A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - PLEDGE WEEK: “My World Fell Down” by Sagittarius

Episode Date: July 10, 2024

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2024. From Tuesday through Saturday this week I’m posting some of my old Patreon bonuses to the main feed, as a taste of what Patreon backers get. If you enjoy them, why not subscribe for a dollar a month at patreon.com/andrewhickey ? (more…)

This episode is part of Pledgeweek 2024. From Tuesday through Saturday this week, I'm posting some of my old Patreon bonuses to the main feed as a taste of what Patreon backers get. If you enjoy them, why not subscribe for a dollar a month at patreon.com slash Andrew Hickey. A brief note before we start. This episode features mentions of HIV-related discrimination and death

and a brief excerpt of some Nazi chanting. One of the stories we touch on briefly in this week's main episode is that of the band Sagittarius. Originally, the episode had a rather long digression about them, and they're also coming back briefly in the next episode, another part of the bird's story. But with the new format of multiple shorter episodes about a song rather than one long one,

This seemed a little like too much of a digression to fit neatly. So this week's Patreon bonus is a look at one of the more obscure acts we'll be dealing with in one of these bonuses, a studio collaboration that never had a hit. The origins of Sagittarius lie in Gary Usher's work as a staff producer at Columbia Records. Before he started to work for Columbia in 1966, his job had essentially been to make records with whoever was at hand. He had tended to treat things like band names, and artists as mere formalities, necessary for putting on a record label,

but it didn't really matter if the record said it was by the superstocks or the sunsets, Mr Gasser in the Weirdos or the Silly Surfers. It didn't even matter if Usher was the credited producer or some label executive was. Usher's job had always been the same. Pull together a bunch of musicians, give them a dozen songs, either ones he'd written or once by his friends, record an album in a few hours,

stick it out with a band name on it, onto the next session. But by the time he was working at Columbia, things had changed. While Annette Funnicello or Frankie Avalon had been fine singing Muscle Bussell or Beach Party, it turned out that David Crosby and Paul Simon weren't interested in doing what Gary Usher told them. His role at Columbia was to facilitate the artists, not to create himself. And even though he was working harder than ever, he wasn't creating anything like as much of his own music. The opportunity to do so came when he was producing an album for Chad and Jeremy,

a British duo who had been one hit wonders in the UK but had had several top ten hits in the US. ...presenting the sembler, she fulfills her... Until all the changes she goes through. ...mites to her sister at school in the... To inquire how she is progressing Usher was unimpressed with the material the duo were working on, considering it uncommercial,

and was under pressure from Columbia to produce a hit single for them, as they'd not had a major hit since signing to the label. So he started looking for some outside material they could record, and happened upon a recording by the Ivy League, which had been a flop single in the UK. He was convinced that the song could be a hit, and not only that, that it was perfect for Chad and Jeremy, who were known for soft, close harmony ballads.

But there was one problem. Chad and Jeremy hated the song, and no matter how much Usher insisted that it could be the thing that brought them back to the top of the charts, they just flat out refused to do it. So Usher decided he was just going to make the record himself. The track he recorded was very clearly influenced by the work his friend Brian Wilson was doing at the time,

so much so that some people have suggested that one of the reasons that Wilson abandoned work on Smile was that he thought Usher had beaten him to it. As Usher wasn't much of a vocalist himself, the main lead vocal on the verses was by Glenn Campbell, who had not yet had a major hit himself and was best known as a session guitarist, but who had also filled in as a temporary beach boy in 1965.

And on the choruses, the lead was taken by Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys, who also sang lead on a new bridge section, which didn't appear on the original record by the Ivy League and seems to have been bitten by Usher. Another of Usher's editions was Odder. At this point, Usher seemed to have a minor obsession with breaking up songs with short excerpts of music Concret and sound effects.

He did this on Faking It by Simon and Garfunkel, one of the tracks on which he was an uncredited co-producer and on several other tracks around this time. And he seems also to have influenced Jim Gwergio, who was at this time Chad and Jeremy's bass player to do the same on Susan by the Buckingham's but the section on My World fell down is possibly the most jarring

Usher sent the finished master off to Clive Davis the head of Columbia Records who was impressed and told him to sign the group which was a problem as there was no group but Usher didn't want to admit that he knew that if he told Davis that he had had enough time to produce side projects by himself Davis would load him up with more production work.

