A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 68: “Yakety Yak” by the Coasters

Episode Date: February 4, 2020

Episode sixty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Yakety Yak'” by The Coasters, and at the group’s greatest success and split, and features discussion of racism, plagiarism, STDs and Phil Spector. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Tears on My Pillow” by Little Anthony and the Imperials. (more…)

A history of rock music in 500 songs by Andrew Huck. Episode 68, Yackety Yak, by The Coasters. When we last left the Coasters, they'd just taken on two new singers, Cornell Gunter and Doug Jones, to replace Leon Hughes and Bobby Nunn. The classic lineup of the Coasters had finally fallen into. into place, but it had been a year since they had had a hit. For most of 1957, their writing and production team, Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, had been concentrating on more lucrative work, with Elvis Presley, among others. Lieber and Stoller had a rather unique setup, which very few other people

in the business had at that point. They were independent writer-producers. an unusual state in itself in the 1950s, but they were effectively under contract to two different labels, whose markets and audiences didn't overlap very much. They were contracted to RCA to work with white pop stars. Not just Elvis, though he was obviously important to them, but people like Perry Como, who were very far from Libre and Stoller's normal music.

that contract with RCA produced a few hits outside Elvis but didn't end up being comfortable for either party and ended after a year or so but it was still remarkable that they would be working as producers for a major label while remaining independent contractors and at the same time they were also attached to Atlantic where they were recording almost exclusively with the black performers that they admired

such as Ruth Brown, Laverne Baker and The Drifters. And it was, of course, also at Atlantic, that they were working with the coasters, who, unlike those other artists, were Libre and Stoller's own personal project, and the one with whom they were most identified, and for whom they were about to write the group's biggest hit. For the most part, Lieber and Stoller had the classic songwriting split of one lyricist and one composer. Lieber had started out as a songwriter

who couldn't play an instrument or write music. He'd just written lyrics down and remembered the tune in his head, while Stoller was already an accomplished and sophisticated jazz pianist by the time the two started collaborating. But they wrote together, and so occasionally, one would contribute ideas to the other's sphere. Normally, we don't know exactly how much each contributed to the others' work, because they didn't go into that much detail about how they wrote songs.

But in the case of Yackety Yack, we know exactly how the song was written. Everyone who has had a certain amount of success in the music business tends to have a store of anecdotes that they pull out in every interview, and one of Libre and Stollars was how they wrote Yakety Yak. According to the anecdote, they were in Lieber's house in a writing session, and Stoller started playing a piano rhythm, with the idea that it might be suitable for the coasters, while Lieber was in the kitchen.

Lieber heard him playing and called out the first line, take out the papers and the trash, and Stoller immediately replied, or you don't get no spending cash. They traded offline, and had the song written in about ten minutes. Yakety Yak featured a new style for the Coaster's Records, where their earlier singles had usually alternated between a single lead vocalist,

usually Carl Gardner, on the verses, and the group taking the chorus, with occasional solo lines by other members. Here, the lead vocal was taken in unison by the two longest-serving members of the group, Gardner and Billy Guy, with Cornell Gunter harmonising with them. Libra and Stoller, in their autobiography, actually call it a duet between Gardner and Guy,

but I'm pretty sure I hear three voices on the verses, not two, although Gardner's voice is the most prominent. Then, at the end of each verse, there's the chorus line, where the group sing, Yackety-Yack, and then Dub Jones takes the single line, Don't Talk Back. This formula would be one they would come back to again and again. And there was one more element of the record that became part of the coaster's formula. King Curtis's saxophone part.

