Classic Pop Icons

The Hollies are among those who will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010.

The British rockers will be honoured at the 25th annual induction ceremony in New York on March 15, along with ABBA, Genesis, Jimmy Cliff and The Stooges.

Graham Nash, who left The Hollies in 1968, has welcomed the news. Speaking to Rolling Stone, Nash said:

“My absolute first reaction was that I was so pleased for my friend Allan Clarke. He’s my oldest friend. We met when we were five years, I’ve known him for 62 years. I’m already in the Hall of Fame with Crosby, Still and Nash, of course, of which I’m grateful, but this is really an honor for my first band.”

The Hollies formed in Manchester in the early 1960s and chose their name in tribute to Buddy Holly. They joined Parlophone in 1963 as label-mates of The Beatles. Famed for their distinctive vocal harmonies, the group scored twenty UK Top 40 hits in the 1960s - only behind The Shadows with 24 and The Beatles with 21. Among their big hits were “Bus Stop,” “Jennifer Eccles,” “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother,” and “I’m Alive”, which was their only number one.

The Hollies still tour with two original members, Tony Hicks and Bobby Elliott. Original lead singer, Allan Clarke, retired in 1999 and was replaced by Carl Wayne, former lead singer of The Move.

Enjoy The Hollies classic “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”

A number of superb songwriters are also to be inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010, as recipients of the Ahmet Ertegun Award. A quick look at some of their writing credits reveals some truly classic pop and rock songs:

Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil - “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” (with Phil Spector), “On Broadway” (with Leiber and Stoller), “We Gotta Get Out of this Place” and “Walking in the Rain

Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich - “Da Doo Ron Ron,” “Then He Kissed Me,” “Be My Baby” and “River Deep, Mountain High”

Mort Shuman (alongside Doc Pomus who was inducted in 2002) - “This Magic Moment,” “Save the Last Dance for Me” and “Viva Las Vegas”

Otis Blackwell - “Great Balls of Fire,” “All Shook Up,” “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Fever”

Jesse Stone - “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” “Flip, Flop and Fly” and “Money Honey.”

The Induction Ceremony will be televised live on Fuse on March 15th.

Congratulations to all inductees.

When Bertha Franklin, a down and out motel manager and alleged madam, shot Sam Cooke to death on December 11, 1964, under still mysterious circumstances, the history of pop music was altered in ways we could never fully understand. Cooke, a fully-fledged national recording star for nearly a decade, was reaching the peak of his gifts as a performer and songwriter at the time of his death. Additionally, his work as a businessmen and cultural visionary was starting to blossom with several up and coming acts on his independent record label about to hit the big time.

In 1964, Sam Cooke may have been the only man in America equally at home with Malcolm X and white talk show host Mike Douglas. The massive divide between those figures represents how much Cooke could have accomplished. At a time when black and white popular music was starting to splinter after a period of integration, Cooke could have brought it all back together, and theoretically, helped usher in a new era of overall integration. It’s not too far-fetched. Look at the attitude changes in the decade or so since hip hop has been the mainstream American taste. With Sam Cooke, though, there is no need to dwell on what might have been. He accomplished more in his 33-plus years than most people achieve in lifetimes more than twice as long.

Cooke was a preacher’s son who relocated from Mississippi to Chicago when he was just a boy. Despite being a middle child in a large brood, he was always gifted with a preternatural sense of self. Friends and family remember him laying out his ambitions at an astonishingly young age; ambitions that the cultural and political apartheid of the era did nothing to diminish. His main ambition since boyhood was to be a singer. As a child, Sam would sneak into local taverns and make spare change singing popular hits of the era. The young Cooke also possessed an intellectual curiosity that allowed him to develop a plan that would help him realize his ambitions and become a first rate songwriter.

Gospel was the music that offered Cooke his first opportunity. As a teenager, he formed his own group the Highway QCs, which eventually became successful enough to appear on concert bills with major gospel stars. The QCs were heavily influenced by the Soul Stirrers, and it may have been that influence that prompted the Stirrers to consider Cooke as a replacement when R.H. Harris, their longtime leader, (temporarily) retired in 1951.

Sam Cooke and The Soul Stirrers

At first, gospel audiences were sceptical of Sam Cooke as leader of the Soul Stirrers. Some never did accept him as an equal to Harris, but a strange thing happened when the first single from the Cooke-led Stirrers (”Peace in the Valley”/ “Jesus Gave Me Water”) was released. It sold more than any Stirrers release to that point. The total was only about 65,000 copies, but that was huge in the tiny gospel world.

