Let’s Hear It For The Girls!

It’s no secret that some of the greatest popular music ever made will never make Top Hundred lists of Rolling Stone or Uncut. There are a number of reasons for this but the most important is that much of it was released on singles rather than albums. Furthermore, rock ‘n’ roll music is very male dominated and so some extremely good music has been criminally overlooked and undervalued, for instance; the girl group genre of music.

Mr Lee– The Bobbettes (1957)

The Bobbettes were the first girl group to make it into the charts with this, a doo-wop ode to a teacher they despised. In fact they disliked this particular teacher so much that the original title of the song was ‘I Shot Mr. Lee’, and those sentiments were reflected in the lyrics of the original recording. Although Atlantic Records sensed they might have a hit on their hands, the murderous element of the song made them a tad nervous and so they asked the group to record this more sanitised version.

Maybe – The Chantels (1958)

The Chantays were the first to craft something that more noticeably all the hallmarks of what the girl group became . The pain and longing in Arlene Smith’s vocal is so audible that teenagers everywhere must have instantly been able to relate to it and they bought the record in droves. It sold over a million copies when it was first released. Lead singer, Arlene Smith, also wrote the song.

Be My Baby – The Ronnettes (1965)

By the mid-60s , this was released. Be My Baby is perhaps the most legendary girl-group record of all time – some say the greatest pop record ever made. Phil Spector may be more notorious than famous now, but in the mid-60s he was at the peak of his powers. Even so, the lyrics of Be My Baby are rather disturbing; ‘So won’t you say you love me, I’ll make you so proud of me, we’ll make them turn their heads every place we go…’ The words almost suggest that the singer is happy to be the object of her love’s possession – quite ominous in retrospect.

Don’t Say Nothing Bad About My Baby – The Cookies (1963)

The Cookies were a prolific girl group who recorded under several different names, including; The Pasilades, The Stepping Stones and The Honey Bees; usually with Dorothy Jones on lead vocals. They were a very successful session group too and can be heard supplying backing vocals on many of Neil Sedaka singles, Little Eva’s ‘Locomotion’ and its follow-up hit, plus Mel Torme’s ‘Comin’ Home Baby’. They were Goffin and King’s demo group of choice and recorded some of their songs as singles, including ‘Don’t Say Nothing Bad About My Baby’, which became The Cookies’ biggest hit. Check out the way Dorothy Jones says, ‘So girl, you better shut your mouth,’ they were the epitome of cool.

Tell Him – The Exciters (1963)

Produced by the legendary Leiber and Stoller, The Exciters were quite different from the girl-groups who preceded them. They were noted for having a ‘tougher’ sound and a more aggressive variety of femininity. Fronted by Brenda Reid, this was their first hit:

Nowhere To Run – Martha & The Vandellas (1965)

Another record from 1965, this is a far more up-tempo R&B number and Martha Reeves had the vocal chords to carry a song like this off. Before The Supremes arrived on the scene, Martha & The Vandellas were one of Tamla Motown’s most commercial acts and they hit after hit, most of which haven’t dated one jot. Vandellas records were typically dancey, R&B powerhouse numbers, which went on to be covered by many of mod bands, such as; The Who, The Kinks, etc. None of those cover-versions surpassed the originals though.

Baby Love – The Supremes (1964)

According to Supremes mythology it was Florence Ballard who had the vocal talent, but whatever the truth is, Diana Ross went on to front the band and there’s no denying her charisma. However, the hit-making team placed with The Supremes (Holland, Dozier and Holland) realised that Ms Ross’ voice was not remotely in the category of a powerful singer like Martha Reeves and so they had to take a different approach to accommodate it. The Supremes wanted to record Vandellas style records but instead were presented with more subtle songs like ‘Where Did Our Love Go’ and ‘Baby Love’. The young Diana Ross’ breathy, kitten-like voice suited the syncopated style of those records in a way that Martha Reeves’ would have been too powerful.

