Speaker 1: Hudson River Radio dot com.
Speaker 2: Yum yo, how does Sasa? Jonnifer Leasberry Jukes.
Speaker 3: Hey, this is Tom Chapin. Hello, just preaching in Rock
and Roll History Show.
Speaker 4: You're listening right now.
Speaker 5: Welcome to the latest installment of the Rock and Roll
History Show. And no, I did not kidnap Brian and
lock him in a closet. He's here, but they're going
to torture me today, so I get to leave the show. Fun, fun, fun.
Every so often we do an episode where it's all
about songs with an instrument that one of us hates,
and we've already done Barbara with the ukulele and Mercedes
with the harp. So now it's my turn. And what
instrument do I usually hate to hear? Harmonic? Before we
get started, let me introduce the Corimbos. Let's start with
our usual host Ryan. Ryan used to play bass by ear,
but he's doing much better now because he's switched to
using his hands. Go. Neil heard a rumor about butter,
but he decided not to spread it.
Speaker 2: People, lies, lies, lies, How you do everybody?
Speaker 5: Mercedes from Silver Screen saw a skeleton walk into a
bar and she wanted to see what happened. The skeleton
said to the bartender, a bartender, I'll have one beer
and a mop. Yes, hey, everybody, Barbara feel from shaving cream.
She saw a snowman throwing a tantrum. It was a
real meltdown.
Speaker 6: Oh good one, Gil and should.
Speaker 5: A retired teacher John got carded at a liquor store
and he went to take out his license from his
wallet and his Blockbuster card fell out by mistake. The
cashier said, never mind.
Speaker 4: You know, Blockbuster brings brings up a lot of good.
Speaker 7: Running to Blockbuster to get that, uh, you know, the
latest release before the you know, thirty other people went
clambered to get it as well.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it was fun.
Speaker 3: It was you know, adjacent to go into the record store. Yeah,
all the time. Yeah, you go to block.
Speaker 7: At a Blockbuster, go to the record store, grab a slice,
grab some pizza.
Speaker 4: Bring it home.
Speaker 5: Yeah, popcorn.
Speaker 3: Yeah, good times.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now you scroll endless screens on Netflix going nah yeah doom.
Speaker 4: Scroll for like three hours trying to find something.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I don't I don't have any of the streaming channels,
so I don't even know like how that is. But anyway,
so before we get started with the songs, one of
which I actually really love, so it's not going to
be torturing me at all in spite of the harmonica. Uh,
let's talk a little bit about harmonic, because it's considered
a loose reed instrument, and these poor people. Loose read
instruments not to be confused with lou reed instruments, date
back to China around eleven hundred BC. Oh my god,
they tortured people even back then. What we would recognize
as a mouth organ. I'd rather have a kidney or liver,
thank you. Dates to around eighteen twenty when it spread
around Europe, Oh God help them, and into the US.
Oh no, and that's when the evil began. It was fun, huh.
That's subjective, portable, and relatively inexpensive. A German clock maker
named Matthias Hohner started the Honer Company in eighteen fifty
seven when he realized that custom clocks were fading in popularity. Personally,
I think a custom clock would be really cool, much
less annoying, sound wise.
Speaker 3: Way more expensive.
Speaker 5: Yeah. He started selling harmonicas in Germany, those poor people,
and it found out.
Speaker 3: From there they.
Speaker 5: Are still by far the biggest selling brand. It's popularity
soword after World War One and lasted through World War Two,
and a lot of these old World War One movies
you see these guys one guy is sitting around mournfully
playing the harmonica.
Speaker 2: A lot of Western a lot of Western movies have that. Well, yeah, guys.
Speaker 1: Sitting cowboy by the fire.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what I'm talking about.
Speaker 5: So the popularity lasted through World War II, when it
faded a bit, thanks be to God, but came back
in the folk music revival of the nineteen sixties, which
is why I am mostly not a folk music.
Speaker 3: You might want to be kind of grateful because it
got Bob Billin to stop singing for a minute.
Speaker 5: Oh goodness. So I believe that. First to start out
is Neil.
Speaker 2: All right, Well, I will ask a rhetorical question before
we start into Gail. Is that I mean, you've professed
here on the Rock and Roll History Show your love
of the blues and the harmonica is like, it's like
the number one instrument in blues and and and you
don't you don't have to answer.