While Yackety Yack seems in retrospect to be an obvious hit record, it didn't seem so at the time, at least to Jerry Lieber. Mike Stoller was convinced from the start that it would be a massive success and wanted to put another Libre and Stoller song on the B-side so they'd be able to get royalties for both sides when the record became as big as he knew it would. Lieber though thought they needed a proven song for the B-side

something safe for if Yacht-D-Yack was a flop. They went with Lieber's plan and the B-Side was a version of the old song Zing went the strings of my heart, performed as a duet by Dub Jones and Cornel Gunter. Lieber shouldn't have worried. Yackety Yak was, of course, a number one hit single. The song was successful enough that it spawned a few answer records, including one by Cornell Gunter's Sister Gloria,

which Cornell sang backing vocals on. With the new lineup of the group in place, they quickly settled into a hit-making machine. Everyone had a role to play. Lieber and Stoller would write the songs and take them into the studio. Stoller would write the parts for the musicians and play the piano, while Lieber supervised in the control room. Cornell Gunter would work out the group's vocal arrangements. Dub Jones would always take his bass solo lines,

and either Carl Gardner or Billy Guy would take the lead vocal. But when they did, they'd be copying, as exactly as they could, a performance they'd been shown by Lieber. From the very start of Lieber and Stoller's career, Lieber had always directed the lead vocalist and told them how to sing his lines. You may remember from the episode on Hound Dog, one of the very first songs they wrote, that Big Mama Thornton was annoyed at him for telling her how to sing the song.

When Lieber and Stoller produced an artist, whether it was Elvis or Ruth Brown or the Coasters or whoever, they would get them to follow Lieber's phrasing as closely as possible. And this brings me to a thing that we need to deal with when talking about the coasters, and that is the criticism that is often levelled against their records, that they perpetuate racist stereotypes. Johnny Otis, in particular, would make this criticism of the group's records, and it's one that must be taken seriously, though, of course, Otis had personal issues with Libre and Stoller,

resulting from the credits on Hound Dog, but other people, such as Charlie Gillett, have also raised it. It's also a charge that, genuinely, I am not in any position to come to a firm conclusion on. I'm a white man, and so my instincts as to what is and isn't racist are likely to be extremely flawed. What I'd say is this. The Coaster's performances, and especially dubbed Jones's vocal parts, are very clearly rooted in particular traditions of African-American comedy, and the way that that form of comedy plays with black culture

and reappropriate stereotypes of black people. If black people were performing just like this, songs just like this, that they had written themselves, there would be no question, it wouldn't be racist. Equally, if white people were performing these songs, using the same arrangements in the same voices, it would undoubtedly be racist. It would be an Amos and Andy style audio blackface performance,

and an absolute travesty. The problem comes with the fact that the coasters were black people, but they were performing songs written for them by two white people. Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, and that Leiber and Stoller were directing how they should perform those songs. To continue the Amos and Andy analogy, is this like when Amos and Andy transferred from the radio to the TV, and the characters were played by black actors

imitating the voices of the white comedians who had created the characters? I can't answer that. Nor can I say if it makes a difference that Leva and Stoller were Jewish, and so were only on the borders of whiteness themselves at the time, or that they were deeply involved in black culture themselves. Though, that said, they also claimed on several occasions that they weren't writing about black people in particular in any of their songs. Lieber said of Riot in Cell Block No. 9, it was inspired by the gangbusters radio drama. Those voices just happened to be black, but they could have been white actors on radio, saying,

Pass the Dynamite because the fuse is lit. air. If you don't stop this riot, you all gonna get the chair. Scarface Jones said it's too late to quit. Pass the dynamite, cause the views is lit. That may be the case as well. Their intent may not have been to write about specifically black experiences at all. And certainly, the Coaster's biggest hits seem to me to be less about black culture and more about generic teenage concerns. But still, it's very obvious that a large number of people did interpret the Coaster's songs

as being about black experiences specifically, and about a specific type of black experience. Otis said of Libre and Stoller, they weren't racist in the true sense of the word, but they dwelt entirely on a sort of street society. It's a very fine point. Sure, the artist who performed and created these things, that's where he was. He wasn't a family person going to a gig, he was in the alleys, he was out there in the street trying to make it with his guitar. But while it might be a true reflection of life, it's not invariably a typical reflection of the typical life in the black community. The thing is, as well, a lot of this isn't in the songwriting.

