Episode 56 - Ho Daddy! The Surf & Turf Episode

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It's Summertime, the living is easy, and our July Twenty-Ought-Eight show is all about solar rays and happiness, direct from the sun and fun capital of the world, Merrimack, NH.

Summer Days, Summer Nights

Leading us off, a 19 and 67 song in praise of Trans-Love Airways, strobe lights, blue jeans, Harley-Davidsons and warm summer nights in San Francisco. Direct from the Summer of Love, Eric Burdon and the Hippie incarnation of The Animals with San Franciscan Nights.

[San Franciscan Nights - Eric Burdon and The Animals]

As anyone who has spent any time in San Francisco can tell you, "warm" would only be used to describe a San Franciscan night by someone who's never lived there. But hey, it's still a pretty song, and one that could only have been written in the summer of 1967, when all of us wanted to wear flowers in our hair.

This was the second incarnation of the Animals, much more psychedelic than the earlier blues-oriented Animals of the `early 60s, whose big hit was House of the Rising Sun. The New Animals would also have a string of hits during the late `60s, each one getting successively weirder, until culminating with 19 and 68's Sky Pilot, a seven-minute song that included gunfire, bagpipes and dive bombers, and which had to be split over two sides of a 45. Nevertheless, Sky Pilot (Parts 1 and 2) made it to #14 on the charts.

[Jingle]

Nobody Puts Baby in a Corner

There's a movie I watch every summer, on a warm night, all the lights off, just the glow of the tube lighting the room. Now - don't laugh at me - that movie is Dirty Dancing, which is one of my favorite summer movies of all time.

Some movies just get the time and place right on, and Dirty Dancing hits the summer of 19 and 63 and the Borscht Belt world of summer resorts perfectly. Maybe that's no surprise, as screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein, herself called "Baby" as a girl, used the memories of her own childhood to write Dirty Dancing.



You know the plot: Young Jewish girl goes to summer resort, falls for dancer on wrong side of tracks. Hotel workers spend nights gyrating hips. Obnoxious college kid moonlighting as waiter knocks up hired help. Doctor Father confused about who's sleeping with who. Sister sings Wiki-Wacky-Woo. Old Jewish couple revealed as master thieves. Everybody dances at the end.

And nobody puts Baby in a corner.

One of the things that make Dirty Dancing so great is the soundtrack, much of which was based on screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein's personal record collection. That soundtrack includes our next song, Mickey & Sylvia's Love is Strange, a hit from thirty years before the movie was made.

[Love is Strange - Mickey & Sylvia]

Love is Strange was written by Bo Diddley, but was credited to Ethel Smith, who was Bo Diddley's wife at the time, because he was in the middle of a legal battle with his record label over who owned what. "Who owned what?" might be the best phrase to describe Love is Strange and its history, as its distinctive riff was lifted for numerous songs - including the roller skate rink hot hit of 19 and 62, Rinky Dink and 1963's Killer Joe by The Rocky Fellers.

You can make up your own mind how closely either song resembles Love is Strange by checking out the Dreamtime podcast blog (that's right here), where I've posted YouTube videos featuring both songs. For the record, Dave "Baby" Cortez was sued over Rinky Dink's close resemblance to Love is Strange - and lost - while The Rocky Fellers weren't. On the other hand, Mickey & Sylvia might have thought a band named The Rocky Fellers was already punishment enough.

Surf's Up!

Hey! What's that I hear? I think it's time to hit the beach!

[Ho Daddy! - Bob Denver]

I have many guilty pleasures - indeed, Jailbait claims that my life is one big guilty pleasure - and one of those guilty pleasures is my love of surf movies from the `60s. One of the best from that genre that did not have Annette Funicello in it, but did have James Darren, Bob Denver, Tina Louise, Nancy Sinatra and Paul Lynde was 1964's For Those Who Think Young.

A "hodad" or "hodaddy" is surfer slang meaning someone who adopts the surfer look, even to the extent of having a surfboard that he never uses, because he's on the beach to pick up girls, themselves referred to by the surfing crowd as "Betties."