Speaker 5: I'm just like, it's no, I can explain it totally.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 5: It depends on the type of harmonica. Playing if it's
the high pitched shrieky like some of Stevie Wonders music
has that type the high pitched, shrieky, kind of gritty
sounding harmonica. Hate it, absolutely hate it. It literally is
physically disturbing to me.
Speaker 2: Okay, now, let just you know we.
Speaker 4: Should want you to pick Stevie wonder Then.
Speaker 2: I want you to make sure I want you to
that you don't have ear plugs inside your headphones. That's cheating.
You have to listen. You have to listen.
Speaker 5: Rats. I thought I had the situation solved.
Speaker 2: Well, I'll tell you because when the topic of torture
or the torture topic of the harmonica came up, when
it was first mentioned, I immediately thought of the Jay
Giles band. Now, not the Jay Giles band that dominated
the early nineteen eighties MTV charts with a mainstream, semi
new wave commercial sound. Oh no, no, no, no, I'm
I'm talking about the Jay Giles band that I saw
back in the early nineteen seventies as a young high
school teenager at places like the Fillmore East and the
Academy of Music down in Manhattan in New York City.
A simple R and B influenced blues rock group that
just happened to kick major ass. Okay, let's talk about them.
The Jay Giles Band were formed in Boston or the
Boston area in nineteen sixty seven. Original members included the
band's namesake, John Giles but you can call him Jay
On guitar, singer and frontman extraordinaire Peter Wolfe, keyboardist Seth Justman,
bassist Danny Klein, drummer Stephen Joe Blad and the man
at the center of our topic today, mister Richard Solwitz,
but you can call him Magic Dick or as Peter
wolf would call him, magic Dick on the licking stick.
And I knew you'd like that, and we'll have more
about him later. But The Jay Giles Band released their
eponymously titled debut album in late nineteen seventy and although
the song We're about to hear called Whammer Jammer didn't
appear until their second album, called The Morning After, which
was released in late nineteen seventy one, it was already
a staple of their live shows, and it would later
appear on a live LP called Full House in nineteen
seventy two. Now, generally the main focus of the band
was there flamboyant frontman Peter Wolf with his rapid fire
between song banter and his swagger like Mick Jagger. But
on this song an instrumental, no words, it's Whammer jammer,
where Magic Dick took center stage.
Speaker 8: Sometimes drinking hand time, beshrinking hand time.
Speaker 9: Baking, baking had story.
Speaker 8: Entire the root, the room, your cap, your can.
Speaker 9: Sing since things seconds.
Speaker 2: All right, gall, let's hear it. What is your reaction
to Wamma jammer?
Speaker 5: I'd rather not ever hear it again?
Speaker 2: If people at home listening at home, if if you
could see her, it looked like she was We were
watching her, Yes, a big bite out of a lemon.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're watching her face contort all through that.
Speaker 4: It was Yes, that was a lot of fun.
Speaker 2: You know it is it rocks? Oh yeah, oh yeah.
Speaker 5: It was a little easier to handle when the other
instruments came in too, so I wasn't just listening to
shrieking air.
Speaker 3: If we had turned down the volume on our headphones,
we could tell the pitch of the harmonica by the
scrunch on Gail's face.
Speaker 5: Yes, yes, yeah, I don't even have to say anything,
Mike gooms my face has subtitles.
Speaker 3: If we ever played poker, Invite Gael.
Speaker 5: At this point in my life, I wouldn't even be
able to remember the rules of this state.
Speaker 2: So let's get back to Magic Dick, like I said before. Okay.
He was born in New London, Connecticut, in nineteen forty five.
In addition to the harmonica, he also plays the trumpet
and the saxophone, and in nineteen seventy nine, music critic
Dave Marsh described Magic Dick as quote possibly the best
white musician to ever play blues harmonica. Now I take
a little lumberge, I would say simply he was the
best musician period to play blues harmonica, or at least
one of them. But I'll get off my soapbox. Magic
Dick also co created a harmonica design called appropriately the
Magic Harmonica, and he's still based in the Boston area
and he is a member of the Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra. Gail,
you want to get tickets? Oh god, I'll take that
as a yes.