Luckily, Oshan knew someone who did have a group. Kurt Becher was a singer and songwriter from Wisconsin, who had started out in a folk group called the Gold Breyers, who had performed traditional material in a close harmony style that was something close to what groups like the mamas and the poppers would later do. The gold-stopping let me turn around Oh don't you leave me here Oh don't you leave me here

Oh don't you leave me here Oh don't you leave me here The gold briars had never had much success And when the craze for clean-cut folk groups ended Betcher had moved into other areas He'd first formed a duo Some was children Who'd released a couple of singles

But he'd gone into production Rather than continue trying to become a star in his own right Usher had first encountered Betcher's music while working with Brian Wilson in the studio. The two had been sat in a control room and had heard something that enthralled them coming from the next studio in the complex. They'd wandered over and found it was an engineer mastering a single by Lee Mallory. That's the way it's going to be. They discovered that the track was produced by Betcher

and quickly decided they were both Kurt Betcher fans. Soon a lot of other people became fans of Betcher's work, though they didn't know it. Betcher produced the first album by the Association, coming up with the vocal arrangements, including on their big hit Cherish, and was an uncredited co-writer on Along Comes Mary. He was also the uncredited producer for several hits for Tommy Rowe

and credited as vocal arranger on Mo's album It's Now Winter's Day, which featured Betcher on backing vocals, along with Dotty Holmberg of the Gold Breyers, Lee Mallory, Michelle O'Malley, Sandy Salisbury, and Jim Bell, among others.

Betcha, Omali, Salisbury and Bell were all part of a band that Betcha had formed as another attempt to get himself a career as a performer. The Ballroom only released one single, a startling version of Baby Please Don't Go. But they were working on an album, and Betcher was someone who spent a lot of time in the recording studio. A lot of time.

And it so happened that the studio he was using for the ballroom's recording sessions was the same one that the birds were using for younger than yesterday, and he kept overrunning and eating into the bird's studio time, sometimes by mere minute, but other times by as much as two hours. Eventually, Usher got sick of this and confronted him

and discovered that Betcher was the same person that had made that Lee Mallory record that he had been so impressed with. The two quickly struck up a friendship, and Usher realized that Betcher would perfectly complement his own abilities in the studio. Usher was someone who was keen to experiment, but he was also very much a company man who would get the job done quickly and get out, while Betcher would spend far more time working on tracks. Betcher also had a wonderful singing voice, which Usher definitely

didn't. And Betcher was as interested in mysticism and mind expansion as Usher was getting. Usher said that the ballroom album Betcher was working on was the first LSD album he'd ever heard. but that album wouldn't get released at least not in that form Betcher at the time was in a business and production partnership with a producer named Steve Clark but Usher wanted him for Columbia There were also problems between Usher and Clark

and Warner Brothers, the label for which the ballroom were recording, was unhappy with their work. So Usher arranged for the ballroom contract with Clark and Warners to be bought out, and the core tracks from the Bull Room sessions were now to be used, with some additional overdubs, as the basis of what was to be the first Sagittarius album. Betcher started getting Usher involved in a hipper scene than the serve and hot rod music scene that Usher had been part of previously, taking him along to Monterey. Usher later said,

Kurt was really a big influence on me, and he fitted perfectly into the Monterey scene. He was trying to get me out of the shirt and tie hondowl scene and into the new street scene and I think in that respect his influence was beneficial. It really was a period of growth. Betcher also worked with Jean Clark around this time, producing two tracks that went unissued, but which have later turned up on reissues of Jean Clark with the Gosden brothers. Betcher also contributed vocals to some birds recordings, which we'll talk about in the next episode. But Betcher and Usher's collaboration, rarely started with the second Sagittarius single, Hotel Indiscreet, on which Betcher sang lead. That track, despite having Betcher's lead vocals, was definitely an Usher work first and foremost,

right down to being a second Sagittarius single to feature an excerpt of music Concrete, this time including a certifical rant from another of Usher's discoveries, the Fire Sign Theatre. While My World Fall Down made the lower reaches of the Hot 100, Hotel Indiscreet. didn't even do that well, and the record label was so unimpressed with these collage excerpts, that the versions on the eventual Sagittarius album, present tense, had the collages from both singles edited out, much to their detriment. There was no such problem with the third Sagittarius single, a song written by Betcher, and one of the finest things he ever wrote. There was a different edit, though, this time to the lyrics. Listen to Betcher's original demo.

and say you never knew me some lonely night you'll cry yourself to sleep but you won't know it another time you'll be like not knowing that he's also found his death but you'll understand another time so i guess i'll say and now to the same section in the version released by Sagittarius. Betcher was queer. He's generally described as gay, but he did marry at one point and have a child, and as we've discussed before, the labels people attach to themselves can change over time. But clearly, having him sing a love song with male pronouns would not be the most commercial decision that could be made in 1967.

The Sagittarius Project was very much Usher's baby at the start, but Betcher ended up dominating the finished album. Usher had other commitments and only contributed one new song to the album, a track called The Truth Is Not Real. The rest of present tense was made up of the previously released singles, a few ballroom tracks, and one song, Glass, whose lead vocalist was apparently just a friend of Betcher's who turned up to the sessions.