While one story has it that the term "Betty" came from The Flintstones character Betty Rubble (an obvious sexual hysteric who Barney isn't satisfying in bed, according to that great surfing mystery, The Dawn Patrol), "Betty" was being used by surfers to refer to an attractive girl long before the cartoon was a glimmer in Hanna-Barbera's eye. "Betty" is probably derived from Bettie Page, fabulous pin-up and bondage star of the `50s, whose life story is worth a Dreamtime by itself.



Jerry Fielding, who is credited with writing the music for For Those Who Think Young, must have consulted with some real surfers to come up with the authentic lyrics. Besides "hodaddy," you'll hear Denver refer to "hot doggers," "gremmies," (inexperienced surfers), "pearl diving," "the nose," and "going over the falls.

The Man Who Walked on Water

Believe it or not jazz babies, the godfather of California surfing was novelist Jack London, who, while trying to learn to surf in Hawaii saw what London later described as a "brown-skinned god" shoot past him on a surfboard.

That brown-skinned god was one George Freeth, son of an Irish sailor and a Polynesian mother, who would later become the All-Father of California surfing.

The legend goes that Freeth borrowed a surfboard from an uncle, and finding the 16-foot board too unwieldy to carry, chopped it in two. The truncated board was not only easier to carry, Freeth found he was able to surf a helluva lot more easily too, and soon earned a reputation as someone who could do about anything in or on the water.

The impressed London talked up Freeth to anyone who would listen, and Freeth was eventually recruited by Henry Huntington - he of the famous beach - to come to California. Huntington was trying to promote his new pier at Redondo Beach, and crowds started to gather when Freeth - billed as "The Man Who Can Walk on Water" - began swooping through the pier's pilings on his surfboard.

Freeth's exploits were legendary - wrestling sea lions into submission, saving seventy-eight people from drowning, rescuing a capsized Japanese fishing skiff and surfing it to the shore, saving its crew of seven. That last exploit prompted Congress to award Freeth with the Medal of Honor.
Freeth also invented the crawl stroke and the the torpedo-shape life float that lifeguards still use to this day. Freeth started the world's first water polo team and founded the San Diego lifeguard corps. His proteges won both gold and silver medals in the 1912 Olympics. Freeth himself probably would have won a slew of medals, but he lost his amateur status because he took Henry Huntington's money.

Freeth died in 1919, age 35, a victim of the Spanish influenza epidemic that was raging through the world. Today, if you take a stroll on the Redondo Beach boardwalk, you'll find a bust George Freeth, one of the few memories left of the Man Who Walked on Water.

The Case of the Missing Navel

I have this theory that all men of a certain age had the hots for Annette Funicello, as I certainly did, and as I did for another Disney girl, Hayley Mills.

The last of the original Mouseketeers to be cast, Annette also turned out to be the most popular. Even though Annette herself knew she had an unremarkable singing voice, by age 16 she was in the studio, recording 15 albums for Disney, which resulted in a string of pop hits during the `50s and `60s.

In 1963, Annette took to the beach, starring with Frankie Avalon in what was essentially the same movie repeated five times over the next two years, culminating with 19 and 65's Beach Blanket Bingo.

Here's Annette with the theme from the first of those infamous beach movies, Beach Party, from 19 and 63.

[Beach Party - Annette Funicell0]

One of the more enduring - and kind of endearing - urban legends surrounding Annette and the beach movies is that Walt Disney himself gave Annette the go-ahead to do them, but with the caveat never, ever to "show her navel." And thus that is why you never see Annette in a bikini in any of the beach movies, even though nearly every other girl on the beach is fruggin' around in the skimpiest two-pieces allowable by 1960 standards.

However close study - and believe me, I've studied those movies closely - reveals that Annette also reveals in 19 and 64's aptly named Bikini Beach, where her belly button is shown repeatedly to God and everyone else in all its glory.

[Left- Annette's belly button. Photo via The Myth of the Hidden Navel]

Annette wrote a charming autobiography several years ago titled, A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes, which I heartily recommend if no other reason that it's one of the few autobiographies I've read where there are no stories of exploitation, abuse, or backstabbing.

If not fully a charmed life, as she now suffers from multiple sclerosis, Annette seems to have had a pretty good one, and one that she's appreciated even through illness. To us, she'll always be our favorite Disney Girl, and we offer her our best wishes from Dreamtime.




Fugue for Tinhorns

Hey, I see that Jailbait has the lobster tails and steaks on the grill, so I think it's time for the turf portion of our show. Here's a song that I can almost guarantee you'll know, but I bet you can't tell me the title.