Speaker 5: Okay, What an abomination road trip? How I really feel?
Speaker 9: No?
Speaker 3: No, no, no, no no no.
Speaker 2: The Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra front row, all right, the Jay
Giles band did have several top forty singles in the
early nineteen seventies, but as I mentioned earlier, the majority
of their success came in the nineteen eighties, with hits
like Freeze, Frames, Centerfold and of Course Loves Things So hey,
you know, and I'll say I like those records too,
but I was always partial to the earlier stuff because
that's what I heard first. So just to say, you know,
everybody knows my eighties bias somewhat, but no, I'd like
those songs too, so don't worry. So but what does
a band do after striving for years to reach the
top and they finally make it in the nineteen eighties,
what do they do?
Speaker 5: Stop making shrieking sounds?
Speaker 2: No? They break up? Of course? What do you think?
Peter Wolf left the band in nineteen eighty three to
pursue a solo career. The band did release one more
album without Wolf in nineteen eighty four, before breaking up
for good in nineteen eighty five, But beginning in nineteen
ninety nine, the band did get back together for several
reunion tours with and without Jay Giles, the latter resulting
in a bitter lawsuit over the use of the guitarist name,
as you might think, being that the Jay Giles Band
did not have a Jay Giles in them at that point. Anyway, Sadly,
J Giles himself passed away in twenty seventeen. Now, the
Jay Giles Band, they were nominated for induction into the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, not once, not twice,
five different times, but were not voted in on any
of those attempts. So that I find that criminal. I
find that felonious. I find that is why I don't
really take much stock in the Rock and Roll Hall
of Fame, because that's crazy that they and the people
that they do induct. No, no, this is there is
no justice. But as I also mentioned, I did get
to see the band live a number of times throughout
the nineteen seventies, and they always were incredible. Peter Wolf
is out there too. I've seen him solo and he's incredible.
And I also got to see Magic Dick perform along
with a guitarist named Seun Eng as an acoustic duo
and they were great. That was up at Daryl's house
in paul in, New York, and that was back in
twenty nineteen. So he's still out there playing too, So
get out there and catch these people. That's all I
can say.
Speaker 5: And Gail, I hope you liked it well, Neil, that
was interesting.
Speaker 2: Nice. I can see how happy you are.
Speaker 1: Okay, I'm surprised you don't have alcohol in front.
Speaker 5: Of you right now. I do have a bottle of
wine in the other room. I should go get it.
So John, what do you have?
Speaker 4: Okay?
Speaker 3: I don't know you.
Speaker 7: You might like this, you might not because there's a
lot of harmonica in it, but there's also a lot
of guitar in it as well, so.
Speaker 4: The selection is a little long tonight. It's the work song.
Speaker 7: By the late great Paul Butterfield and the Paul Butterfield
Blues Band from nineteen sixty six. It was from their
East West, their second album, East West, released in August
of that year. And Paul Butterfield does the harmonica and
Mike Bloomfield does the guitar, and I think this is
a classic.
Speaker 4: It's a bit of a long one.
Speaker 7: So I think we're gonna do about three three and
a half minutes and then we're gonna kind of fade
out from there, and then I'll just.
Speaker 4: Say tell you a little bit, a little bit of
a teaser after that as well. So, Gail, I.
Speaker 7: Hope you enjoy this little this little blues selection Butterfield
Blues Band.
Speaker 10: So enjoys.
Speaker 1: Seven s.
Speaker 3: The moment.
Speaker 7: Focus, okay, And that was the work song by Paul
Butterfield and Mike Bloomfield.
Speaker 4: Great song. Uh, it's got a great beat.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 7: It goes on for about seven and a half minutes scales,
so there's a lot more after that. So uh, we
were kind enough to only give you about three and
a half minutes.
Speaker 5: There, but thank you. Actually I liked the guitars and
the percussion and the keyboard.
Speaker 4: Yes, it's it's it's got a lot of bass.
Speaker 3: Hello, sorry the bass, yes, the back all right, then,
whether you meant it or not, you have to say it.
It's got a lot to it.
Speaker 2: Well, that was They were a good band.
Speaker 7: That a really great I mean, and to think what
they could have achieved had both Bloomfield and Butterfield not
engaged in a lot of recreational pharmacology, which led to
their demise. Mister Butterfield nineteen eighty seven in Bloomfield in
eighty one, I believe. So again, it's a great piece
of music, but gone too soon.
