#bug influences

By macabre coincidence an event that took place around Bristol marks a major turning point in the story of pop music. Eddie Cochran died hours after appearing at the Bristol Hippodrome in 1960, as part of the Larry Parnes-produced Anglo-American rock ’n’ roll package tour. Two of the people who shared a stage with Cochran that night were Tony Sheridan and a Liverpudlian singer called Johnny Gentle. Both were under contract to Parnes and both would play a significant role in the history of the most influential British act of all time, the Beatles. Sheridan, the first British rock ’n’ roller to sing and play his own guitar live on British TV, would become best known for the recordings he made in Hamburg with the Beatles shortly before they found fame.

Parnes was the first manager in Britain to become as famous as his artists – the Simon Cowell of his day – with a stable of singers including Tommy Steele, Britain’s first real rock ’n’ roll star, Marty Wilde, Billy Fury, Vince Eager and others. He was also homosexual, a dangerous thing to be at a time when gay men were routinely arrested, fined or even imprisoned.

Their tour was due to take a break after a week of shows in Bristol, and Cochran and co-headliner Gene Vincent wanted to get home to America. Cochran was in a hurry to get to London, where he was going to meet up with Vince Eager before the pair flew to the States together, and Cochran and Vincent rented a private hire taxi, driven by George Martin from Hartcliffe, to take them. Shortly after 11pm on 16 April 1960, their car set off from Bristol’s Royal Hotel (now the Bristol Marriott Royal, on College Green) for London Airport.

Sadly, none of the passengers would make their flight. Less than an hour out of Bristol, Martin realised he had taken a wrong turn. On Rowden Hill, a notorious accident black spot near Chippenham, he lost control and the car spun backwards, hitting a lamppost. The impact of the crash sent Cochran up into the roof of the car and forced the rear passenger side door open, throwing him onto the road. Martin and tour manager Patrick Thompkins, who were in the front of the vehicle, were able to walk away uninjured. The three passengers who had occupied the back seat – Eddie, Gene and Eddie’s girlfriend Sharon Sheeley – were lying on the grass verge. All three were rushed to Chippenham Cottage Hospital, before being transferred to St Martin’s Hospital, just outside Bath. Vincent had broken his collarbone, Sheeley was badly bruised and concussed, but Cochran was seriously injured and would not regain consciousness: he died in hospital in Bath the following day. A young police cadet, David Harman, was among those called to help clear the scene after the crash. Harman would later find fame as Dave Dee, front man of the hit group Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich.

Three weeks after Cochran’s death, Larry Parnes auditioned the Beatles to act as the backing group to his big signing, Billy Fury. They did not win that booking, but he hired them to play with Johnny Gentle on a short tour of Scotland. All of the Beatles were fans of Cochran and Vincent, and lapped up Gentle’s tales of life on the road with the two big American stars. When the 17-year-old George Harrison discovered that Gentle owned the shirt that Cochran had worn on stage in Bristol for that last show he begged the singer to give it to him.

The thread of this song weaving in and out of Paul’s most formative music experiences

Oct 1956: Elvis’s debut album is released in the UK as Rock ‘n’ Roll and the B-side includes Trying to Get to You

I just had to reach you, baby / In spite of all that I've been through / I kept traveling night and day / I kept running all the way / Baby, trying to get to you.

Well if I had to do it over / That's exactly what I'd do / I would travel night and day / And I'd still run all the way / Baby, trying to get to you

[full lyrics]

Jan-June 1957: Ian James gets the Elvis record and a guitar

“It was in this time frame that Paul formed a closer friendship with Ian James, an Institute boy (in his year) he’d known since 1954. Ian was also into rock and skiffle and he’d recently been bought an acoustic guitar by his grandparents, at whose house he lived in the Dingle. (Every guitar had a maker’s name: his was a Rex.) The two boys became good pals on the strength of it. While they tended not to see each other in the evenings, because they lived some distance apart, Paul often went to Ian’s house for an hour or two after school—they walked there together down the hill from the Institute—and Ian sometimes went to Forthlin Road at weekends, taking his guitar with him. Ian James held a triple attraction for Paul: he was an intelligent, decent and affable lad, he had some rock records, and he had a guitar—an unbeatable combination.

In the front room at home I had a table-top portable record player, three speed. I remember playing “Blueberry Hill” by Fats Domino over and over, just the first line and then I’d pick up the needle and put it back at the start. I also had Elvis Presley’s first album, which we played time after time after time, with “That’s All Right Mama,” “Trying to Get to You,” “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Cry (Over You),” “Mystery Train” … Elvis was the one to copy, he was the hero. He had everything: the charisma, the looks, the voice. Frank Sinatra had only one style but Elvis could do anything—gospel, blues, rock and roll, romantic ballads. There was nobody else like him. Paul and I talked about Elvis all the time.15

The Rex guitar was ever at hand. Ian showed and reinforced to Paul those three chord fundamentals that would get him started, C, F and G or G7, the basis for pretty much every song they loved.”

