A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 90: “Runaway” by Del Shannon

Episode Date: July 18, 2020

Episode ninety of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Runaway” by Del Shannon, and at the early use of synthesised sound in rock music. 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 “Blue Moon” by the Marcels. 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 Hockey Episode 90 Runaway by Del Shannon Today's episode is an odd one to write As just as I put the finishing touches to the script I discovered that Max Crook, the keyboard player at the centre of this story, died less than two weeks ago. The news wasn't widely reported

and I only discovered this by double-checking a detail and discovering an obituary of him. Crook was one of the great early pioneers of electronic music, and a massive talent, and he's a big part of the story I'm telling today. So before we go into the story proper, I just wanted to take a moment to acknowledge his passing and to regret that it hasn't been more widely noted. One of the things we've not talked about much in this podcast so far is the technology of music. We've discussed it a bit. We've looked at how things like the change from 78s to 45s affected the music industry,

at the transition from recording on discs to recording on tape, at the electrification of the guitar and at Les Paul's inventions. But in general, the music we've looked at has been made in a fairly straightforward manner. Some people with some combination of guitars, bass, piano, drums and saxophone, and maybe a few string players on the most recent recordings, get together in front of a microphone and sing and play those instruments. But today we're going to look at the start of synthesizers being used in rock and roll music. Today we're going to look at Runaway by Del Shannon.

Synthesized sound has a longer pedigree than you might expect. The use of electronics to create music goes back to the invention of the Theramine and the And Martino in the 1920s. and by the 1930s, people had already started using polyphonic keyboard-based electronic instruments. The Novacord was produced by the Hammondog and Company between 1938 and 1942, and was introduced at the World's Fair in 1939, where Ferdi Grofe, who we talked about a little in the episode on Kathy's Clown, led a group consisting only of Novocord players in a public performance. The Novacord never achieved mass popularity because of World War II halting its production, but it was still used in a few recordings.

One that's of particular interest to those of us interested in early rock and roll is Slim Galard's Novacord Boogie, but also it was used on one of the most famous records of the late 30s. These days, when you hear We'll Meet Again by Vera Lynn on documentaries about the Second World War, this is the version you hear. But the record that people actually listened to in World War II didn't have any of that orchestration. It was Lynn accompanied by a single instrument, an overcord played by Arthur Young,

and is notably more interesting, and less. syrupy. So even sound where, don't know where, some sunny day. So even in the late 30s,

synthesized sounds were making their way onto extremely popular recordings. But it wasn't until after the war that electronic instruments started getting used in a major way. And the most popular of those instruments was a monophonic keyboard

instrument called the clavoline, which was first produced in 1947. The clavioline was mostly used as a novelty element, but it appeared on several hit records. We're going to devote a whole episode in a few months' time to a record with the clavoline as lead instrument, but you can hear it on several 50s novelty records, like Little Red Monkey by Frank Chaxfield's Tunesmiths, a UK top 10 hit from 1953. But while the clavoline itself was in use quite widely in the 50s, the first big rock and roll hit with an electronic synthesizer actually used a modified clavilline called a Musitron, which was put together by an electronics amateur and keyboard player named Max Crook,

from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Crook had built his Musetron using a clavilline as a bass, but adding parts from TVs, reel-to-reel recorders, and bits of whatever electronic junk he could salvage parts from. He'd started playing electronic instruments in his teens, and had built his own recording studio. Sadly, the early records Crook made are not easily available. The only place I've been able to track down copies of his early singles in a digital format is one Grey Market CD, which I wasn't able to obtain in time to include the tracks here,

and which only seems to be available from one shop in Cornwall. His first band, The White Books, released a single Get That Fly, backed with Orney, on dot records. but I can tell you from experience that if you search anywhere online for White Books Only, you will find, well, not that record anyway. Even more interestingly, he apparently recorded a version of Bumble Boogie, the novelty instrumental that would later become a hit for Bumble and the Stingers, with Barry Gordy at some point in the late 50s. Sadly, that too is not generally available.

But it wasn't until he auditioned for Charlie Johnson and the Big Little Little show band that Max Crook met the people who were going to become his most important collaborators. The big little show band had started as Doug DeMott and the Moonlight Ramblers, a honky-tonged band that played at the High Low Club in Battle Creek, Michigan. Battle Creek is a company town, midway between Chicago and Detroit, which is most famous as being the headquarters of the Kellogg Company, the serial manufacturer and largest employer there. It's not somewhere you'd expect great rock and roll to come from, being as it is, a dull, medium-sized town

with little in the way of culture or nightlife. The High-Low Club was a rough place, frequented by hard-working, hard-drinking people, and Doug DeMott had been a hard drinker himself, so hard a drinker, in fact, that he was soon sacked. The group's rhythm guitarist, Charles Westover, had changed his name to Charlie Johnson and put together a new lineup of the group

based around himself and the bass player Lauren Dugger. They got in a new drummer, Dick Parker, and then went through a couple of guitarists before deciding to hire a keyboard player instead. Once they auditioned Crook with his Musicron, which he could clip to the piano, and thus provide cordal piano accompaniment while playing a lead melody on his Musicron,

they knew they had the right player for them. Crook had a friend, a black DJ named Ollie McLaughlin, who had music industry connections, and had been involved in the White Books recordings. Crook and Johnson started writing songs and recording demos from McClockland, who got Johnson a session with Irving Mickenick and Harry Bulk, two record producers who were working with Johnny and the Hurricanes, an instrumental group who'd had a big hit with Red River Rock a year or so previously.

