I was saddened to hear about the passing of Ellie Greenwich, a true pop genius, late last week from a heart attack brought on by complications with pneumonia at the age of 68. Don’t recognize the name? Surely you’ll recognize her work if you’ve listened to pop music in the last five decades—her catalog is that vast and influential. Quitting her high school teaching gig in ’62, Greenwich claimed a role in the music industry that was highly unconventional for a woman of her time: “…most of the women were background singers, or they were lyricists,” she told writer Charlotte Greig. “There were very few women who played piano, wrote songs, and could go into a studio, work those controls, and produce a session.”
One of the leading lights of the early ‘60s in the legendary NYC Brill Building factory of songwriters that also included Lieber and Stoller, Burt Bacharach, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, and Phil Spector, Ellie Greenwich cranked out a simply unbelievable amount of landmark pop songs and iconic hits. Collaborating with her then-husband Jeff Barry, they actually had 17 songs in one year hit the Top 40 charts in 1964. A partial list of their artistry includes “Be My Baby,” “Leader Of The Pack,” “Chapel Of Love,” “Baby I Love You,” “Do Wah Diddy Diddy,” “River Deep Mountain High,” “Maybe I Know” and “Look of Love” (two of the greatest Lesley Gore songs not called “It’s My Party” and “You Don’t Own Me”), “Then He Kissed Me,” “I Can Hear Music,” “Da Doo Ron Ron,” and “Christmas(Baby Please Come Home).” Greenwich and Barry also performed together as a duo called The Raindrops, and Greenwich helped a young Neil Diamond launch his own career, producing the singer’s early hits “Cherry, Cherry” and “Kentucky Woman.”
Ellie Greenwich also sang back-up for Lesley Gore, Dusty Springfeld, Frank Sinatra, Bobby Darin, and Cyndi Lauper (among many others), and was a creative consultant and appeared in the On and Off Broadway stage productions of THE LEADER OF THE PACK, a musical partially based on her story. A member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame, this was a truly gifted woman who left her creative footprint on the music world, and we should all be thankful she did.
Chances are if you can finish this song lyric you’re part of the generation of 1960s music lovers that would care to know that another music icon of the era passed away recently. Of course the next line of the song is “in ‘A World Without Love’,” the Paul McCartney penned 1964 debut single from the Everly Brothers-influenced British pop duo, Peter and Gordon. “Peter” was Peter Asher, brother of actress Jane Asher (who McCartney was dating at the time), who went on to be an award-winning producer of such artists as James Taylor (he signed him to Apple Records), Linda Ronstadt, Bonnie Raitt, and 10,000 Maniacs. His musical partner, whose claim to fame was the string of hits the duo created in the mid-60s, was the lesser known Gordon Waller, who died of a heart attack this week in Connecticut at the age of 64. While the gorgeous and Beatle-esque “A World Without Love” hit No. 1 on music charts worldwide, their trademark acoustic sound and fine harmonies also graced some other terrific covers, including Del Shannon’s “I Go To Pieces” and Buddy Holly’s “True Love Ways,” as well as two other McCartney compositions—“Nobody I Know” and “I Don’t Want to See You Again.” So go home and break out that British Invasion LP or CD if you have one, and check out some Peter and Gordon for old times sake—it holds up remarkably well. RIP Gordon Waller.
Fans of Los Straightjackets and other instrumental rockers should stop for a moment today and pay homage to a wonderful musician they’ve probably never heard of—Bob Bogle. Bogle, whose lead-guitar work with ‘60s surf-rock pioneers The Ventures influenced countless bands to come, has died at the age of 75. Details from his obit read as follows:
Bogle died from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in Vancouver, WA, according to his longtime bandmate, Don Wilson.
Wilson and Bogle founded the group in 1958 after both learned to play guitar while they worked as construction workers in their native Tacoma, WA. “We had a lot of time on our hands after work, so we’d get together and play,” Wilson told CNN. “A year and a half later, we had a number two hit called ‘Walk Don’t Run.’” The group originally discovered the song on a Chet Atkins record and applied their own rapidly developing formula to the song, featuring a stripped-down, high-energy approach that became typical for the band in the years to come.