Speaker 2: So but hope you know, I know this will shock you,
But I did get to see a later version of
the Butterfly Field Blues Band, not the one we just
heard right, probably just a couple of years later. It
was probably around nineteen seventy one. Yeah, but they were
still great. Yeah, it was still the same groove going there.
Speaker 7: That kind of music is a kind of music I
would love to just listen to in like a smoky
bar somewhere, you know, and just.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 5: You obviously don't have asthma like I do, well.
Speaker 7: I could do that pretty bad lung problems, but still
would have been a fun thing to just kind of
just kick back and hill with a drink in hand
and a low key kind of.
Speaker 4: Smoky bar and just kind of take in that harmonica.
Speaker 3: It's the kind of thing I think, even if you
don't necessarily like it, when it's live, for some reason,
it just hits better.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, exactly play it, you know. No, you're right,
You're you're right, Brian.
Speaker 7: It's just I could see enjoying that down in Pyramont
at what's the club down to Pyramount? We go to
uh point yes, I would love I would love to
hear somebody do that kind of a do a remake
of it at the turning point. That'd be a lot
of fun, that really would anyway, Hope you all enjoyed it, Gail,
it was a pleasure to Uh.
Speaker 5: All right, well I survived that one. But we need
to take a very quick break.
Speaker 4: What's the the River Radio? Your dog likes us.
Speaker 5: This concludes the first part of this cassette.
Speaker 11: Please turn the cassette over and begin again on side too.
Speaker 1: This is Hudson River Radio dot Com.
Speaker 8: A y.
Speaker 5: All right, so we're back at the middle section of
today's Rock and Roll History Show episode where my fellow
crambones are torturing me with songs of my least favorite instrument,
the harmonica. Up next is Barbara. What do you have
to drive me nuts?
Speaker 2: Barbara?
Speaker 1: First, I want to say when you were telling us
the story of the Harmonica, I loved your little commentary.
That is excellent.
Speaker 3: The poor Chinese.
Speaker 5: Oh my gods, wait, wait till you see Sunday at church,
I have to give a talk on St. Teresa of Avola,
and I put little things like that in there. When
I'm giving my talks about Saints, and I think that's
why everybody shows up when we only have morning prayer
and I'm the one doing it.
Speaker 3: Gone, Jesus may have suffered, but I had to listen
to the harmonica.
Speaker 5: No no, I usually start out Saints, Who are they,
what do they do? And why do we like them?
Speaker 1: Excellent? Excellent. So besides saying that praise on your commentary,
the second thing I wanted.
Speaker 3: To say is more.
Speaker 1: And the song I chose to torture Gale for today's
theme is called I Want My Mama, and it's by
Salty Holmes. Born Floyd Holmes on March sixth, nineteen ten
in Kentucky. He played jug and guitar, but was famous
for his harmonica playing. He specialized in the style called
talking harp, in which the harmonica sounds like a human voice.
Oh joy, I'm twirling my imaginary mustache right now. Holmes
formed the group the Kentucky Ramblers in nineteen thirty, but
they changed their name to the Prairie Ramblers three years
later and began broadcasting on WLSAM in Chicago. I Want
My Mama was recorded during the nineteen forties, but I
could not find an exact date. Despite searching multiple sites.
The recording we Will Hear was included on the two
thousand and five compilation album Harmonica Masters, which I'll be
gifting to Gail next Christmas.
Speaker 5: She needs another coaster, Don't waste the money.
Speaker 1: Out of all harmonica songs, I chose this one especially
for Gail because not only does it feature the dreaded harmonica,
but Holmes makes it sound like a child crying.
Speaker 5: I want my.
Speaker 1: Let the torture begin.
Speaker 5: Harmonica and crying children Ga Gail lame from.
Speaker 10: No No no no.
Speaker 8: M m m m m la La from No no
no no no no no no no from.
Speaker 2: A La La La.
Speaker 12: La la la la la la la la la la
la la la l l l l l l l
l l l la.
Speaker 10: L l l l l l l l l l
l l.
Speaker 13: L l l l l l la la la.
Speaker 8: La la la la la la la.