Baby It’s You – The Shirelles (1961)

The Shirelles were one of John Lennon’s favourite groups and The Beatles even went on to record a version of this on the first album. The Shirelles’ version of ‘Baby It’s You’ has a unique, weird sound all of its own though, and that’s why I’ve included it here. The record has a disconcerting atmosphere and this is quite typical of the Shirelles, whose imperfect harmonies add depth to all of their recordings. Even their most famous single, ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow’, shares this quality.

Out In The Streets – The Shangri-Las (1964)

Some of The Shangri-Las’ records are, quite simply, masterpieces. The Shangri-Las’ producer, George ‘Shadow’ Morton was heavily influenced by Phil Spector, but unlike Spector was less overbearing and temperamental. Although The Shangri-Las’ quickly became associated with a short 60s phenomena known as ‘the death ballad’, their records always had a sense of humour and fun about them and the group embodied streetwise glamour.

Nobody Knows What’s Going On In My Mind – The Chiffons (1965)

The Chiffons were one of the most successful girl groups of the 1960s and they had many hits, most of which were pop at its purest form (‘He’s So Fine’, ‘Sweet Talking Guy’, and ‘One Fine Day’, etc). Their records were very stylish and had a great deal of natural poise and elegance. This record is no exception but it has far more in common with R&B than their earlier pop hits. In fact, it’s very easy to imagine this being a hit in Northern Soul clubs.

Attack – The Toys (1966)

The Toys scored a Number One single in the US with ‘Lover’s Concerto’ in 1965 – they only managed to get to Number Eighteen with this, but I like it. Again, it has a Northern Soul style quality and should be heard more often.

The Hunter Gets Captured By The Game – The Marvelettes (1967)

The Marvelettes are one of the great girl groups but perhaps owing to the fact that they shared the Tamla Motown label with The Supremes, they have been too often overshadowed. They recorded the original version of ‘Please Mr Postman’ and took it to Number One in the Billboard Charts and recorded many equally memorable singles. In fact, they were Motown’s most successful girl-group for a short time.

Bad Boy – The Donays (1962)

‘Bad Boy’ was the A-side of ‘Devil In His Heart’, which went on to become a vehicle for an early George Harrison vocal performance (as ‘Devil In Her Heart’, of course). As far I can make out, it was sadly the only single The Donays ever released.

He Was Really Saying Something – The Velvelettes (1964)

This was the original version of the song Bananarama and FunBoy 3 had a hit with in 1982. The Velvelettes were another first-class Tamla Motown girl-group and they specialised in street-wise anthems like this (another was ‘Needle In The Haystack’). The Velvelettes were unfortunately another great girl-group who suffered as a consequence of Motown’s relentless cash-generating machine.

Nothing But A Heartache – The Flirtations (1968)

Play this record to most people and they will immediately think that is one of the best Supremes songs they’ve never heard or will at least imagine that it’s a Tamla Motown single. Not so, this was a group of US émigrés recording for British record-label, Deram (which was Decca’s more ‘with it’ younger brother). This was the best record The Flirtations ever managed to release though as they were never quite able to find the right producers or material to match their potential. This is an undeniable masterpiece though.

Mama Didn’t Lie – The Orions (1963)

The Orions were primarily renowned for realeasing dance-craze singles like ‘The Wah Watusi’, but the foursome had far more range, as this early Curtis Mayfield composition demonstrates. Rosetta Hightower was their lead singer and they were one of the forerunners of the early Philadelphia Soul sound.

I Wanna Love Him So Bad – The Jelly Beans (1964)

The Jelly Beans were signed by Leiber and Stoller and placed with production and songwriting team, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. This was their debt single and it peaked at Number Nine in the Billboard Charts. Apparently the group did a lot of recording but much of it was remained unreleased. Two further singles came out with little interest being generated at the time and so their label Red Bird didn’t put out an album, despite ample material being available. The group split up in 1965.