Hits followed in rapid succession after the band’s initial breakthrough with “Walk Don’t Run,” including “Perfidia,” “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” and “Walk Don’t Run ‘64,” all of which found their way onto the Top 40. After enduring a commercial slump in the mid-‘60s, the group rebounded with the theme for the hit TV show “Hawaii Five-O” in 1968, reaching No. 4 on the Billboard singles chart.
Aside from success as a singles band, the group pumped out a seemingly endless series of hit LPs, with 38 of the band’s studio sets entering The Billboard 200 chart, albums that spanned a wide variety of genres, from Christmas songs to country and western. In 1972, the group scored its final entry on The Billboard 200 with its version of the music from the movie “Shaft.”
According to The Ventures’ bio, the group sold more than 110 million albums worldwide, ranking the band as the best-selling instrumental group of all time. The Ventures were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008.
These guys kept cranking it out, and one of the favorite items in my music collection is actually a cassette cut-out of a double Ventures “Best of” that is simply amazing—talk about twang guitar nirvana! I had the privilege of seeing them once at the Lonestar in NYC in the mid-80s, and I remember it fondly as an incredibly rockin’ good time. The Ventures may not have had any vocals, but their twin guitars sang like angels for decade after decade. That the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame finally recognized their contribution to the music world last year was a long time coming, and a nice thing to happen before Bogle’s passing. Rest in Peace, Bob.
CHRISTMAS ON MARS is finally coming to Orlando. The long-awaited (and we do mean long), micro-budget, sci-fi, self-described “fantastical film freakout” was actually conceived by Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne back in 2001, and we’ve been looking forward to it and in hot pursuit ever since. In fact, my very first show in Orlando after moving down from NYC in September, ‘87, was the Lips in a club off of South O.B.T. somewhere (nice neighborhood), and the Florida Film Festival was honored to have the East Coast Premieres and 2nd US showings of both Bradley Beesley’s previous projects starring the band, THE FLAMING LIPS HAVE LANDED (2000) and FEARLESS FREAKS (2005).
This Saturday, October 18, at 1:00 and 11:59 PM, Enzian is proud to present, in glorious 35mm, the Florida Premiere of the film that the Village Voice compared to both David Lynch’s ERASERHEAD and John Carpenter’s DARK STAR. So don’t wait for the DVD release in November you wusses—this is your one and only chance (actually two) to catch this trippy, bizarre, utterly ridiculous and highly inventive sci-fi fable from one of the coolest bands on the planet on the big screen. Hell, even SNL’s Fred Armisen and the Hebrew Hammer himself, Adam Goldberg, make cameos. And remember to hang on to your ticket stub and redeem it for $2 off at Park Ave CDs when the DVD actually does see the light of day (one fan called it “the Chinese Democracy of DVDs.”)
Friday night at The Social in downtown Orlando I had one of the most fun experiences at a club that I’ve had in a long time. The Silver Beats are a Beatles cover band from Tokyo, complete with original guitars and outfits, and they put on a fantastic show that exceeded all expectations. Concentrating on mostly earlier material including those great Chuck Berry and Carl Perkins covers from the first LPs and live shows, they took a brief foray into later stuff such as “Come Together,” “Don’t Let Me Down,” a keyboard-less (!) “Let It Be,” and “Back in the USSR.” But the majority of their 95 minute set was “Rubber Soul” and back, hit after hit, energetically performed often note for note. And you know how many great Beatle songs can be played in an hour and a half?
Apparently the band have 160 tunes in their Fab Four repertoire, hold a steady gig at The Cavern Club (I kid you not) in Tokyo, and just finished a tour as openers for The Killers. When the members were introduced by both their Beatle names and real names, “Paul” introduced “John” as “the # 1 John Lennon in Japan!” When you see and hear this guy, you don’t doubt it. Check them out at www.silverbeats.com or the “A Hard Day’s Night” promotional video on You Tube. Watch out for cheap imitations though—apparently there’s a Silver Beats in Spain as well that can’t hold a candle to these talented performers from the Far East. The merch table had cool retro shirts and buttons too, but it’s the unbelievable pop genius of song after song and effervescent performances that put a big smile on everyone’s faces—hipsters and rednecks, hippies, punks, and middle-agers alike.
I know New York has an acclaimed Beatles cover band of famous session musicians called The Fab Faux, but The Silver Beats have made a believer out of me. You need to see these guys…
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