Usher co-produced the new recordings, helped with the overdubs on the ballroom material, and is often doubling Becher's vocal on songs where Becher takes a lead, singing the same part lower in the mix. But the finished album is about 70% Becher and his friends, 30% Usher. And Becher was so productive at this point that almost simultaneously with the Sagittarius album, another album by another group of his came out.

Becher is only credited as a writer on half the tracks on Begin, the only album released by the Millennium during their time together, and only three of those are solo credits, but he's still undoubtedly the driving force on the album. The Millennium were a self-contained band, and all seven members were accomplished songwriters and vocalists. Drummer Ron Edgar had played with Betcher and the Gold Briars before going on to join the music machine,

which also featured keyboard player Doug Rhodes. Sandy Salisbury had been a member of the ballroom. Betcher had produced records for Lee Mallory as a solo artist, and Joey Steck and Michael Fennelly were new songwriters who Betcha had been introduced to. Big In was, by some accounts, the most expensive album that had ever been made up to that point, and it was one of the earliest to be recorded on 16 tracks. But it was an expensive flop, even though it contained some great material. The choices of single reflected the fact that the band was, in theory, a democracy.

The first single was It's You, a song by Steck and Fennelly. and the other singles were Steck and Fennellys to Clodia on Thursday, and Salisbury's 5am. But despite this, everyone has agreed that Betcher was the dominant force in the studio, to the detriment of the rest of the band, some of whom have gone so far as to describe their experience of the Millennium as being cult-like, with everything attuned to the leader's whims. After the album flopped, the group split up.

For the most part, the Millennium and Sagittarius recordings were completely again. ignored, but there was one odd exception. Even before the albums came out, several songs from them were covered by the biggest band in Sweden, who were trying to break the international market and hired Betcher's old partner Steve Clark to produce an album for them. It's been a long, long time by the Hepstars, included four Betcher's, songs plus Sandy Salisbury's 5am and covers of songs that Betcher had produced for Tommy Row and the association. Clearly, Betcher was seen as having far more commercial potential than the group's keyboard player Benny Anderson, who only wrote one song on the album. Though Anderson would go

on to have a few hits of his own when he went on to form Abba. Soon after the Sagittarius and Millennium albums came out. Both Usher and Betcher left Columbia records and started up their own label, together records, with Keith Olson, Betcher's production partner on the Millennium Material. Both Usher and Betcher worked on a huge amount of material together and separately, but most of it never got released, the one exception being a second Sagittarius album, The Blue Marble. Betcher would go on to release one solo album in the mid-70s, but he recorded so much material particularly in collaboration with Sandy Salisbury, that new archival material is still coming out regularly,

and much of it is as good as or better than the material that was released at the time. But the material that Betcha was involved in the 70s that did see release was generally fairly poor. He did sing backing vocals on several Elton John records, including the hit, Dungo Breaking My Heart. He also got involved in a project called California Music, which at various times involved most people from the surf music scene of the 60s and which recorded an eclectic mix of remakes of ballroom era songs,

disco remix of calypso songs, and a seven-minute yacht rock ballad about the Marx brothers by Bruce Johnston. Much of his work in the late 70s was on Beach Boys' side projects. He did backing vocal arrangements on Bruce Johnston's solo album Going Public, which was produced by Usher, and produced Mike Love's solo album, looking back with love, none of which are highlights of Johnston, Love or Betcher's careers. Wikipedia also credits him with backing vocals on Dennis Wilson's much better solo album,

Pacific Ocean Blue, but I don't hear him on there, and he's not credited elsewhere for it. He was also largely responsible for one of the most controversial recordings in the Beach Boys' career. Their attempt at going disco, here comes the night, which Betcher co-produced and did most of the backing vocals on himself. But for the most part, Vetych's musical reputation rests on his work from 1965 through 1973, and it's best to draw a veil over the last 14 years or so of his work. And that reputation is one that has only grown in the last 30 years or so. For the first couple of decades after its release,

begin by the millennium was a cult album, one that, for example, Jack Holtzman of Elektra Records would always list as among the best albums ever made, but with almost no audience. But in the 90s, as a generation of musicians like Santetienne, Stereo Lab and the High Llamas started to be influenced by 60s Exotica and soft pop, Becher's work became endlessly name-checked and reissued,

with massive archival releases like a three-cd box set of all the Millennium and Ballroom recordings. Sadly, Betcher didn't live to see this. According to his ex-wife, with whom he remained on friendly terms after their divorce, he tested positive for HIV in the Med 80s. He didn't get AIDS, but he developed a lung infection and went to the hospital for a biopsy. During the biopsy, a blood vessel was clipped and because the staff were terrified of getting infected themselves, they'd just let him bleed to death.

He was only 43.