating history of George Armstrong Custer)
Franklin Delano Roosevelt by Conrad Black (best biography of our most interesting 20th C. president)
Company Commander by Charles B. MacDonald (a wonderful, almost moment by moment account of a WW2 rifle company in Europe. It’s like riding with them in a Jeep. It’s not blood and gore and guts. It’s just an absorbing account of what it was like to be there)
Co. Aytch by Sam R. Watkins (ditto as above but a Confederate account of the Civil War)
Lincoln by David Herbert Donald (there are several but this is the best recent one volume biography of Lincoln)
Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (he was dying of throat cancer and his family was destitute when Grant began to write. He finished the book and died three days later. It became the best-selling book of the 19th Century and earned $400,000 in royalties in those days…probably the equivalent of $100,000,000 now. Quite a guy, quite a book. If you’re ever discouraged about things, read this!)
Lincoln Finds A General by Kenneth P. Williams (four volumes but my favorite of all my Civil War books – it’s largely about Grant and the western theater of the War. This is a great set to look for in used book stores. It was published between 1949 and 1956)
Battle Cry of Freedom by James M.McPherson (the best single volume account of the Civil War. It’s part of a series by various authors in the Oxford U. Press’s Oxford History of the U.S. They’re all pretty good and they’re appearing in no particular chronological order)
The Story of the Great March by George Ward Nichols (1865 with a 1972 reprint – what it was like to be on Sherman’s staff on the March to the Sea)
There are two other books that I have to mention though they don’t fit any of the criterion I set up for this list. One is a biography, The Days of Henry Thoreau by Walter Harding. I can’t explain my attraction to it but every time I notice it on the shelf I have to resist the urge to pick it up and read it. And I’m not a particular Thoreau fan.
The other is a trilogy, the overall title being The Sword of Honor, by Evelyn Waugh, the 20th Century English novelist. It’s a fictionalized account of his own service in WW2 and I have the same problem with this book as with the Thoreau.
Give me the word and I’ll pass along some English history recommendations.
As a final recommendation, when you’re done with all of the above, see Maps and Map makers of the Civil War (Abrams 1999) by Earl B. McElfresh.
The maps McElfresh Map Company prepares and publishes are in the rather arcane genre known as “historical base maps” or in England as “reconstruction maps.” Our maps are primarily of Civil War and other battlefields but the data on the map relates 99% to the cultural and physical aspects of the field (the lay of the land in other words) with perhaps a brief reference to some military aspect of the field. For example, on an endpaper map we prepared for volume 1 of Library of America’s The Civil War: As Told By Those Who Lived It, the Bull Run map specifically labels the roundabout route the Union flank march followed to Sudley Ford. Otherwise the massive details presented on the map are interesting but insufficient to provide an understanding of the development and progress of the battle.
Questions are often raised about the process, in the 21st Century, of determining the direction of some long vanished lane or the type of fence surrounding a field or the crop growing in it at Gettysburg in July 1863. Or Antietam in 1862. Or the wartime route of Stonewall Jackson enroute to Cedar Mountain. The question is, are these features accurate or speculative or just made up?
As I researched,I found some surprising resources available to accurately map a Civil War battle in amazing detail.
First: the photographs. William A. Frassanito in his extraordinary books on Gettysburg, Antietam, and the Overland Campaign, collected an enormous number contemporaneous photos and then performed the nearly impossible task of properly locating the vantage point of the photographer and identifying their actual location on the battlefield.
It was then possible for me to identify the types of fences: the post and rail fences were nearly impossible to pull down, so that was easy. Ditto for the board fences. Rock walls stayed put and the detritus along other fields would evidence worm/rail/Virginia type fences.
Further, in these vivid photos, crops in the field could be identified. Dale Dewing, a Cornell agronomist, studied the photos and, knowing the early July time frame, was able to distinguish among wheat, rye and oat fields. Scratchy corn fields were obvious. Orchards were orderly sets of trees.
Also clearly evident were barns, sheds, houses, toll houses, small wooden bridges over culverts…these photos, accurately located, were de facto indexes of the cultural and physical details of the featured battlefields. At Gettysburg, an additional invaluable resource was the isometric (or balloon view) map of the field prepared by John Bachelder in 1863. Bachelder arrived on the field shortly after the battle, interviewing the captive (literally) audience of wounded Confederates, the Union wounded, civilians and anyone with knowledge of the battle and the field. Bachelder then established north/south columns and marched up and down them with a scroll of mapping paper, examining and recording the topographical features of the field as carefully as he did the comments of survivors and witness to the battle. He carefully depicted stone bridges, covered bridges and other encompassing details that no known photographs supplied.
Prior to the McElfresh map of Antietam battlefield, the “definitive” map since the 1880’s had been the Carmen/Cope map. A quick initial glance at this map in comparison with post battle photographs revealed numerous missing details…and that was just in the immediate vicinity of the Middle Bridge. Missing on the earlier “definitive” map, just in this one tiny section of the field, were two substantial farmhouses, their outbuildings, a fenced in cornfield and a toll booth on the Boonsboro pike. Again, the Frassanito Antietam study provided invaluable guidance.
The next mapping blogs will provide further incontrovertible resources to inform a 21st Century mapmaker of the lay of the Civil War’s land, including such arcane and/or obvious resources as 20th Century aerial photography, memoirs, burial maps, contemporaneous military maps, outdated USGS maps, regimental histories, bird droppings, orderly rocks and other peculiar but reliable resources.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