At which point did rock and pop become separate genres? And why?

This is a question I asked on my Facebook account recently and received a number of very intelligent responses from a wide cross-section of people. This in turn is my own opinion.

Some Beatles fans. Note home-made Beatles jumper in the middle.

One person indicated that they felt that in some respects it may have started with the rivalry between The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and their respective fans.  In some ways I would agree with that, but only partially.  If we look at the difference between the two bands in the early days one thing becomes clear.  The Beatles’ hits were all self-penned songs with an undeniable pop slant.  Any analysis of those songs would perhaps reveal that they reveal that they were largely influenced by the pop hits of the day; the songwriting of Carole King and Jerry Goffin, girl groups in general, Roy Orbison, The Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, and so on.  This would seemingly put The Beatles firmly in the pop category then.

The Rolling Stones when they were still blues purists.

The Rolling Stones are another matter.  The Stones’ roots were self-consciously more rhythm and blues based since many of the bands members came from the Alexis Korner stable.  Brian Jones had even written letters to the music magazines of the day, some of which were printed, extolling the virtues of the blues and advocated that the genre should be given more coverage.  The Rolling Stones early records were largely cover versions of some blues staples and featuring very bluesy instrumentation; blues harp, slide guitar, open tunings.  However, purists of the time argued that The Rolling Stones were more of rock ‘n’ roll band, mainly because they played a lot of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley numbers.  Neither of those artists were considered blues because their songs were primarily aimed at the dance-floor and – in the case of Chuck Berry – had lyrics that enshrined youth culture.

A further problem arises when we look at what musical academics call authenticity.  The Beatles were in many ways a far more authentic band than The Rolling Stones in those early days.  The Beatles had served an apprenticeship in a dangerous German red-light district and had honed their craft there.  By the time they returned to the UK they were a self-contained unit, functioning with almost military precision and knew the ins and outs of songwriting intimately, having played hundreds of songs for months on end to keep up with an aggressive audience’s demands.  The Rolling Stones hadn’t been playing for anything like as long before they were signed.  Furthermore, all of The Beatles hits were written by members of the band, while The Rolling Stones were initially reliant on cover-versions, which caused them to struggle for a while.  In fact, it was only at the instigation of their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, that they began writing songs at all.

The intimidating presence Ewan MacColl

So where did this issue about authenticity come from?  Did audiences really care whether artists wrote their own songs or not, or even what genre they were in.  Perhaps a minority did.  In the early sixties the UK still had a jazz scene and some young people were into ‘trad’ and others preferred the more up to date, sharper dressed ‘modern’ jazz.  That is what the original ‘mods’ were; fans of modern jazz, and even in the early sixties, the jazz genre had a lot of snobs in it, who would argue about which artist was ‘authentic’ jazz and who wasn’t.  There were people arguing that 1962 hit ‘Take Five’ by The Dave Brubeck Quartet wasn’t proper jazz because it was played in the wrong time-signature (5/8).

There were other snobs among the music-buying public too; those who listened to or even played folk.  The ultimate folk snob was the late, great Ewan MacColl, who reportedly ran folk clubs with an iron hand and forbade folk singers to sing a song from a culture other than their own, and even banned acoustic guitars .  The latter may have taken place because of the influence of Bob Dylan, who MacColl distrusted and felt had taken folk music in the wrong direction.

A young and already iconic Bob Dylan.

The Yardbirds featuring the melancholic Eric Clapton on lead guitar.

Bob Dylan began his recording career as a folk artist, of course. He was one of most influential figures in popular music industry and in the mid-60s his songwriting was at its most popular.  Both The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were caught up in his spell and one only has to listen to their records of 1965/66 to hear evidence of it (John Lennon was showing signs of a Dylan influence as early as 1964).  It was Dylan who proved that lyrics could be used to convey something important rather than just throwaway clichés about teen-romance.  Of course, Dylan wasn’t the first person to do this – Jerry Goffin’s lyrics were never throwaway – but he was the first young, fashionable person of any prominence to do so and the effect it had on popular music was staggering.