—Tune In (Ch. 5, Jan-June 1957)

July 1957: Paul is invited to join the Quarrymen and trades his trumpet for his first guitar

At some point in July 1957, Paul finally got his first guitar. It had been a long time coming and he was desperate. As he couldn’t afford to buy one he had the bright idea of swapping his trumpet for it, the one his dad had bought him two years earlier. Jim didn’t mind—it was clear where Paul’s interest was. “I traded in the trumpet for a £15 Zenith guitar from Frank Hessy’s. There was a feller there called Jim Gretty and he showed us (me and George) a great chord. I never knew its name—we called it ‘a jazz chord’…”

Mike McCartney has said of Paul and his first guitar, “He would get lost in another world. It was useless talking to him—I had better conversations with brick walls.” Paul played the guitar everywhere, even on the bus. At home he played it in the bath and sitting on the toilet. “The fine acoustic of the toilet area was always very appealing to me. And it was also very private, about the only private place in the house. I used to sit there for hours—there and the bathroom. Dad would shout, ‘Paul, get off that toilet!’ [And I’d reply] ‘I’m practicing!’ ”4

…Rod Davis has a recollection of Paul dropping in to see a group rehearsal at (of all places) Mimi’s house, and Eric Griffiths says the group all went to Paul’s house one afternoon for a rehearsal together—something Paul has never mentioned. (Like almost everything to do with the Quarry Men, solid information is lacking.)

…Ian James says he and Paul struck up an informal musical duo: “We used to take our guitars around to parties and play a few numbers. Have guitar will travel—wherever we went our guitars went too. We played songs from that first Elvis LP: ‘Trying to Get to You,’ ‘Lawdy Miss Clawdy,’ ‘Mystery Train’…

—Tune In (Ch. 7, July-Aug 1957)

Aug 1957: Paul’s away at summer camp and then on holiday but glued to his guitar

[O]n August 7, the Quarry Men played the Cavern again…This Cavern booking would have been Paul’s Quarry Men debut but for him being away with the Boy Scouts at summer camp—another ten days of wet feet, wind and Woodbines. The 19th City troop’s destination this year was the Peak District—Callow Farm, Hathersage, Derbyshire—and both McCartney brothers went. Paul (inevitably) carted his Zenith along with his sleeping bag and tin mug. Almost as soon as they’d pitched tents, Mike had an altercation with an oak tree, badly breaking his arm; he was taken to the hospital in Sheffield while Paul remained at the camp and entertained around the fire with Elvis’s “Trying to Get to You.”13

Mike was in the hospital four weeks, his plastered arm in a sling, and on the day of his release—the last full week of the school holidays—Jim arrived in Sheffield with Paul and revealed they were all heading straight off to Butlin’s. Bett and Mike Robbins had fixed them seven days at Filey, on Yorkshire’s east coast…

Ever the keen photographer, Mike operated the camera single-handedly to take a fascinating photo of Paul on Filey beach with Bett Robbins and her infant son Ted. Paul is perched on Ted’s pushchair and playing the much-traveled Zenith. The photo could be the closest taken to the date he met John Lennon, showing a 15-year-old who’s come through his chubby period and is looking good.

—Tune In (Ch. 7, July-Dec 1957)

Oct-Nov 1957: Paul plays his first gigs with the band as John’s equal

In images of the Quarry Men before Paul joined they’re all wearing different clothes. In the first photo of the group with Paul they have a uniform look, and a sharp one at that: white shirts with black bootlace ties and black trousers, and John and Paul (only) are also wearing jackets on top, white or cream—it’s Paul’s “white sports coat” and something similar John has managed to acquire. This was undoubtedly Paul’s doing, reaching back to his experience at Butlin’s in 1954 when he saw how a singing group in matching gear claimed everyone’s attention. He’d brought the thinking early to John, and John had bought it. And something else is compelling about this Quarry Men photo: although it’s John’s group, new boy Paul is not at the back with Colin or Len, or to the side like Eric, he’s up front with John. Lennon and McCartney are clearly the front line of the Quarry Men, strumming crummy Gallotone and upside-down Zenith, and they’re the only ones with vocal microphones. The group is the two of them and three others. When one sings lead the other provides harmony; often they sing the lead in unison—and their voices go together.