but in the performance, and that performance was clearly directed by Lieber. I think it makes a difference as well that the coasters had two different audiences. They had an R&B audience, who were mostly older black people, and they had a white teenage audience. Different audiences preferred different songs, and again, there's a difference between black performers singing for a black audience and singing for a white one. I don't have any easy answers on this one. I don't think that whether something is racist or not is a clear binary, and I'm not the right person to judge whether the coaster's music crosses any lines. But I thought it was important that I at least mention that there is a debate to be had there, and not just leave the

subject alone as being too difficult. The song Johnny Otis singled out in the interview was Charlie Brown, which most people referred to as the follow-up to Yackety-Yack. In fact, after Yacety-Yack came a blues song called The Shadow Nose, based on the radio mystery series that starred Orson Wells. While Libre and Stoller often talked about the inspiration that radio players gave them for their songs for the group, that didn't translate to chart success. Several online discographies even fail to mention the existence of the shadow nose. It's a more adult record than Yakety

yak and seems to have been completely ignored by the Coaster's white teenage audience. And in Libre and Stolle's autobiography, they skip over it completely and talk about Charlie Brown as being immediately after Yakety-Yack. Charlie Brown took significantly longer to come up with than the ten minutes that Yakty-Yak had taken. While Stoller came up with some appropriate music almost straight away, it took Lieber weeks of agonising before he hit on the title Charlie Brown

and came up with the basic idea for the lyric, which, again, Stoller helped with. It's clear listening to it that they were trying very deliberately to replicate the sound of Yacety Yack. pop charts. So of course they followed it with a third song along the same lines. Along Kane Jones. This time the song was making fun of the plethora of Western TV series. He tied her up, and then he turned on the buzz off,

and then, and then, and then, uh-uh, and then a long day, John. While that's a fun record, it only reached number nine in the pop charts. Still a big success, but nowhere near as big as Charlie Brown or Yagety Yack. Possibly along Came Jones did less well than it otherwise would have, because the Olympics had had a recent hit with a similar record. Western movies Either way, the public seemed to tire of the unison vocals and honking sax formula

While the next single was meant to be a song called I'm a hog for you baby Which was another iteration of the same formula Although with a more bluesy feel And a distinctly more adult tone to the lyrics Listeners instead picked up on the B side Which became their biggest hit among black audiences becoming their fourth and final R&B number one,

as well as their last top ten pop hit. This one was a song called Poison Ivy, and it's frankly amazing that it was even released, given that it's blatantly about sexually transmitted diseases. The song is about a woman called Poison Ivy, and it talks about mumps, measles, chicken pox and more, before saying that, Poison Ivy will make you witch,

and you can look but you'd better not touch, It's hardly subtle Surely Shortly after that The minute you start to mess around Shortly after that Adolf Jacobs left the group While he'd always been an official member

It had always seemed somewhat strange that the group had one non-singing instrumental member and that that member wasn't even a particularly prominent instrumentalist on the records, with Mike Stoller's piano and King Curtis's saxophone being more important to the sound of the records. Poison Ivy would be the group's last top ten hit, and it seemed to signal Libre and Stoller getting bored with writing songs aimed at an audience of teenagers. From that point on, most of the group's songs would be in the older stale that they'd used with the Robbins, songs making social comments and talking about adult topics. The next single, What About Us, which was a protest song about how rich,

and by implication white people, had an easy life while the singers didn't have anything, only reached number 17. And there seems to have been a sort of desperate flailing about, to try new styles. They released a single of the old standard Bessame Mucho, which extended over two sides. The second side, mostly being a King Curtis saxophone solo. That only went to number 70.

Then they released the first single written by a member of the group, Wake Me, Shake Me, which was written by Billy Guy. That was backed by the old folk song, Stew Ball, and didn't do much better, reaching number 15. on the charts. The song after that was an attempt at yet another style, and it did even worse in the charts,

but it's now considered one of the Coaster's great classics. Cloth's line, Wrap It Up, was a comedy blues song written by a singer called Kent Harris and performed by him under the name Boogaloo and his solid crew, and it seems to have been muggled both on the early Robin's songs that Lieber and Stoller had written, and on Chuck Berries no money to. down.

