revisionist doo-wop

"The Lion Sleeps Tonight" is Eno doing Afropop, not doo-wop, as I recall. I'd go more with "Cindy Tells Me".

the zombies example i offered above is basically a doo wop homage filtered through the beach boys. and they use it as an unexpected musical punctuation to a pop song about a woman getting out of prison. and it's clearly some kind of comment on something, and not just on rod argent's penchant for strange arrangements.

it really goes for the 'exaggeration of certain effects' i mentioned upthread. and the rough-hewn (ahem understatement) quality of beefheart's voice serves to set the rest of the song--played straight, more or less--in relief.

Thus proving my point about Eno's version being revisionist afro-pop, though perhaps inspired by his love of doo-wop — an interesting connection to be sure.

BTW, I kind of hate this song.

re: beach boys, i would say all comparisons to doo wop should be heavily cautioned until one has listened to a few records by the four freshman and parlor jazz of that ilk. my impression of brian's early esthetic is that he looked to the somewhat complex jazz harmonies for technique on the ballads, and doo wop for the fun rock sound which in beach boys rock songs [as on jan & dean etc] tend to be fairly one-dimensional and unstartling chord progressions. that said, i think barbara ann is a prime example of revisionist doo wop - it's intentionally sloppy yet clearly that's what makes it great.

the revisionist doo wop undercurrent also had to contend with 2 types of latter day doo-wop derived music both of which had reliable chart action: soul groups/girl groups such as the miracles, impressions, shirelles, dixie cups ruled the mid 60s; and that despicable [to me anyway] four seasons sound. there are elements to both that can be viewed as intentionally ironic, but this is clearly something we are reading in to a great extent. i guess, now that i think about it, there was a slew of stuff like "happy together" that deserves mention here as well.

another important element in this is the function of backup vocalists in garage rock bands in the mid 60s. not to make a general rule, but the more rudimentary the backing vocals called for by a cover song, the more likely the poor-voiced non-singers in the band will shout them out. therefore, songs like "searchin" or "night and day" almost always have these simplistic backing vocals, but - what is relevant to this discussion - they are typically delivered in a half-assed way.

the masked marauders hoax lp has some excellent half assed doo wop...
i think rama-lama-fa-fa-fa [mc5] counts. some of nilsson's early stuff, as well as simon and garfunkel on the feelin' groovy side of things, is very respectful yet fully aware of the unreclaimable distance between their revisioning and the real thing.

xexxe, dunno exactly what you're saying, but if you are interested in the original african recording of wimoweh, it's called "mbube" and was recorded by solomon linda & the evening birds, in 1939 i think. it's available on several different compilations, including one of the secret museum discs [where i heard it] and is pretty great.

maybe sun ra continued to use doo-wop elements as he "advanced" (ugh that word, but you know what i mean) into his own version of jazz? that would be interesting. the art ensemble of chicago sometimes used r&b elements in the mix, but in a way very very different from the other folks mentioned on this thread--there isn't a hint of ironic distance in their appropriations, i think.

in any case i'll have to pick up that cd, thanks for the tip!!

amateurist, the best i can do is make a tape of it. i don't have a cd burner connected to my record player. interested? email me.

I've only seem him once, in Ann Arbor, and I don't know what sort of recordings he has. But I swear by the awesomeness of that one show.

P-Funk, as an outgrowth of the Parliaments, was and remains very doo-wop based.

Favorite nouveau doo-wopper of mine to search for: The Tymes' "You Little Trustmaker." The "doobie-doobie" bass part used to knock me out as a kid. Nowdays when I listen to it I imagine I can hear the exact moment when doo-wop vocal soul morphed into disco.

who is/was "mig" -- his/her posts here are wonderful.

also where can i find these matt bauder doo wop tunes?

there were a lot of bands in the new york punk and postpunk orbit that were fascinated by all things 50s and early 60s that pulled what to me are an astonishing number of doo-woppy moves but to them may have simply been basic tools of rock and roll, if a bit kitsch

am thinking of Bomp! Records, the Aural Exciters, people like that

Interesting thread. I might be wrong, but I've always assumed that the early '60s doo-wop revival (concurrent btw with the 1962 "oldies weekend" depicted in American Graffiti) was mainly a Belmonts-spurred white Italian thing, what with Vito and the Salutations and all. Am I wrong about that?