And nope, it's neither Paul Revere or Can Do.

[Fugue for Tinhorns - from Guys and Dolls]

That was Fugue for Tinhorns - from Guys and Dolls, and like I said, you probably know the song, if not the name.

If you've been to Vegas, or even a carnival, you've probably seen a chuck-a-luck cage. It kind of resembles an hour-glass-shaped birdcage. It contains three dice, the dealer tumbles the cage, and you bet on the dice roll.

The first version of chuck-a-luck was played with a tin horn, and since chuck-a-luck players were considered small-time by their more sophisticated brethren, they acquired the name tin horn gamblers, which eventually became shortened to tinhorn, meaning any cheap gambler.

While there's no evidence that the horses named in Fugue for Tinhorns were real, Equipoise, whose name is mentioned by "Rusty Charley" as being the great-grandfather of "Epitaph", was a famous thoroughbred from 1928 to 1938. "Known as the "Chocolate Soldier," Equipoise won 29 of 51 races in six years of racing and was named Horse of the Year twice.

Here's one more song dedicated to the Sport of Kings to add to our turf portion of our show, Willie Egan and Big Boy Groves doing You Can't Beat the Horses from 19 and 56.

[You Can't Beat the Horses - Willie Egan with Big Boy Groves]

In 19 and 62 Willie Egan lost all his equipment in a nightclub fire, and broke and worn out from the music business, retired and went to work as a hospital orderly. Twenty years later a fan tracked him down after hearing his solo singles on an LP that a British label had put out. Everybody - including the label - had thought Willie Egan was dead, but when he found out that he was a hit in Europe, he went to London, revived his career, and cut a new record in 1984.


Willie Egan, a man who couldn't beat the horses, but did all right anyway.

It's a Cruel, Cruel Summer

Cruel Summer was originally cut by the British girl group, Bananarama in 1983, and then re-recorded by the Swedish group Ace of Base in the late `90s. Me, I like the hip-hop version Blestenation, using samples from Bananarama's original, did for Blue Crush, another one of my all-time summer movie faves... and that's what I'm going to play for you now to close out the show.

This is Fred Bals, your summertime theme deejay left all alone and putting in a hot day at the studio while Mr. D. takes his leisure at the beach.

Here's hoping your summer is cool rather than cruel, the back of your neck doesn't dirty and gritty, and those summertime blues stay far away.

[Cruel Summer - Blestenation]

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With Theme Time Radio Hour on hiatus, Dreamtime is on a once-a-month podcast schedule for the duration. We'll be back in August with a new show. Thanks as always for listening, and remember to enter our Dreamtime Constant Listener Contest, underway right now. Send us an email with your guess on the date that Theme Time Radio Hour returns with Season 3, and get the opportunity to win a copy of Million Dollar Bash, as well as a CD of Poetry Readings direct from the Dreamtime studio with those nifty stewART covers.

***

You've been listening to the Dreamtime podcast – occasional commentary on Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour. Dreamtime is researched and written by Fred Bals and is a Not Associated With production. As the name says, we're not associated with XM Radio, Bob Dylan, or much of anything else.

Some of the music on Dreamtime is provided via the Podsafe Music Network. Check it out at music.podshow.com.

Remember that the Dreamtime team loves to get email. You can write us at dreamtimepodcast@gmail.com

The Dreamtime top cats are Curly Lasagna and Shaggy Bear. Our announcers are the notorious honky-tonkin' sisters, Jailbait and Joyride.

Until next time, dream well.

Episode 37 - Chasing The Rising Sun

Left: E. J. Bellocq 1873-1949 Untitled [Prostitute, Storyville, New Orleans] c1911-13

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I: That girl from Kaintuck

"Georgia, hurry up! He's at Cadle's!"

"Okay, mama," Georgia Turner answers, wiping her hands on a dish cloth. The sixteen-year-old's birthday is today, September 15, 1937. She and her mother walk out of the log house onto the dirt street of Noetown, a poor shanty neighborhood of Middlesboro, Kentucky.

They're going to go sing at Tillman Cadle's house. A man has come down from Washington, D.C. to hear the old music. Mary Gill Turner is known in the neighborhood for her religious songs. The blond-haired Georgia, who always seems to be singing, likes ballads and the blues best.

