A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 81: “Shout” by the Isley Brothers

Episode Date: May 4, 2020

Episode eighty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Shout” by the Isley Brothers, and the beginnings of a career that would lead to six decades of hit singles. 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 “Tell Laura I Love Her” by Ray Peterson. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

A History of Rock Music in 500 songs by Andrew Hig. Episode 81 Shout by the Aisley Brothers Today we're going to take one of our rare looks at this point in the story anyway at an act that is still touring today. Indeed, when I started writing this script back in February, I started by saying that I would soon be seeing the moment.

live in concert, as I have a ticket for an Isley Brothers show in a couple of months. Of course, events have overtaken that, and it's extremely unlikely that anyone will be going to any shows then, but it shows a fundamental difference between the Isley Brothers and most of the other acts we've looked at, as even those who are still active, now mostly concentrate on performing locally, rather than doing international tours, playing major venues. Of course, the version of the Isley Brothers touring today isn't quite the same as the group from the 1950s, but Ronald Isley, the group's lead singer, remains in the group, and indeed has remained artistically relevant, with collaborations with several prominent hip-hop artists.

The Isleys had top 40 hits in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and 2000s, and as recently as 2006, they had an album go to number one on the R&B charts. But today, we're going to look back at the group's very first hit from 1959. The Isley brothers were destined to be a vocal group even before they were born, indeed, even before their parents were married. When O'Kelly Isley Sr. was discussing his marriage proposal with his future in-laws, he told his father-in-law to be that he intended to have four sons, and that they were going to be the next Mills brothers.

Isley Senior had been a vaudeville performer himself, and as with so many family groups, the Isleys seemed to have gone into the music business more to please their parents than because they wanted to do it themselves. As it turned out, O'Kelly and Sally Isley had six children, all boys, and the eldest four of them did indeed form a vocal group.

Like many black vocal groups in the early 50s, they were a gospel group, and O'Kelly Jr., Rudolph, Ronald and Vernon Isley, started performing around the churches in Cincinnati as teenagers, having been trained by their parents. They appeared on Ted Max Amateur Hour, the popular TV talent show, which launched the careers of many entertainers, and won. Their prize was a jewelled watch, which the boys would take turns wearing. But then tragedy struck. Vernon, the youngest of the four singing Isleys, and the one who was generally considered to be far and away the most talented singer in the group, was hit by a car and killed while he was riding his bike, aged only 13. The boys were, as one would imagine, devastated by the death of their little brother, and they also thought that that should be the end of their singing career, as Vernon had been their lead singer.

It would be two years before they would perform live again. By all accounts, their parents put pressure on them during that time, telling them that it would be the only way to pay respect to Vernon. Eventually, a compromise was reached between parents and brothers. Ron agreed that he would attempt to sing lead, if in turn the group could stop singing gospel music and start singing doo-wop songs, like the brother's favourite act, Billy Ward and the Dominoes.

We've talked before about how Billy Ward and the Dominoes were a huge influence on the music that became soul, with hit records like Have Mercy Baby. Both Ward's original lead singer Clyde McFatter and MacFatter's later replacement Jackie Wilson sang in a style that owed a lot to the church music that the Young Isleys had also been performing, and so it was natural for them to make the change

to singing in the style of the Dominoes. As soon as Ronald Isley started singing lead, people started making comparisons both to Macfatta and to Wilson. Indeed, Ronald has talked about Macfatter as being something of a mentor figure for the brothers, teaching them how to sing, although it's never been clear exactly at what point in their career they got to know McFatter. But their real mentor was a much less well-known singer, Buehler Bryant. The three eldest Isley brothers, O'Kelly, Riddellie, Rudolph and Ronald, met Bryant on the bus to New York, where they were travelling to try and seek their fortunes. Bryant was one of the many professional blues shouts who never

became hugely well-known, but who managed to have a moderately successful career from the 50s through to the 80s, mostly in live performances, though she did make a handful of very listenable records. When they got to New York, while they got to New York, while they were. While they had paid in advance for somewhere to stay, they were robbed on their second day in the city and had no money at all. But Bryant had contacts in the music industry and started making phone calls for her young protégés, trying to get them bookings. At first she was unsuccessful, and the group just hung around the Harlem Apollo and occasionally performed at their amateur nights. Eventually, though, Bryant got Nat Nazaro to listen to them over the phone.

Nazaro was known as the Monster Agent. He was one of the most important booking agents in New York, but he wasn't exactly fair to his young clients. He would book a three-person act, but on the contracts the act would consist of four people. Nazaro would be the fourth person, and he would get an equal share of the performance money, as well as getting his normal booking agent's share.