Therefore, as we have seen, there were purists among blues fans, the folk community and those following jazz.  An example of a purist working in the 1960s popular music scene was Eric Clapton.  In 1965, Clapton decided that to leave The Yardbirds after recording their breakthrough single ‘For Your Love’ (a surefire hit composed by Graham Gouldman).  His reason leaving was that he felt that the band had moved too far away from their blues-based material.  He then joined John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, who were totally immersed in electric blues and he took part in recording arguably their best album, before leaving to form Cream – the first super-group.

Personally, I’m not a fan of Clapton, but he was perhaps the first pop musician to be afforded ‘god-like’ status for his prowess on the guitar and for what was considered to be his musical integrity.  He was considered to be a serious artist because he had forgone the hit-making Yardbirds to join a serious blues band at the height of his talent.

The music press of the early to mid-sixties was far different to what it became.  Music magazines were strictly for fans, there was little or no real serious criticism in them, just news about pop-stars.  In fact, it was quite common for some of them to just print the lyrics of chart-topping singles, to enable teenagers to sing along with the radio.  The heavyweight music magazines didn’t come along until serious ‘rock-bands’ arrived.  Remember, this was a time when bands were more commonly described as ‘groups’.

It was people like Clapton and Dylan who began to change this.  Both demanded to be taken seriously.  It was impossible to write about a record like ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ in the same way that you’d approach ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’.  This doesn’t mean one is necessarily better than the other – each has its own merits – but Dylan’s lyrics were complicated and almost invited analysis, and writers wanted to do precisely that.

This is the point where pop and rock divide, I think.  However, on the face of it The Beatles’ ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ is unashamedly a pop song, but it is just as authentic as the Dylan song.  The Beatles were a self-contained band performing just as original material, whereas Dylan’s had only been put together to record.  However, the Dylan record has certainly been afforded more value than The Beatles’.  One is considered art, whereas the other is merely ‘popular’.

There is another interesting component to all of this.  It was male rock critics who decided what the distinctions between rock and pop were.  One of the most noticeable things about The Beatles’ career is the way critics talk about ‘early Beatles’ and ‘late Beatles’ almost as if they are different entities entirely; the former being ‘a group’ and the latter being ‘a band’ (that is, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club ‘Band’).  The early Beatles – the clean cut ‘pretty’ version – are forever associated with screaming female fans, whilst the latter, drug-taking bearded version are preferred by chin-stroking male intellectuals.

As mentioned earlier The Beatles’ early hits were very influenced by the music of girl groups.  Those early Beatles hits will be forever in the rock music canon, whereas only a handful of the girl groups singles that inspired them have joined them there.  This again is an example of male rock critics placing more value on one than the other.  Rock is a very masculine construct, which is afforded far more importance than ‘pop’, which male rock writers associate with female listeners.  The facts are far more complex than that, however, but that seems to be how rock history has been written.

A Hard Day’s Night -The Definitive Beatlemania Album

The later Beatles material may be the most fashionable but this is the Fab Four at the moment they conquered the world.

It also captured The Beatles at their most urgent; you still get the impression that this was still a band with something to prove and that they were enjoying the whole process of doing so.  All of the songs on ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ were The Beatles’ own compositions – all by Lennon & McCartney – and there isn’t a Ringo vocal to be heard.  By their next album, ‘Beatles For Sale’, they were beginning to sound exhausted – some of the focus had been lost during the relentless touring, filming and recording and they were back to recording cover versions, albeit temporarily.  ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ showed The Beatles at their most unified and – what’s more – there are no songs with the express purpose of pleasing mums and dads.  The phenomenon of Yesterday hadn’t happened yet.