One can only surmise what they sang into those microphones. Nigel Walley remembers plenty of rock in the repertoire in this period and not so much skiffle, including several Elvis numbers—“All Shook Up,” “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Hound Dog,” “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” “That’s All Right Mama” and “Trying to Get to You”—as well as “Be-Bop-A-Lula,” “Blue Suede Shoes” (Carl or Elvis), “Come Go with Me” and “Twenty Flight Rock.”

—Tune In (Ch. 7, July-Dec 1957)

Jan-May 1958: Paul writes In Spite of All the Danger and John wants to record it

As George knew several more guitar chords than John or Paul, every time he showed them a new one they tried to write a song around it36—and it was in this period, possibly at Upton Green, that Paul wrote one he called “In Spite of All the Danger,” a chugging and melodic country-flavored number with a couple of extended lead guitar solos created by George. For this reason, the song was a unique deviation from the Lennon-McCartney credit: it went down as McCartney-Harrison.

The tune of “In Spite of All the Danger” was entirely Paul’s, but it leaned heavily on the melody of Elvis’s “Trying to Get to You,” a song that includes the lyric “[in] spite of all that I’ve been through.” Using an existing song as inspiration for the writing of another is standard practice, but the rock and roll era was already littered with outrageous examples of plagiarism seemingly free of legal action—possibly because the song being copied was not entirely original to that composer either.

…John decided the Quarry Men should make a record, and the others needed no persuading—just 3s 6d each. This time the answer to “Where we going, Johnny?” was 38 Kensington, where one Percy F. Phillips ran probably Liverpool’s only recording studio and record press.

Seventeen years later, without the advantage of hearing it in between times, John recalled what he could of the session: “The first thing we ever recorded was ‘That’ll Be the Day,’ the Buddy Holly song, and one of Paul’s called ‘In Spite of All the Danger.’ It cost us fifteen shillings and we made it in the front room of some guy’s house that he called a recording studio.”

…John again sings lead on “In Spite of All the Danger,” Paul provides more fine harmonies throughout, and George adds an “ah” backing. It’s said Colin and Duff hadn’t heard the song before, and so were feeling their way through it, but it’s not solely for this reason that it plods somewhat. Though the debt to “Trying to Get to You” is clear, it’s still an original number and an interesting, attractive one at that, written by a boy of 15—a fantastic achievement.

Having spent entirely too much of my life studying all matters Beatles-related, I sometimes like to play a parlor game with other fans. I ask them which year was the band’s best, before offering an answer of my own. Many people stump for 1967, when Sgt. Pepper came out, recasting the pop-culture zeitgeist. Others opt for 1964, the first year of stateside Beatlemania. A dark horse sometimes gets a vote, like 1965, the year the Beatles produced their first mature masterwork in Rubber Soul. But when I provide my answer—1963, all the way—I’m usually met with puzzled looks. It’s no wonder. Fifty years have passed since that magical and formative year for the band, yet most of the music the Beatles recorded throughout it remains commercially unavailable. But 1963 is the band’s annus mirabilis.

—Colin Fleming, 1963: The Year The Beatles Found Their Voice [x]

So why 1963?

Well, I think people like to focus on [Sgt.] Pepper from '67, maybe Rubber Soul from '65 or Revolver from '66. But if you wanted to know what The Beatles liked, what they listened to, what they were trying to become and, in large part, who they already were and who they would be, the '63 BBC recordings would be your one-stop shopping destination. When they tackled ... a crucial rock 'n' roll text like Elvis' "That's All Right, Mama," you can hear that they keep elements of the past — that burnished country tone that Elvis' band excelled at — but they've added a sort of stomping, northern soul element to it. So they're really overhauling the past.

—The Beatles Defining Moment (Hint: It's not Sgt Pepper) [x]

randomly caught this headline and surprise surprise, it’s a copy and paste job from an old interview. but now i’m curious.

has anyone run into the original 1994 Reverb interview?

According to Reverb, during a 1994 interview with guitar writer Tony Bacon, Paul shared which Elvis song made him burst into tears as an adult.

Reflecting back on The King’s 1950s Sun Studio records, Macca said: “Yeah. I heard them this summer – haven’t heard them for years – and I was blown away. I suddenly realised the last time I listened to this thoroughly was before The Beatles, before all that happened to me, and it just stripped it all away. It was like I was a kid playing snooker again and listening. It actually got me crying, pow. Really did it to me.”