Johnson recorded two songs in New York, without his normal musicians backing him. However, Micannick and Bulk thought that the tracks were too dirty. and Johnson was singing flat. And listening to them, it's not hard to see why they thought that. They told him to go back and come up with some more material that was less dirgy. Two things did come out of the association straight away, though. The first was that Charles Johnson changed his name again,

combining a forename he chose to be reminiscent of the Cadillac Coup de Ville, with a surname he took from an aspiring wrestler he knew, Mark Shannon, to become Del Shannon. The second was that Johnny and the Hood, Horicans recorded one of Max Crook's instrumentals, Mr Lonely, as a B-side, and you can hear in the Hammondogne part the kind of part that Crook would have been playing on his music run. Shannon and Crook recorded a tape of many other songs they were working on for McClockland to play to make an ik in bulk, but they weren't interested, until they heard

a fragment of a song that Shannon and Crook had recorded and which they'd then mostly taped over. That song, Runaway, was the one they wanted. runaway had been an idea that had happened almost by accident the band had been jamming on stage and crook had hit a chord change that shannon thought sounded interesting in later tellings of the story this is always the a minor to g chord change that opens the song but i suspect the actual chord change that caught his ear was the one where they go to an e major chord rather than the expected g or e minor on the line as our hearts were young that's the only truly unusual chord change in the one that's the only truly unusual chord change in the one the song. But whatever it was, Shannon liked the changes that Crook was playing. He and Crook would both later talk about how bored he was with the standard do-wop progression that made up the majority of the songs they were playing at the time, and the band ended up jamming on the new chord sequence for 15 or 20 minutes before the club owner told them to

play something else. The next day, Shannon took his guitar to the carpet shop where he worked, and when there were no customers in, he would play the song to himself and write lyrics. He initially wrote two verses, but decided to scrap one. They performed the song, then titled My Little Runaway, that night, and it became a regular part of their set. The crucial element in the song, though, came during that first performance. Shannon said, just before they started, Max, when I point to you, play something,

and so when Shannon got to the end of the chorus, he pointed, and Crook played this. When they were told that Micanick and Bulk liked the fragment of sorts, that they'd heard, Shannon and Crook recorded a full demo of the song and sent it onto them. The producers weren't hugely impressed with the finished song, saying they thought it sounded like three songs trying to coexist. And they also didn't like Shannon's voice, but they did like Crook and the Musicron, and so they invited Crook and Shannon to come to New York to record. The two men drove 700 miles in a broken down car with their wives to get from Michigan to New York. It was the middle of winter, the car had no heating, and Shannon smoked while Crook was allergic to tobacco smoke,

so they had to keep the windows open. The session they were going to do was a split session. They were going to record two Del Shannon vocal tracks and two instrumentals by Crook, who was recording under the name Maximilian without a surname, though the Max in his name was actually short for Maxfield. Crook was definitely the one they were interested in. He rearranged the way the microphones were arranged in the same. studio to get the sound he wanted rather than the standard studio sound and he also had a bag full of gadgets that the studio engineers were fascinated by for altering the musetron's sound the first single

released as by maximilian was the snake which featured crook and shannon's wives on hand claps along with an additional clapper who was found on the street and paid 40 dollars to come in and clap along after that the two women got bored and wandered off down roadway They eventually found themselves in the audience for a TV game show, beat the clock, and Joanne Crook ended up a contestant on the show. Their husbands didn't believe them, when they explained later where they'd been, until acquaintances mentioned having seen Joanne on TV. Meanwhile, the two men were working on another Maximilian track,

and on two Del Shannon tracks, one of which was Runaway. They couldn't afford to stay overnight in New York, so they drove back to Michigan, but when the record company listened to Runaway, they discovered that Shannon had been singing flat due to nerves. Shannon had to go back to New York, this time by plane, to re-record his vocals. According to Crook, even this wasn't enough, and the engineers eventually had to vary speed his vocals

to get them in key with the backing track. I'm not at all sure how this would have worked, as speeding up his vocals would have also meant that he was singing at a different tempo, but that's what Crook said, and the vocal does have a slightly different quality to it. and Harry Bolk backed Crook up, saying, We finally got Del on key, and it sounded great,

but it didn't sound like Del. We mixed it anyhow, and it came out wonderful. When I brought Ollie and Del into my office to hear it, Del had a bit of a fit. He said, Harry, that doesn't even sound like me. I just remember saying, You but Del, nobody knows what the hell you sound like. Like most great records,

Runaway was the sum of many parts. Shannon later broke down all the elements that went into the song. saying, I learned falsetto from the ink spot, We Three. I eventually got hooked on Jimmy Jones' handyman in 59, and would sing that at the High Low Club. I always had the idea of running away somewhere in the back of my mind. I wah, wow, wow, why. I borrowed from Deane on the Belmont. I wonder why.

