A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - PLEDGE WEEK: “Hey Little Cobra” by the Rip Chords

Episode Date: June 21, 2021

This is a bonus episode, part of Pledge Week 2021. Patreon backers get one of these with every episode of the main podcast. If you want to get those, and to support the podcast, please visit patreon.com/andrewhickey to sign up for a dollar a month or more. Click below for the transcript. (more…)

This is a bonus episode, part of Pledge Week 2021. Patreon backers get one of these with every episode of the main podcast. If you want to get those, and to support the podcast, please visit patreon.com slash Andrew Hickey, that's A-N-D-R-E-W-H-I-C-E-Y, to sign up for a dollar a month or more. In today's main episode, we look at the most prominent surf and hot rod duo of the early 60s. So in this bonus, we're going to look at another duo who came from the same scene.

Or were they a trio? Or a quartet? Or a different duo? Or were the six of them? We're going to look at the ripcords and at their big hit, Hey Little Cobra. Don't you know you're going to shut them down? The ripcords started out as a duo, Phil Stewart and Ernie Bringus, from Englewood, California, the next town over from Hawthorne,

where the Beach Boys grew up. Stuart and Bringus originally called themselves the opposite, because they regarded their occupations as the opposite of each other. Stuart was a private detective, while Bringus was studying to become a priest. They noticed that Jan and Arnie had started out on Arwen records, but then moved to another label,

and so they tried to sell themselves to Arwin as a replacement for them. Indeed, since Stuart's middle name was Jan, for a while they were going to be billed as Jan and Ernie. That never happened, but they ended up getting signed as songwriters to Arwin's publishing arm, Daywin, and so coming to the attention of Terry Melcher. Melcher signed Stuart and Bringus to a deal with Columbia, but changed their group name to the ripcords.

Their first single was actually by the duo. Here I Stand was a cover, of a minor R&B hit by Wade Flemens, and featured Bringas on Lead, and the two ripcords overdubbed all the vocals themselves. The musicians on that track were all members of the session collective later known as the wrecking crew, including keyboard player Leon Russell, guitarist Blanc Campbell, and drummer Earl Palmer. The arrangement on that, and on many of the ripcords' future recordings, was by Jack Nitchie. who also did Phil Spector's arrangements.

Nitch's wife Gracia was also involved in the second Ripcord single. She was a session singer who was a member of the Blossoms for a while, and the Blossoms added vocals on Gone, and Gracia did the spoken intro. The man singing, Yeah, she's gone, whoa, she's gone, there, wasn't either of Stuart or Bringus, but Terry Melch's regular collaborator, Bruce Johnston. We've seen Johnston turn up a few times in the main part,

podcast, but at the time he'd just started making surf records in an attempt to jump on the latest bandwagon. Johnston came in to thicken the vocals on Gond, but he would soon be an essential part of the rip chords. As the group were touring regularly, they got in another couple of musicians, Rich Rockkin and Arnie Marcus, to back them on stage. Rockkin and Marcus didn't take part in the recordings, but Johnston and Melcher added additional voices. then Bringus, the lead singer, had quit the live line-up of the group because he couldn't perform live and keep up with his studies for the ministry, but he stayed in the studio. So the live line-up of the band was Stuart, Rotkin and Marcus, while the studio line-up was Stuart, Bringus,

Johnston and Moucher. The third single, Hey Little Cobra, was written by Carol Connors, the former lead singer of the Teddy Bears, who had started her own solo career a couple of years earlier, with My Diary. Conner spent much of the early 60s collaborating with people like Roger Christian and Gary Usher on Beach Party songs, but Hey Little Cobra was her first solo composition, though both Usher and Melcher have claimed to have helped her with it. While all four studio ripcords are apparently on the record, the only vocalists who could be easily distinguished are Melcher and Johnston, who were now.

ever credited on the records as anything other than producers. According to the line of notes of the Rip Cords original albums, the vocals were all by the official group members. Hey Little Cobra with Melcher on lead ended up making number four on the charts. The follow-up, Three Window Coop, was a cover version of a Jan and Dean album track, written by Jan Berry and Roger Christian, and made the top 30. machine in town by this johnston and melchette were also recording as a duo under the name bruce and terry making records like summer means fun a minor hit for them in 1964. But the age of the studio surf and hot rod group only lasted about 18 months, and the Ripcord's fourth single only made number 98, while the fifth didn't chart at all. After that,

the group split up. Bruce and Terry continued recording as a duo until 1966, and some of their records were truly excellent, like the majestic, Girl It's All Right Now. By the time that came out, though. Both men had gone on to the work that would be what they were remembered for in later decades. Johnston joined the Beach Boys, and we'll be hearing much more about him throughout the 60s and 70s, and Terry Melcher was producing acts like the birds, and we'll hear more of him, too. The ripcords remain largely a footnote to their work, to the extent that much of the time, when people talk about the ripcords, they don't even know that there was a real band at all. Stuart, Rockkin and Marcus

reformed the ripcords and have sometimes toured under the name in recent decades and put out an album of re-recorded versions of the hits a few years back, while Melcher and Johnston briefly revived the name for recordings to fill out a compilation cassette of hit re-recordings

mostly by Mike Love of the Beach Boys and Dean Torrance of Jan and Dean released only in Radio Shack stores in the 80s. Ernie Bringus now teaches theology and also seems to be the primary author of the group's Wikipedia page, which is largely devoted to making it very clear that Bringus rarely sang on the records his group put out.