The success of Cooke’s record anticipated what would happen in the greater pop music scene half a decade later. A younger audience, responding to the jubilant tempo and personality of “Jesus Gave Me Water”, went and bought the record. They didn’t have the disposable income of what their white peers would have in a few years, but they had more than their parents and they made the young new singer a bigger hit, on record at least, than Harris had ever been.

Cooke was not content though to be just a star within the tiny confines of gospel. Despite driving audiences into ecstasy from coast to coast with his grainy tenor and wild on stage improvisations, Cooke started angling towards a pop career. While records like the agonizing “Touch the Hem of His Garment” showed that Cooke could testify as well as anyone in the business, only a few well placed words made records like “Wonderful” gospel. As Cooke pushed the gospel audience closer to an acceptance of pop, the success of Little Richard, Ray Charles and Elvis Presley showed that the secular audience had an appetite for gospel styled singing.

The owner of Cooke’s label Specialty, Art Rupe, opposed Cooke’s change to pop. He feared the singer would alienate his gospel base, who took their religion as seriously as they did their music. However, although Cooke was popular with the traditional gospel audience, he was more popular with their kids who did not have the same lines drawn in the sand, and Sam knew it. After an unsuccessful half-hearted experiment as Dale Cooke (a pseudonym that did not disguise Cooke’s singular singing style), Sam switched to Keen records, another independent. Using his own name, Cooke released an astoundingly simple tune called “You Send Me” that became a fabulous pop success, earning Cooke a gig on the prestigious Ed Sullivan show. In retrospect, save for Cooke’s trademark “whoa oh whoa ohs,” it was a pure pop record. Its fabulous success even quelled some of the concerns of critics of Cooke’s decision to leave gospel. This was one of their own who had made it.

Sam Cooke on Ed Sullivan - “You Send Me” and “For Sentimental Reasons”

As profitable as the new teen subculture was, Cooke was not content with that audience alone. He also wanted their parents. Being the biggest star in gospel or R&B wasn’t enough; he wanted to be the biggest star period. This was an amazing ambition for a black man in a country where blacks in the South were not even allowed to drink at the same water fountains as whites. The next few years were filled with traditional standards and appearances on shows like Arthur Murray’s Dance Party. Yet, despite a few hit records, Cooke was not able to achieve the kind of success he wanted. All his releases missed the Billboard Top Ten and an appearance at the prestigious Copacabana Club bombed.

In 1960, Cooke was successful enough though that was he able to land a contract with RCA, then the most powerful label in the industry. At first, the RCA suits threatened to take him even further into the blandest reaches of pop. His first record there, “Teenage Sonata,” was a string-laden fiasco reminiscent of the lightweight material that Frankie Avalon and Paul Anka were recording at the time. According to Cooke biographer Daniel Wolff, Cooke got a chance to do things his way when his old label Keen released one of his old masters “Wonderful World” as a single. This was a real rock n’ roll record; it had an insistently strummed guitar, a strong beat and a clever lyric that matched young love with success in school. As Greil Marcus said, it sounded like it could have been written by Buddy Holly. It was Cooke’s biggest success since “You Send Me” and set the stage for an even bigger hit on RCA.

Jet Harris, Little Richard, Gene Vincent and Sam Cooke - Oct ‘62

“Chain Gang” was also rock n’ roll despite Sam’s soothing tones and the presence of strings. There was the sound of clinking chains, a lyric that sympathized with the outsiders on a prison chain gang, and most significantly of all, a chorus chanting suggestively “Ugh, agh” over and over. The record made #2 on Billboard and set Sam Cooke on the final stage of his career.

Sam Cooke - “Chain Gang”

From 1961 to 1964, Cooke was RCA’s second most successful artist behind Elvis Presley, and one of the most successful artists in the business. The fabulous string of hit records he made - “Cupid,” “Twistin’ the Night Away,” “Havin’ a Party,” “Bring it On Home to Me,” “Another Saturday Night,” “Good Times,” “Shake,” and “A Change is Gonna Come,” among others - provided as effective a marriage between gospel and the teen pop market as his gospel songs. Some like “Bring it On Home to Me” went even further. It was probably the purest distillation of the gospel feeling in the Top 40 to that time. The move back actually provided Cooke with the mainstream success he so desired. He not only was a regular in the Top 40, but only a few months before his untimely death he even conquered the Copa. There was even talk of a break into movies. Unlike many performers of the first rock ‘n’ roll generation who saw their audiences diminish after the British Invasion, Cooke saw his expand.