I was shopping for a suit the other day and I walked into the department store. I stepped on the elevator and told a girl, dry goods flowed. When I got off a salesman come up to me, he said, what can I do for you? I say, go in and show me all those spoiled clothes like you're supposed to. He said, well, this year the country's on a continental kick. Everybody likes the Latin designs. I say, well, do you have? He said, we got everything, you see, clothes is our line.

Or wrap it up. and Storrock told various different stories over the years about how the coasters came to record what they titled Shopping for Clothes. But the story they seemed to have settled on was that Billy Guy vaguely remembered hearing the original record and knew about half the lyrics, and they'd reconstructed the song from what he remembered. They'd been unable to find out who had written it, so it just credited it to Elmo Glick, a pseudonym they sometimes used. The new version of the song was reworked significantly, and in particular it became a dialogue, with Billy Guy playing the shopper and Dub Jones playing the sales assistant.

I said, We went into the department store. Stepped on elevator and told the girl, dry goods flow. When I got off a cell and come up to me, he said, now what can I do for you? I said, we're going out and show me all this folk clothes like you spoke me to. He said, well, show, come. The record only reached these fabrics we got laid out on the shelf. He said, The record only reached number 83 on the chart.

And of course, Kent Harris sued and was awarded joint writing credit with Lieber and Stoller. While it didn't chart, it is usually regarded as one of the Coaster's very best records. It's also notable for being the first Coaster's record to feature a young musician that Leiber and Stoller were mentoring at the time. Lester Sill, who had been Leibran-Staller's mentor in their early years, had partnered with them in several business ventures,

and was currently the Coasters manager, phoned them up out of the blue one day, and told them about a kid he knew who'd had a big hit with a song called To Know Him Is To Love Him, which he'd written for his group, The Teddy Bears. That record had been released on Trey Records, a new label that Sil had set up with another producer,

Lee Hazelwood. Sil said that the kid in question was a huge admirer of Leber and Stoller and wanted to learn from them. Would they give him some kind of job with them so he could be like an apprentice? So, as a favour to Sil, and even though they found they disliked the kid

once he got to New York, they signed him to a publishing contract, gave him jobs as a session guitarist, and even let him sleep in their office or in Leiber's spare room for a while. We'll be hearing more about how their collaboration with Phil Spector worked out in future episodes. Around the time that shopping for clothes came out, the group became conscious that their time as a pop chart act with a teenage fan base

was probably close to its end, and they decided to do something that Carl Gardner had wanted to do for a while and tried to transition into the adult white market, the kind of people who were buying records by Tony Bennett or Andy Williams. Gardner had wanted, from the start, to be a big band singer, and his friend Johnny Otis had always encouraged him to try to sing the material he really loved, rather than the stuff he was doing with the coasters.

So eventually it was agreed that the group would do their first proper album, something recorded with the intention of being an LP, rather than a collection of singles shoved together. The record was to be titled One by One, and would have the group backed by an orchestra, singing old standards. Each song would have a single lead vocalist, with the others relegated to backing vocal parts. Gardner took lead on four songs,

and seems to have believed that this would be his big chance to transition into being a solo singer, but it didn't work out like that. The album wasn't a particular success, either commercially or critically, but to the extent that anyone noticed it at all, they mostly commented on how good Cornell Gunter sounded. Gunter had always been relegated to backing roles in the group.

He was an excellent singer and a very strong physical comedian, but his sweeter voice didn't really suit being lead on the material that made the group famous. Gunter had always admired the singer Dinah Washington, and he used to do imitations of her in the group's shows. Getting the chance to take a solo lead on three songs, he shone with his imitation of her style. For comparison, this is Washington's version of the same song.