The beats you hear in there, I wonder, bam, bam, bam, bam, I waw, I stole from Bobby Darren's dream lover. Listening to the song, you can definitely hear all those elements that Shannon identifies in there, but what emerges is something fresh and original, unlike anything else out at the time.

Runaway went to number one in almost every country that had a chart at the time, and top five in most of the rest. In America, the song it knocked off the top was Blue Moon by the Marcells, one of those songs with the do-wop progression that Shannon had been so bored with. At its peak, it was selling 80,000 copies a day, and Billboard put it at number 364 on the all-time charts in 2018. It was a massive success, and a game-changer in the music industry. Maximilian single, on the other hand, only made the top 40 in Argentina.

Clearly, Del Shannon was the artist who was going to be worth following, but they did release a few more singles by Maximilian, things like The Twisting Ghost. That made the Canadian top 40, but Maximilian never became a star in his own right. Shannon, on the other hand, recorded a string of hits, though none were as successful as runaway. The most successful was the follow-up, hats off to Larry. which was very much runaway part two. But every single he released after that was slightly less successful than the one before.

He soon stopped working with Crook, who remained at the Highlo Club with the rest of the band, while Shannon toured the country. And without Crook's Musicron playing, his records were far less interesting than his earliest singles, though he did have the distinction of being one of the few singers of this era to write the bulk of his own material. He managed to further sabotage his career by suing Mickernick and bulk,

and by 1963 he was largely washed up, though he did do one more thing that would make him at least a footnote in music history for something other than runaway. He was more popular in the UK than in the US, and he even appeared in the film It's Trad Dad, a cheap cash-in on the Trad Jazz Crays, starring Helen Shapiro and Craig Douglas as teenagers, who try to persuade the stuffy adults who hate the young people's music

that the Dukes of Dixieland, Mr. Aka-Bilk, and the Temperance Seven, are not dangerous obscene noises threatening the morals of the nation's youth. That film also featured Jean Vincent and Chubby Checker, along with a lot of British trumpet players, and was the first feature film made by Richard Lester, who will be hearing more about in this story. So Shannon spent a fair amount of time in the UK, and in 1963 he noticed a song by a new British music,

British group that was rising up the UK chart and covered it. His version of From Me to You only made number 77 on the US charts, but it was still the first version of Alenan McCartney song to make the Hot 100. He made some interesting records in the rest of the 60s and had the occasional fluke hit. But the music he was making, a unique blend of hard garage rock and soft white dewwop, was increasingly out of step with the rest of the industry. In the mid and late 60s, his biggest successes came with songwriting and productions for other artists. He wrote I Go to Pieces, which became a hit for Peter and Gordon. Produced the band Smith in their cover version of Baby It's You, which made the top five, and produced Brian Highland's million-selling version of a Curtis

Mayfield song that I'm not going to play, because its title used a racial slur against Romani people, which most non-Romany people didn't then regard as a slur, but which is a great record if you can get past that. That Highland record featured Crook, reunited briefly with Shannon. But over the 70s, Shannon seemed increasingly lost, and while he continued to make records, including some good ones made in the UK with production by Dave Edmonds and Jeff Lynn, he was increasingly unwell with alcoholism.

He finally got sober in 1978 and managed to have a fluke hit in 1981 with a cover version of Phil Phillips's Sea of Love, produced by Tom Petty and with Petty's band The Heartbreakers backing him. He also came to people's attention when a re-recorded version of Runaway with new lyrics was used as the theme for the TV show, Crime Story. In 1989, Del Shannon was working on a comeback album with Jeff Lynn producing and members of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers as backing musicians. The same people who are the same people had previously worked on Roy Orbison's last album, which had been his biggest success in decades, and Lynn was gaining a reputation for resuscitating the careers of older musicians.

Both Lynn and Petty were fans of Shannon, and had worked with him previously, and it seemed likely that he might be able to have a hit with some of the material he was working on. Certainly, Walk Away, which Shannon co-wrote with Lynn and Petty, sounds like the kind of thing that was getting radio play around that time. There were even rumours that Lynn and Petty were thinking, of inviting Shannon to join the travelling Wilburys to replace Roy Orbison, though that seems unlikely to me.

Unfortunately, by the time the album came out, Shannon was dead. He'd been suffering from depression for decades, and he died of suicide in early 1990, aged 55. His widow later sued the manufacturers of the new wonder drug, Prozac, which had been prescribed a couple of weeks earlier, claiming

that it caused his death. Max Crook, meanwhile, had become a firefighter and burglar alarm installer, while also pursuing a low-key career in music, mostly making religious music. When Shannon was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Brooke volunteered to perform at the ceremony,

playing his original music run, but his offer was ignored. In later years, he would regularly show up at annual celebrations of Shannon and talk about the music they made together and play for their fans. He died on July 1st this year, aged 83.

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