Cooke not only consolidated his artistic vision in his final years, he expanded it. His 1963 album “Night Beat” was a masterful late night jazz/blues session, more Charles Brown than Ray Charles. He also incorporated the new ground being broken by white performers like Bob Dylan, who directly inspired the protest classic “A Change is Gonna Come,” which is arguably Cooke’s finest composition.

Sam Cooke - “A Change is Gonna Come”

Also slated for a 1963 release, but abandoned, was “One Night Stand,” which was to provide a record of Cooke’s stunning live performance at Harlem Square Club in Miami, Florida. He had debuted the act at the Apollo in November 1962, and this was the set that he presented at the Harlem Square two months later. The show was finally released in 1985 as “Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963″ and has received great acclaim.

Sam was also a cultural pioneer in these final years. He started his own record label SAR. In addition to recording old favorites like R. H. Harris and a reconstituted Soul Stirrers, SAR also helped to midwife the careers of several future stars, including Bobby Womack, Billy Preston, and Johnnie Taylor. (Cooke was also a pivotal figure in the career of Lou Rawls.) The best SAR records, such as L.C. Cooke’s (Sam’s brother) “Put Me Down Easy” are amongst the most sublime pop-soul of the era.

That Sam Cooke had so much going for him at the time of his death makes “what ifs” even more natural with him than with other figures that passed away at a young age. Unlike Presley or Lennon, there was no question his gifts were peaking at his demise. Unlike Buddy Holly, there had been no commercial slump before his death. He really seemed poised for bigger and more revolutionary things.

That type of potential makes it easy to forget just how much Cooke did accomplish. His influence has been omnipresent since 1964. Think of Otis Redding, Rod Stewart, even Steve Perry. Think of the success of a Michael Jackson or a Prince. Or even think of a smaller moment like Kelly McGillis and Harrison Ford’s tentative dance to “Wonderful World” in Witness. It would be a different world, a lesser world, if he’d never been here.

Biographical sources:

You Send Me by Daniel Wolff, S.R. Crain, Clifton White, and G. David Tennenbaum
Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick

It’s a busy time for Ray Davies, with the release of a choral album, ‘The Kinks Choral Collection’, a short UK tour, a single with Pretenders singer Chrissie Hynde and a Kinks movie on the way.

The Kinks Choral Collection The Kinks Choral Collection features arrangements of many of The Kinks’ classic numbers, including ‘Waterloo Sunset’, ‘You Really Got Me’, ‘Shangri-La’, ‘Village Green Preservation Society’ and ‘All Day and All of the Night.’ The CD was released in the USA on November 10th and re-released in the UK with extra bonus track on December 7th.

‘The Kinks Choral Collection’ has been generally well received and for fans of The Kinks it’s an essential purchase. Terry Staunton of ‘Record Collector’ summed it up nicely when noting “…it’s a powerfully evocative record that adds fresh colours and detail to some already gorgeous musical landscapes.”

Listen to clips of ‘The Kinks Choral Collection’

Ray Davies UK tour

The UK tour commenced at the Corn Exchange on December 11th and will end at the Hammersmith Apollo on December 19th. The Crouch End Festival Chorus backed Davies on the CD and are joining him for two of the tour dates at the Symphony Hall in Birmingham and the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester.

Go here for full details of the tour.

Postcards from London - Ray Davies and Chrissie Hynde

The new single, ‘Postcard from London’, was released on December 11th, and reunites Davies with Chrissie Hynde,for whom he left the first of his three wives 30 years ago.

Temple on board for Kinks movie

Fans of The Kinks will also be interested to know that a film about the band is to be made. There are no cast details yet, but Julien Temple has been named as the director. Temple previously directed the Sex Pistols documentaries ‘Great Rock’n’ Roll Swindle’ and ‘The Filth and the Fury.’ Temple is currently collaborating with Ray Davies to plan the film’s approach before penning a screenplay. Speaking to ScreenDaily, he said:

“Love/hate, sibling rivalry is at the core. I think it’s a very rich social, cultural nexus around the Kinks. Their story is the untold story of all those big bands of the 1960s.”

To enjoy great performances from the band, head over to The Kinks video section

The great soul pioneer Sam Cooke died 45 years ago today. Sam Cooke possessed one of the finest soul voices of all time and has been a huge inspiration to countless artists.

Just last year, Sam Cooke’s civil rights anthem ‘A Change is Gonna Come’ was featured prominently during Barack Obama’s election campaign. Others have covered it, including Otis Redding and recently Seal, but none match the masterful delivery of Sam Cooke on the original. On this 45th anniversary of his death, take a few minutes to listen to this superb performance and remember why Sam was so revered among his peers and continues to delight fans to this day.