The Elvis song that reduced Paul to tears was I Want You, I Need You, I Love You. The Beatles star said he could remember all the words, singing the lyrics: “Hold me close, hold me tight…”

The now 80-year-old shared: “And my kids were like, Dad, you know all the words to this stuff? You better believe it. And I thought, ‘Well, I once was a kid like this, before all The Beatles thing, and now you live with the whole legacy of The Beatles, and it’s great. You could do a lot worse.’ But you know what I mean? i Just the idea of that was fantastic—I was 17 again. Not a bad feeling when you’re 52. Anyway, what do you want to talk about? I’m nattering on here.”

A million years ago, I had heard somewhere about how the Beatles had early on gotten ahold of the Lomax ethnomusicology collection: recordings of black folk singers in the American South. I’ve always wondered when? how? I myself didn’t get the chance to hear them until college with access to the music department’s library.

Listening to their 1960 home recordings, I felt convinced they’d had them by then. I Don’t Know (Oh Johnny) especially sounds like a teenage boy’s attempt to imitate those recordings. But where on earth would have have gotten access to them as teens?

Well, it looks like Lewisohn tracked down the source. In Spring 1958, John meets Tony Carricker at art school:

By some distance, friendships were the most attractive aspect of art school life for John. He and Tony Carricker gravitated toward each other on the basis of a shared love of music. As Tony puts it, “Early rock freaks found each other like drug takers will find each other.” He still recalls their first conversation, as they walked down the hill into town: “It was like an interrogation: ‘Have you got this?’ ‘Have you heard that?’ ‘Oh, you’ve got that, have you?’—it was like being vetted. I was in.”41 Tony had “Bloodshot Eyes” by Wynonie Harris, he had red label Vogue 78s, he introduced John to Bobby Freeman’s “Do You Want to Dance,” he had country blues and he loved Chuck Berry; when John found out Tony had memorized all the words of “Roll Over Beethoven” he got him to write them down for him. He recalls overhearing John saying to somebody, “He’s got all the records!”

Tony was one of those enthusiasts not merely prepared to accept whatever was available in the local shops but to seek out scarce sounds. He was a gatherer, hungry to expand his knowledge. He’d discovered that the cultural department of the American Embassy in London loaned Smithsonian Institution and other rare records free to applicants, on trust. Packages containing discs by Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, Lead Belly, Big Bill Broonzy, Blind Willie Johnson, Sleepy John Estes and other such fabulously exotic creatures, remarkable field recordings from the American South and rare studio sessions of the 1920s to 1940s, would be dispatched via Royal Mail from Grosvenor Square to Tony’s tiny house in Widnes, the return postage prepaid.

—Tune In (Ch. 8), Mark Lewisohn

and my brain mindlessly drifts to come together

and I do a double take

y’all it’s the same song

At first I was like, “oh, is this where he got the idea?” I’ve been deep diving on tons of bugs influences this year. I love seeing links here and there piecing together how creatives inspire each other. But no, this goes way past inspiration.

The brass replies and the backing vocals (on take 5 not the final) are one thing. But there’s no denying it by the chorus. It’s the most blatant steal I’ve found so far. And that includes the ones they got sued for!

Solomon Burke apparently started it the night he learned his friend Sam Cooke had been killed in LA. This is December 11, 1964 (the case is a mess and raises more questions than answers, inspiring two recent docs, and tons of conspiracy theories including one on Allen Klein who ends up with his publishing rights). He continues it in Sam Cooke’s style the week of the funeral. This was also after Burke’s second wife left him so they’re both thought to play a role in the inspiration for the song. He records it in January 1965 with Dee Dee Warwick and Cissy Houston on backing vocals.

It’s released in March 1965 and jumps to No 1 quickly, so there’s zero chance Paul hadn’t heard the song by April 1966, when they’re first recording GTGYIML.

I always look at Paul’s stories about waking up with new music in his head like how is it new? My brain’s a jukebox, but it’s always repeating something from somewhere else. So I wonder what his ratio is of music in his head that’s new vs someone else’s. I know there’s stories of him playing Yesterday for everyone he can to make sure it wasn’t from somewhere else.

Here, looking at the lyrics and considering the late 65/early 66 context (Jane Bristol drama, JP LSD drama), I’m wondering: is this just in the back of his brain or was he listening to it intentionally?

Some folks love is hard and strong

That's the kind of love that lingers on

Some folks love is swift and fast

That's the kind of love that'll never last

We had a love that was in between

And to me it was like a dream

An “in between” love, eh?

Either way, it’s fascinating on several levels.

Little chance Paul didn’t realize it though, with the chorus being so similar. It’s probably why the first version was without brass, to try not to copy it too closely. See John’s mouth trumpet expression at the end of Take 5 for a laugh. And somewhere along the line they decide to just be shameless and use the brass anyway. And then never speak about it and hope few noticed?

Wait, no, just blame weed! 🤦‍♀️

Look, I love GTGYIML.