Nazaro listened to the eyeslies over the phone, and then he insisted they come and see him in person, because he was convinced that they had been playing a record down the phone, rather than singing to him live. When he found out they really did sound like that, Nazaro started getting them the kind of bookings they could only dream of. They went from having no money at all, to playing on Broadway for $750 a week,

and then playing the Apollo for $950 a week, at least according to O'Kelly Isley Jr's later recollection. This was an astonishing sum of money to a bunch of teenagers in the late 1950s. But they still hadn't made a record, and their sets were based on cover versions of songs by other people, things like Rock and Roll Waltz by K-Star. It was hardly the kind of material they would later become famous for,

and Nor was their first record. They had signed to a label called Teenage Records, a tiny label owned by two former musicians, Bill Bass Gordon and Ben Smith. As you might imagine, there were a lot of musicians named Ben Smith, and it's quite difficult to sort out which was which. Even Marve Goldberg, who normally knows these things,

seems confused about which Ben Smith this was, describing him as a singer on one page and a sax player on another page. As Ben Smith the Sax player seems to have played on some records for teenage, it was probably him, in which case this Ben Smith probably also played alto sax for Lucky Millinder's band and wrote the hit I dreamed I dwelt in Harlem for Glenn Miller. It's more certain exactly who Bill Bass Gordon was. He was the leader of Bill Bass Gordon and the Colonials, who had recorded the doo-wop track, Two Loves Have I.

Smith and Gordon signed the Isley Brothers to teenage records, and in June 1957, the first Isley Brothers single, Angels Cried, came out. Unfortunately, the single didn't have any real success, and the group decided that they wanted to record for a better label. According to O'Kelly Isley, they got some resistance from teenage records, who claimed to have them under contract. But the Isley brothers knew better. They had signed a contract, certainly. But then the contract had just been left on a desk after they'd signed it, rather than being filed.

And they'd swiped it from the desk when no one was looking. Teenage didn't have a copy of the contract, so had no proof that they had ever signed the Isley brothers, and the brothers were free to move on to another label. They chose to sign to Gun Records, one of the family of labels that was owned and run by George Goldner. Goldner assigned Richie Barrett, his talent scout, producer and arranger, to look after the Isleys,

as he had previously done with Frankie Lyman and the teenagers and the Chantels, as well as his own group, the Valentine's. By this point, Barrett had established an almost production line method of making records. He would block book a studio and some backing musicians for up to 24 hours, get as many as 10 different vocal groups into the studio, and record dozens of tracks in a row,

usually songs written by either group members or by Barrett. The Isley's first record with Barrett, was a fairly standard do-what ballad, written by Ron Isley. There's some suggestion that Barrett is also singing on that recording with the group. It certainly sounds like there are four voices on there, not just three. Either way, the song doesn't show much of the style that the Isley brothers would later make their own. Much more like their later recordings was the B-side, another Ronald Isley song, which could have been a classic in the Coasters mould, had it not

been for the lyrics, which were an attempt at a hip rewriting of Old Macdonald. They were nearly there, but not quite. The next single, I Wanna Know, came closer. You can hear they were clearly trying to incorporate elements of other people's successful records. Ronald Isley's vocal owes a lot to Little Richard, while the piano playing has the same piano ripping that Jerry Lee Lewis had made his own. But you can also hear the style that would make them famous coming to the fore. But they were not selling records, and Richie Barrett was stretched very thin.

A few more singles were released on Gone, often pairing a previously released track with a new B-side, but nothing was successful enough to justify them staying on with Goldner's label. But just as they've moved from a micro indie label to a large indie without having had any success, now they were going to move from a large indie to a major label, still not having had a hit. They took one of their records to Hugo and Luigi at R.C. records, and the duo signed them up. Hugo and Luigi were strange, strange figures in popular music in the 1950s. They were two cousins, Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore,

who were always known by their first names, and had started out making children's records, before being hired by Mercury Records, where they would produce, among other things, the cover versions by Georgia Gibbs of black records that we've talked about previously, and which were both ethically and musically appalling. After a couple of years of consistently producing hits, they got tempted away from Mercury by Morris Levy, who was setting up a new label, Roulette, with George Goldner and Alan Freed.

Goldner and Freed quickly dropped out of the label, but Hugo and Luigi ended up having a 50% stake in the new label. While they were there, they showed. they didn't really get rock and roll music at all. They produced follow-up singles by a lot of acts who'd had hits before they started working with Hugo and Luigi, but stopped as soon as the duo started producing them, like Frankie Lyman. But they still managed to produce a string of hits like Honeycomb by Jimmy Rogers, who is not either the blues singer or the country singer of the same name,

which went to number one. and the honey be looking for a home and they also recorded their own and they also recorded their own tracks for roulette, like the instrumental Chawawa. After a year or so with Roulette they were in turn poached by RCA Morris Levy let them go so long as they gave up their shares in roulette for far less than they were worth. At RCA they continued their own recording career