Also, a couple records people haven't mentioned here are the Belmonts' great 1972 comeback-w/o-Dion album Cigars Acapella Candy (which Greil Marcus put in his top 10 of the decade) and the 1982 compilation Everything Old...Is New Again on the (I assume only briefly extant) doo-wop revival label Ambient Sound, on which four or five new or revived or never-disbanded doo-wop groups each did an original song and covered a song by a current performer like Jackson Browne or REO Speedwagon ("In Your Letter," as much as doo-wop homage as the Billy Joel one mentioned above) or Joey Ramone ("Doreen Is Never Boring," which I'm pretty sure he wrote for the occasion.) Some or all of the groups each put out their own full albums on the label as well. The comp (which I used to own and wish I still did) and one or two of the single-group LPs made a couple critics' top ten lists that year, then were never much spoken of again, as far as I can tell.

Nostalgic doo-wop references show up through a lot of '70s and '80s pop and country music too. Here's something I wrote on the Rolling Country thread earlier this year, about the Every Which Way But Loose soundtrack, from 1978:

There's another "instrumental" that actually consists of doo-wop voices, not unlike the doo-wop homage toward the end of the Move's rocking nine-minute "Feel Too Good" off their fun 1971 Looking On LP. Makes me think somebody should do an EMP project on ironic/nostalgic doo-wop homages on '70s non-doo-wop records someday. (Though not me.)

Years later there's also Grizzly Bear, who some fans seem to claim are "doo-wop influenced," though (hater that I am) I don't hear that at all myself.

i have some of those ambient sound LPs, e.g. two by the jive five. there was a CD-era comp too, a reissue of the best stuff, but i imagine this too is OOP. these LPs get very warm reviews in one of the dave marsh-edited volumes of the rolling stones record guide. this inspired me to buy them. they are just OK, the highlight being the jive five's excellent and surprising version of steely dan's "hey nineteen."

but these albums are contrary to the spirit of "revisionist doo wop" as i tried to define it upthread. they are extremely sincere, straightforward, sensitive "updatings" of the classic sound. there is nothing distanced, impish, ironic, faintly over the top about them.

i don't know if i ever stated this pithily upthread, but what interests me most are the doo wop pastiches by '60s rock acts who are identified with the counterculture -- since as soon as these start cropping up, i think a line is drawn, across which there is no going back and forth. maybe this is obvious? it seems one interesting barometer of some larger changes, i guess.

i can hear the grizzly bear thing, but frankly it seems more just a beach boys-esque interest in vocal harmony. doo wop has a very limited and identifiable set of chord structures that they don't seem very interested in.

here's a great 1982 article by robert palmer about the ambient sound phenomenon:

http://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/23/arts/doing-all-right-by-doing-doo-wop.html

and here's the ambient sound CD, for about $5: http://www.amazon.com/YOURE-YOUNG-TWICE-Ambient-Doo-Wop/dp/B000NYXE4M

anyone else remember this nickelodeon spots with the voice of the jive five's eugene pitt?: http://vimeo.com/2703001

Ben Tausig posted on ILX??

ben tausig wrote a really awful and uninformed hatchet piece about alan lomax when the latter died. frankly tausig seems like a pretentious poseur.

what i want to know is who is mig?

A Russian pilot?

Didn't the Ramones write a song for one of those Ambient records, "Doreen Is Very Boring" or something like that?

yes

ben tausig wrote a really awful and uninformed hatchet piece about alan lomax when the latter died. frankly tausig seems like a pretentious poseur.

Haha, okay. I've never read any of his music writing, but he's one of the main reasons I got into crossword construction, so.

I just started listening to Dawn of Doo Wop. Fantastic stuff. My favourite song is probably I Sold My Heart To The Junkman.

Speaking of revisionism, isn't there a story about that, that The Bluebelles released a version that was actually recorded by somebody else?

I am sooooo confused as to why jaymc reposted all that. Nice read, though.

If you have to ask...