Living for you, it's easy living, it's easy to live. It's easy to live. despite when you're in love Yes and I'm so in love There's nothing in life But you Despite the record showing what strong vocalists the group were It did nothing

And by this time The group's commercial fortunes seemed to be in terminal decline Looking at their releases around this period It's noticeable as well that the coasters stopped being produced exclusively by Lieber and Stoller. Several of their recordings accredited instead to Sill and Hazelwood as producers. There could be several explanations for this. It could be that Libre and Stoller were bored of working with the coasters,

or it could be that they thought that getting in another production team might give the group a boost. After all, Sil and Hazelwood had recently had a few hits of their own, producing records like Rebel Rouser by Gwain Eddy. But nothing they produced for the group had any great commercial success either. The group's last top 30 hit was another Libre and Storer song, one that once again shows the more adult turn their writing for the group had taken. Get right up, folks and see little into the pyramids, she walks, she talks, she claws on a belly like a reptile,

just one thin dime, one tenth of a dollar, Stop right up, folks! I went and bought myself a ticket and I sat down in the very first room. Little Egypt was originally the stage name for three different belly dancers, two of whom performed in Chicago in the mid-1890s and introduced the belly dance to the American public,

and another who performed in New York a few years later and was the subject of a scandal when a party she was performing at was raided, and it was discovered she planned to perform nude. These dancers had been so notorious that as late as the early 1950s, nearly 60 years after their careers, there was a highly fictionalised film

supposedly based on the life of one of them. Whether Lieber and Stoller were inspired by the film or just by the many exotic dancers who continued using variations of the name, their song about a stripper would be the last time the coasters would have a significant hit. Shortly after its release, Cornel Gunter decided to leave the group and take up an opportunity to sing in Diana Washington's backing group. He was replaced by Earl Speedo Carroll,

who had previously sung with the group called the Cadillacs, whose big hit was Speedoo. Carol, according to Lieber and Stoller, was so concerned about Job Secure, that he kept his day job as a school janitor after joining the Coasters. Unfortunately, Gunter was soon sacked by Diana Washington, and he decided to form his own group, and to call it the Coasters. A more accurate name might have been The Penguins,

since the other three members of his new group had been members of the Penguins previously. Gunter had come out of the same stew of vocal groups as the Penguins had, and had known them for years. Gunter's group weren't allowed to record as the Coasters, so they made records just under Gunter's own name, whereas Cornel Gunter and the Cornels. But while he couldn't make records as the Coasters, his group could tour under that name,

and they were cheaper than the other group. Gunter was friends with Dick Clark, and so Clark started to book Gunter's version of the group rather than the version that was in the studio. Not that the group in the studio was exactly the same as the group you'd see live, even if you did go to see the main group. Billy Guy decided he wanted to try a solo career, but unlike Gunter, he didn't quit the group.

Instead, he had a replacement go out on the road for him, but still sang with them in the studio. None of Guy's solo records did particularly well, and several of them ended up getting reissued under the Coaster's name, even though no other coasters were involved. The band membership kept changing, and the hits stopped altogether. Over the next few decades,

pretty much everyone who'd been involved with the coasters started up their own rival version of the group. Carl Gardner apparently retained the legal rights to the name The Coasters, and were two people using it without his permission, but that didn't stop other members performing under names like Cornel Gunter's Coasters, which isn't precisely the same. Sadly, several people associated with the coasters ended up dying violently.

King Curtis was stabbed to death in the street in 1971, outside his apartment building. Two people were making a drug deal outside his door, and he asked them to move on, as he was trying to carry a heavy air-conditioning unit in. They refused, a fight broke out, and he ended up dead, aged only 37.

One of Cornell Gunter's coasters was murdered by Gunter's manager in 1980 after threatening to expose some of the manager's criminal activities. And finally, Gunter himself was shot dead in 1990 and his killer has never been found. These days, there are three separate coasters groups touring. Cornell Gunter's Coasters is a continuation of the group that Gunter led before his death.

The Coasters is managed by Carl Gardner's widow, and Leon Hughes, who is the only surviving original member of the Coasters, but was gone by the time of Yakety Yak, Tours as Leon Hughes and his Coasters. The Coasters are now all gone other than Hughes, but their records are still remembered. They created a sound that influenced many, many other groups, but has never been replicated by anyone.

They were often dismissed as just a comedy group, but as anyone who has ever tried it knows, making music that is both funny and musically worthwhile is one of the hardest things you can do, and making comedy music that's still enjoyable more than 60 years later. No one else in rock and roll has ever done that. A history of rock music and 500 songs

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