Speaker 11: La la la la.
Speaker 8: La La Lo Lo Lo.
Speaker 1: Okay, before I proceed, Gail, what say you?
Speaker 5: That was interesting?
Speaker 1: I cringe.
Speaker 5: I like the old timy sounds.
Speaker 14: I do too.
Speaker 5: I swear they don't have talent like that nowadays that
could do the same thing. It was fascinating to me
to figure out or try to figure out how the
performer was making those sounds the quick inhale exhale things.
I could maybe do that twice and then I would
need my asthma inhaler. So I'm surprised. You know, maybe
he had an oxygen tank waiting for when he was done.
I don't know.
Speaker 1: My tombstone would actually say died by playing harmonica too fast.
Speaker 13: Yeah.
Speaker 14: I think it's like a ditchery too, isn't it Like
you breathe in and out at the same time.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you get you get different sounds.
Speaker 13: Breath.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's that's what you do when your coffee is
too high, pretty much.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean the harmonica is actually it's not an
at least to me, not an easy instrument to play.
Speaker 5: It's easy to start, it's very difficult, not if you
want to get specific sounds out of it, and you.
Speaker 15: Have to like.
Speaker 2: Like block certain you know, it's like a little series
of holes. Everybody knows what they look like, believe it
or not.
Speaker 5: I had one as a child.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you had idea too.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: You have to block the ones you don't want to
blow through most of them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, most of them. Exhale when you inhale. It's a
half step off. Yeah, that's it's in out and out now.
But you have to like you're looking for you.
Speaker 2: Got to get to the right one and block out
the other ones with your tongue. And I ended up
having like you know, you know, blostlelia, a petite mall seizure,
you know, like, yeah, I had epilepsy. So yeah, I
I you know, I've tried. I said, Nope, I'm not.
That's one instrument I can check off the list that Nope,
I am not.
Speaker 3: I did figure out how to bend a note, you know. Wow,
I figured out how to do that. Okay, okay, now
to do it on the right pitch at the right time.
Speaker 2: You no. Oh. Then then there's the chromatic ones that
have another little thing on the side that changes everything again.
So it's like it's not yeah.
Speaker 3: Most of the time. You'll see something we haven't talked
about is most of them are keyed, so you're, you know,
whatever key the song is in. Usually take a harmonica
that's a fourth hire, which is a whole music theory thing,
but it's for that key for that song, which is
why you know, like John Popper from Blues Traveler as a.
Speaker 5: Whole, like ten different harmonica usually.
Speaker 3: Twelve yeah, depending on what you would play, Yeah, drive
me crazy, yeah, depending and then one yeah.
Speaker 1: One one giant harmonica and just put all the crambones
at different stations along the giant harmonica, and we all
play our own were.
Speaker 14: Blow breath there into each other's spells.
Speaker 5: No, not a good idea.
Speaker 3: You know what we'll call the song COVID two.
Speaker 5: Yes, okay.
Speaker 1: So the Prairie Ramblers produced over one hundred recordings between
nineteen thirty three and nineteen forty. They continued performing until
nineteen fifty two, playing country hillbilly, which you probably figured
out when I mentioned that Holmes played the jug and
pop music while performing with the Prairie Ramblers. Homes before
did Geene Autry, who invited him to go to Hollywood
and star in westerns, which he did, and we talked
about Cowboy by the Fire before, So there you go.
In one of his films called Arizona Days, he played
two harmonicas at once, using both his mouth and nose.
Speaker 5: It could be worse. It could be worse.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, it could have been mouthed something else. Oh no,
the vertical harmonica.
Speaker 1: Man, oh my.
Speaker 4: God nasty guys.
Speaker 1: So the Prairie Ramblers also backed Autrey in the nineteen
thirties on some of his recordings. Now that's all I
have about Salty Homes. But I did want to mention
that I was driving home, not Holmes home, the other
night and I had serious ExM on in the car
and I heard this song that was all harmonica, and
the they announced that the artist was called Little Walter
and he was the only artist inducted into the Rock
and Roll Hall of Fame specifically as a harmonica player.
So of course, by the time I got home, I
forgot his name.
Speaker 6: So I had a Google only artists inducted into the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a harmonica So
then this came up with a little bio and I
found out he was actually born May first, nineteen thirty
and he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall
of Fame in two thousand and.