They pass a muddy Studebaker as they approach the Cadle home. Automobiles are still a rare enough sight in Noetown that Georgia pauses for a moment to look inside. She's never ridden in a car.

The two join the crowd, centered around a young man, not that much older than Georgia. But he's treated with deference, as much for being the master of the bulky piece of machinery he's working over as anything else.

Alan Lomax's Presto disc recorder had been supplied by The Library of Congress for his first solo field recording expedition. The Presto was billed as a portable model, but at 350 lbs, was "portable" only in a copywriter's imagination, handle or not. Lomax traveled with the machine in the back of his Studebaker. In order to record in places where there was no electricity, like Noetown, Lomax used the Studebaker's battery, which he attached to a transformer, which in turn was attached to an amplifier. Lomax was finishing the last connection from amplifier to Presto when Georgia and her mother walked in.

Mary Gill sang a few songs into Lomax's machine, and then it was Georgia's turn. Lomax lifted another of the massive, black, glass platters onto the machine and beckoned Georgia over. She began with an old standard, Married Life Blues. Then she leaned into Lomax's microphone and began another song, first tentatively, then more strongly, as the sadness of the story seemed to take over her voice.

There is a house in New Orleans
they call the Rising Sun.
It's been the ruin of many a poor girl
and me, oh God for one.

II: On to New York and Over the Pond

Georgia Turner's The House of the Rising Sun, which she called Rising Sun Blues, wasn't the first recording of the song; that's probably Clarence Ashley's of 19 and 33, nor the most famous - we'll talk about that one a little later on. But it's the one that inspired most of the later folk renditions of Rising Sun, as well as the Animal's ground-breaking folk-rock version that reportedly caused Bob Dylan to jump out of his car in excitement when he first heard it on the radio.

No one knows where Turner first heard the song. Her home in Noetown didn't have electricity, let alone a radio or phonograph, so it's unlikely that she had heard one of the recorded versions. Ted Anthony, in his recent brilliant book tracking the song, Chasing the Rising Sun, speculates that Georgia may have heard the song direct from Clarence Ashley's lips as he performed it on the medicine show circuit. There's some evidence to back that theory. The song was obviously known in the area and being passed from singer to singer. Three weeks after meeting Georgia Turner, Lomax would be fifty miles north of Noetown and recording a man named Bert Martin, who sang a slightly different version of Rising Sun. Lomax would use Martin's extra lyrics to fill out Georgia Turner's version and credit her with the song in his collection, Our Singing Country, which was published in 1941.

By the late `50s, the song was already a folk standard, having been added to the portfolios of Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Josh White, and Pete Seeger, among many others. In 1957 the music, guitar chords, and lyrics were published in Sing Out!, a folk music `zine with an influence far beyond its raw production values. Sing Out! was one of the primary sources for the booming folkie revival of the late `50s and early `60s. If you couldn't lay your hands on an original of the magazine, you'd likely have a mimeograph copy of the song sheets to learn the music for your next coffee house gig or hootenanny.

With changed chords and a descending bass line, Rising Sun became one of Greenwich Village folk icon Dave Van Ronk's signature pieces during the early `60s, impressing the young Bob Dylan so much that he recorded his own take on the Van Ronk version for his first album, Bob Dylan. Unfortunately Dylan waited until after the fact before asking Van Ronk's permission, and Van Ronk had had plans to record the song himself. And even more unfortunately, Rising Sun became so closely associated with Dylan in the folk community that Van Ronk had to stop singing the song or listen to snide remarks that it was a pretty good cover but much too close to Dylan's version.

"Now that was very, very annoying," Van Ronk noted, with just a trace of irony. But Van Ronk would see Dylan himself forced to stop playing the song after the Animals' 1964 mega-hit became the definitive version - an electric rendition based on Dylan's cover of Van Ronk... or was that Georgia Turner... or Clarence Ashley?

III: Another Shot Fired in the British Invasion

About two years after the Animals' release of Rising Sun, I was in my freshman year at a boarding school. One of my dorm mates had taken up the electric guitar, and the first piece of music he learned was the famous seven-note, A-minor chord arpeggio that begins House of the Rising Sun. For a good part of that year, our adult dorm master was treated nightly to an unlikely chorus of seven 14-year-olds soulfully lamenting their misfortune in visiting that house in New Orleans.