with records like Just Come Home. They also produced several albums for Perry Como. So you would think that they would be precisely the wrong producers for the Isley brothers. And the first record they made with the trio would tend to suggest that there was at least some creative difference there. I'm going to knock on your door was written by Aaron Schroeder and Sid Wayne,

two people who are best known for writing some of the less interesting songs for Elvis's films and has a generic, lightweight backing track, apart from an interestingly meaty guitar part. The vocals have some power to them, and the record is pleasant, and in some ways even groundbreaking. It doesn't sound like a late-50s record as much as it does an early 60s one, and one could imagine, say, Jerry and the pacemakers making a substantially identical record. But it falls between the stools of R&B and pop, and doesn't quite convince as either. That combination of a poppy background and soulful vocals would soon bear a lot of fruit for another artist Hugo and Luigi were going to start working with,

but it didn't quite work for the Isleys yet. But their second single for RCA was far more successful. At this point, the Isleys were a more successful live act than recording act, and they would mostly perform songs by other people. And one song they performed regularly was Lonely Teardrops, the song that Barry and Gwen Gordy and Raquel Davis had written for Jackie Wilson. The group would perform that at the end of their shows. and they started to extend it,

with Ron Isley improvising as the band ramped behind him, starting with the line, Say You Will, from Wilson's song. He'd start doing a call and response with his brothers, singing a line and getting them to sing the response, shout. These improvised extended endings to the song got longer and longer, and got the crowds more and more excited, and they started incorporating elements from Ray Charles Records too, especially what did I say and I got a woman.

When they got back to New York at the end of the tour, they told Hugo and Luigi how well these performances, which they still thought of as just long performances of lonely teardrops, had gone. The producers suggested that if they went down that well, what they should do is cut out the part that were still lonely teardrops and just performed the extended tag. As it turned out, they kept in a little of lonely tear drops.

the say you will say you will line and the resulting song like rachel's similar call and response based what did i say was split over two sides of a single as shout parts one and two that was nothing like anything that hugo and luigi had ever produced before and it became the isley brothers first chart hit reaching number 47 more importantly for them the song was credited to the three brothers so they made money from the cover versions of the song that charted much higher. In the USA, Joey D. and the Starlighters made number six in 1962 with their version. In the UK, Lulu and the Lovers made number seven in 1964. And in Australia, Johnny O'Keefe released his version only a month after the Isley's released theirs, and reached number two. Despite all these cover versions, the Isley's version

remains the definitive one, and itself ended up selling over a million copies, though it never broke into the top 40. It was certainly successful enough that it made sense to record an album. Unfortunately, for the album, also titled Shout, the old Hugo and Luigi style came out, and apart from one new Isley's original, respectable, which became their next single, the rest of the album was made up of old standards, rearranged in the Shout style.

sometimes this almost worked as on wringling a ling let the wedding bells ring whose words are close enough to little richard style gibberish that ronald isley could scream them effectively but when the isley's take on irving berlin's how deep is the ocean or he's got the whole world in his hands neither the song nor the group are improved by the combination they released several more singles on r c a but none of them repeated the success of shout at this point they moved across to atlantic where they started working with libra and stola leba and stoller kept them recording old standards as b sides but for the a sides they went back to gospel-infused soul party songs like the libra and stella song teach me how to shimmy and the eyes of his own standing on the dance floor a rewrite of an old gospel song called standing at the judgment But none of these songs scraped even the bottom of the charts, and the brothers ended up leaving Atlantic after a year, and signing with a tiny label, SEPTA. After having moved from a tiny indie label to a large indie to a major label,

they had now moved back down from their major label to a large indie to a tiny indie. They were still a great live act, but they appeared to be a one-hit wonder. But all that was about to change. when they recorded a cover version of a flop single, inspired by their one hit, combined with the dance craze. The Isley brothers were about to make one of the most important records of the 1960s,

but Twist and Shout is a story for another time. A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Each week, Patreon backers will get a 10-minute bonus podcast. This week's is on Tell Laura I Love Her by Ray Peterson. Visit patreon.com slash Andrew Hickey to sign up for as little as a dollar a month. A book based on the first 50 episodes of the podcast, from Savoy Swingers to Clock Rockers, is now available.

search Andrew Hickey 500 Songs on your favourite online bookstore or visit the links in the show notes. This podcast is written and narrated by me, Andrew Hickey, and produced by me and Tilt Ariser. Visit 500Songs.com. That's 5000-0-the-numbersongs.com to read transcript. and liner notes and get links to hear the full versions of songs excerpted here. If you've enjoyed the show and feel it's worth reviewing, please do leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. But more importantly, tell just one person that you liked this podcast.

Word of mouth, more than any other form of promotion, is how creative works get noticed and sustain themselves. Thank you very much for listening. Brown he can't be my