Sha Na Na's woodstock performance is some crazy bullshit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDxaLLwyr6I

counterrevolutionary rocksteady

we've discussed it, and it's less "revisionist" than "earnest homage," but let's face it this song is beautiful:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_XgQhMPeEQ

though are those really backup singers on the record or is that billy joel multitracked to infinity?

now that distance between that video and the present day is greater (!) than the distance between the video and the music it is paying homage to, the video and song has revealed itself to be just as authentically moving and beautifully crafted as many of the doo-wop records to which it was no doubt compared unfavorably in 1984.

also sudden unexpected nostalgia for those 80s music videos that actually had nice-looking, well-choreographed tracking shots and an editing rhythm that actually lets you see stuff, etc. see also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCuMWrfXG4E

also christie (sp?) brinkley is stunning.

i dunno why but for some reason i'm expecting joe piscopo in jerry lewis getup to pop out at any moment in these videos.

it's a reasonable expectation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYAIX96v1mI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a6A6oTFdcw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UspGqdwcbQs

thanking amateurist for reposting the Nickelodeon doo-wop interstitials... I missed the link upthread and they are great. I'm not sure if, as a kid, I really grokked that they were meant to be an homage to anything, as opposed to just, like, weird wacky music that fit the strange visuals. Maybe I did, though.

That Neil Young song is also great, wow.

There's a great section of the Ian Svenonius book about the line from street gangs through doo wop groups to rock groups

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMTUPwJTRcI

whoops
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMTUPwJTRcI

& toop briefly traced the line thru to hip hop

A brother group to The Jesters, and "equally fine" (Warner: 269) were The Paragons—"real hoodlums, real zip-gun, street-warring hoodlums", Paul Winley recalled to David Toop in 1984, "but at the time I was young and crazy myself, so it didn't make any difference". (Toop: 98) The Paragons Meet The Jesters (1959), with its street gang cover and vocal duels inspired by doo-wop's street corner singing battles and live show group competitions, was "one of the first rock and roll compilation LPs" (Warner: 231) ... Relic Records have collected Winley doo-wop on The Best of Winley Records (RELIC 5019) with liner notes by Donn Fileti detailing their lo-fidelity, almost ad hoc independent approach creating a valuable and unique New York sound. Quoting Fileti, David Toop makes the point that these are comments that can equally apply to Winley's hip hop output. (Toop: 99)

Winley Records resurfaced in the 1970s with a series of releases which—like the street corner practices of doo-wop foreshadowing those of hip hop (see Toop: Ch. 2)—would in their different ways presage the advent of commercially recorded hip hop even as that movement blossomed in the Bronx and spread to the streets of Harlem. Winley released a series of speeches by Malcolm X, tied into a tradition of black oratory and to be sampled a decade later by Public Enemy and others.

from the wikipedia page for winley records of "zulu nation throwdow" fame

yeah he mentions the continuation to hip-hop as well. it's probably all based on what guys like toop write - he's not a sociologist or anything

don't the beatles do this again on "revolution 1"

Discussion about Beefheart's "I'm Glad" upthread has me thinking that, you know, they were contemporaries of a group like Thee Midniters.

I've also got these compilation albums from the mid-'60s called "Godfrey Presents: 18 R&B Flashbacks" and I guess they were kind of oldies compilations (like the Laboe, Oldies But Goodies comps) but there are records on these (possibly even some of the doo wop) that were pretty contemporary.

those nickleodeon bumpers (esp the one w/ the pineapple singing falsetto) never fail to make me smile

also jonathan richman in the era when he was touring/recording w/ the rockin robins is very akin to that nickelodeon stuff in the childlike sense of fun with which he appropriates doo wop stylings

surely the neil young song is as much or more an homage to rockabilly and the poppier side of country than it is to doo wop

finally sometimes that fleetwood mac song up above is my favorite fleetwood mac song ever--but again, to be precise the harmonies and melody sound more like lou christie or gene pitney than doo wop to me. similar to some stuff on bruce springsteen's tunnel of love LP in that way

maybe i'm splitting hairs

this is more ink spots/orioles-type R&B stuff (which predates doo wop) but ian's post inspired me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoidXDF_vuA

IIRC that's the robins (of smokey joe's cafe, etc.) under an assumed name.

so maybe not orioles but clovers/early coasters/clyde mcphatter-type stuff

I suppose it's a little off topic for this thread, but the characterization of "I'm Glad" was this:

"basically doo-wop taken straight, without any overt indications of ironic distance"

I guess I'm just thinking that there was no reason that someone like Beefheart would have even considered the question of irony with that song, especially given what one seems to read about '60s L.A. (perhaps specifically East L.A.) culture.

And thinking back, "I'm Glad" never seemed to me to be something that stuck out stylistically on that album.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-n5vG2SjJY

so was kenny cool enough to come up with this intro? i want the facts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edHhe8HyekE

anybody got his home number? he'd probably just take credit for it even if he didn't come up with it. that bastard.