There are various stories about where the idea came from - sources claim the Animals decided to record Rising Sun after hearing either Dylan's, or Josh White's, or Nina Simone's versions - but the band knew it needed a memorable signature song for a spring 1964 tour where they would be on the same bill as Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis. They wanted something that would separate them from the pack and make the audience remember them. Something different, because, as Eric Burdon puts it, "You can't outrock Chuck Berry."

Someone in the band - maybe Eric Burdon, maybe Alan Price, depending on whose story you want to believe - suggested Rising Sun and someone - maybe Alan Price again, if you believe him, maybe the band as a whole - developed the unforgettable electric arrangement.

The Animals joined the Berry-Lewis tour and, in their first night on-stage, closed the first half of the show with their first public performance of The House of the Rising Sun. It was one of those moments that performers dream about but seldom really experience. As the final notes of the song ebbed away and the sole spotlight on Burdon faded into darkness, the audience was silent. Then the applause started, and didn't stop.

The Animals recorded the song on May 18, 1964, under the supervision of an unenthusiastic Columbia label producer, who felt that a four-and-a-half minute single was about a minute-and-a-half too long to have any chance to make it to the charts. He was - of course - dead wrong. House of the Rising Sun would become a trans-Atlantic chart-buster, topping both the U.K. pop singles chart in July of 1964 and the U.S. pop singles chart in September, when it became the first British Invasion #1 hit that wasn't a Beatles tune.

Unfortunately, Rising Sun would generate ill feelings among the Animals that would eventually break up the group and rankle the ex-members to this day. Again, someone - the record is unclear but most fingers point to the group's then-manager - told the band that they couldn't all be credited on the 45 single and suggested they just use organist Alan Price's name alone and sort out the royalty percentages later. It didn't occur to the financially naive musicians until after the fact that they could have used "Trad. Arr: The Animals," but the single was released as "Trad. Arr: Alan Price."

Alan Price's official web site notes, "...Price’s hypnotic arrangement of the band's epic version of The House of the Rising Sun was released in June 1964 and went on to become a worldwide smash..." Eric Burdon acknowledges that Price played a major role in the arrangement's development, but claims that ultimately it was a group effort. Less than a year after Rising Sun hit the charts, Alan Price had left The Animals. Some members of the group suspected he left because he had enough money coming in from Rising Sun to strike out on his own.

The other band members never saw a penny from the publishing royalties. But Rising Sun was never a song to reward its various interpreters very well... at least not with money. Clarence Ashley was probably paid $25 and transportation for his recorded version. Alan Lomax spent a great deal time and effort tracking down Georgia Turner in the early `60s so he could offer her royalties from her 1937 recording. But all in all she probably received less than $1,000.

It's a hard-luck song.

Further Reading/Listening: This article was inspired by Ted Anthony's 2007 book Chasing the Rising Sun, Anthony's journey into the heart of that song, as well as into the heart of America itself. I highly recommend it. I should note that, while based on Anthony's report, my description of the meeting between Alan Lomax and Georgia Turner is a pure product of my imagination, and any errors are mine alone.

Georgia Turner's version of House of the Rising Sun (Rising Sun Blues) can be found on Alan Lomax's Popular Songbook The CD also contains Stagolee, Didn't Leave Nobody But The Baby (later popularized in O Brother, Where Art Thou?), and the original Sloop John B. Popular Songbook is a very good starting point for anyone wanting to explore more of the place I spend much of my time, at least in my imagination, the Old Weird America.

***

You've been listening to the Dreamtime podcast – occasional commentary on Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour.


Dreamtime is researched and written by Fred Bals and is a Not Associated With production. As the name says, we're not associated with XM Radio, Bob Dylan, or much of anything else.

Some of the music on Dreamtime is provided via the Podsafe Music Network. Check it out at music.podshow.com. The background music for the opening segment was Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, performed by Bill Furner.

Remember that the Dreamtime team loves to get email. You can write us at dreamtimepodcast@gmail.com

The Dreamtime top cats are Curly Lasagna and Shaggy Bear. Our announcers are the notorious honky-tonkin' sisters, Jailbait and Joyride.

Until next time, dream well.