The Beatles at this point were still a young person’s band and ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ sounds youthful.  Even today everything about the album has a modern sheen, from its timeless cover design to the songs themselves.  The Beatle’s later work, although undeniably of a high (and sometimes higher) quality, sounds comparatively of its time and place.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – if any individual band sums up the 1960s it is The Beatles –  but no other album the band ever released captured the excitement of Beatle mania as well as ‘A Hard Day’s Night’.  The album is shameless pop at its most perfect and much of it is rock n’ roll.

Furthermore, after ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ the popular music industry would never be the same.  The Beatles proved for once and for all that a band could write its own material and perform it as a unit without involving any outsiders.  In 1964 this was unthinkable.  Young people had previously only been allowed to sing what adults had written for them but The Beatles proved that this no longer had to be the case.  Young people could speak for themselves and the music industry could make a huge profit from enabling this to happen.  The Beatles were certainly not the first artists to write their own material but they were certainly the catalysts.

What is remarkable about ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ is how consistently good it is.  Only half of the tracks were used in the soundtrack and the others were of equal quality.  There are some weaker songs; ‘When I Get Home’ is a bit of a plodder even if it is executed well and benefits from a great Lennon vocal and ‘Tell Me Why’ is similar, but all the rest of the songs are nothing short of brilliant.  By doing this The Beatles were breaking the rules were albums were concerned in 1964.  Previously albums had strictly been cash-in on the single affairs, laden with filler and recycled previous successes.  The Beatles upped the ante and as a consequence ‘the album’ as we now know it was born.  Since ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ was soundtrack album, it was the first that the band released singles from (they would also do this on ‘Help!’.  However, it is would easy to imagine that ‘I Should Have Known Better’ and ‘You Can’t Do That’ could have easily topped the charts.

One particular band, The Rolling Stones, already on the scene in 1964, started to write their own songs as a direct consequence of The Beatles’ success.  In the 1960s it became expected and would become impossible to maintain any level of success without doing so, the music scene was evolving so rapidly.  The Beatles were the most successful at seeming to stay ahead because of their superior ability to write songs in practically any genre.

Furthermore, since The Beatles’ line-up consisted of not one, not two, but three songwriters (and latterly even Ringo had a go), the competition even within the band was fierce.  The tensions this created would eventually cause the band to implode in 1970, but in 1964 it was still early days and it was merely helping to maintain a very high quality of songs. John Lennon and Paul McCartney still wrote some of their songs together but were hugely competitive. The song ‘Hard Day’s Night’ was written by Lennon in response to McCartney’s obvious hit-single-in-waiting ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ and both would go onto be massive Number One transatlantic hit singles.  Furthermore they are still both among the most loved and memorable songs in The Beatles’ superlative catalogue.

This is very much a Lennon album though and as such features some of best songs and vocal performances.  In 1964 he was still the de facto leader of the band and he was carrying most of the song writing weight (even McCartney has admitted this in his more honest moments).  Ten of the thirteen songs on ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ are Lennon compositions, which is why he does most of the lead vocals.  However, McCartney’s contributions are all outstanding, even if there are only three of them.  Why was Lennon doing the bulk of the writing at this period?  Perhaps it was down to the style of the music the band was performing at this juncture.  Lennon excelled at writing and performing immediate fully-formed pop/rock songs whereas McCartney was more at home spending some time crafting his material.  For example, McCartney has begun writing Yesterday on the set of ‘Hard Day’s Night’ and even his ‘Michelle’ dates from this period.  In this light, it is small wonder that Lennon was coming up with the finished material; he was the most impatient about getting things done.  They were both very different songwriters with talents to match their temperaments, but they both needed each other to bring out the best in their work.

For all of these reasons and simply because I enjoy it, I think ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ is my favourite album by The Beatles.  It may not be their most musically sophisticated but it is the definitive Beatle mania album and it not only allowed them to go on to change popular music forever but enabled others to do so too.