Speaker 5: Eight, and that that was irrelevant.
Speaker 2: That answered they only have room for one harmonica player,
and he took it. That's why Jay Giles never got in.
Speaker 1: That's the reason be it.
Speaker 3: They did take up a lot of space.
Speaker 2: So yeah, well, you know, you have to have like
twelve or you know whatever.
Speaker 5: I want the rock and Roll Hall of Fame to
be full of harmonica players for God's sake. Well, you
need to vote.
Speaker 1: Remember when the rock and Roll Hall of Fame was
good and there were no harmonica players.
Speaker 2: Remember when it was when it was rock and roll?
But yeah, exactly, And just a side note here too. Now,
maybe I met misread this, But did MTV like go
off the air entirely?
Speaker 3: And I heard, yeah, the music channel, not the main MTV. Okay,
I believe it was called v H one Classics for
a while and then it became m t V two
or something.
Speaker 5: I know they still had anyone with Well that's the problem.
Speaker 3: That's why it went off the airs, because nobody did.
Speaker 2: So.
Speaker 3: The one channel they had that still played music videos,
they shut that one down.
Speaker 2: And at least they played the Buggles as they.
Speaker 1: Signed Circle at least yeah.
Speaker 2: Okay, Well that that, Yeah, that clears that up. Because
I didn't quite I have to.
Speaker 3: Admit I didn't watch it either.
Speaker 1: Now I feel guilty, but I have such good memories.
Speaker 14: Tommy had it, my husband had it, and I didn't
have it yet, and I would go to his apartment
when we first met, and like, I would just sit
there glued to the Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, high school boyfriend, same thing, he had it, and
my father would never let us get cable, so I
would go to my boyfriend's house and watch it and yeah,
same thing, be glued to the TV.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, totally totally.
Speaker 5: So that was that was a gone memory now so
that I've got. So that's all I got, Mercedes, what
song do you have? Thank you? Barbara, welcome. Okay.
Speaker 1: Oh, so, as a feminist, I need to preface my
song with some thoughts.
Speaker 5: The song is good.
Speaker 14: Girls don't by the neck, and while I love the song,
it does make me super uncomfortable, and it's not because
of the harmonica. You can tell me how you feel
about that later, Gail. The song was released in nineteen
seventy nine by Doug Fieger as a follow up to
the band's hit single My Sharona, which was about his
girlfriend Sharona Alperin, who was seventeen while he was twenty five.
Obviously obviously not the largest age gap we know about
in the rock and roll world, but lyrics in My
Sharona like such a dirty mind. I always get it
up for the touch of the younger kind might.
Speaker 1: Be an issue if it was released today.
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 14: And teen Sharona herself appears on the singles picture sleeve
looking like the winner of a quote unquote wet t
shirt contest. According to Rock and Roll Globe dot Com,
this would have been a good addition to our song
our show on songs that could not have been released today,
which we did quite a long time.
Speaker 3: That was a while ago.
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 14: Robert Christau chris Gow, a critic for The Village Voice,
wrote in his review of the record, if they felt
this way about girls when they were unknowns, I shuddered
to think how they're reacting to groupies.
Speaker 13: Yikes.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 14: A quote from Rock and Roll Globe dot Com says,
if you Google get the nec and misogyny, you will
not be lacking in search results. And by the way,
that's exactly what I had done. It's been observed many
times over the years from nineteen seventy nine to the
present that fig Figer, I keep wanting to put an
l in there, doesn't exactly come across as a champion
of women in some of these songs that in itself
would unfortunately not be newsworthy for a rock record in
the seventies, but even for the time, these tunes took
sexism to another level. The article goes on to say,
without getting into quotations, that it simply be said that
at least half the album songs feature either women hating, horny, creepiness, emotional, stunted,
pre prurious, pre pruians, purians, or some combination of all
the above. You can just guess what that word was.
Some other critics said this. Critic Grile Marcus described the
song as a smutty like Beatles imitation. Author John Borak
described the song as a mean pop tune, noting two
that in the song lead singer and songwriter figure comes
off like a leering, sexist twit with hormones arraging. So
something I learned while researching this is that there are
two versions of this song, a clean and an explicit version.
My roommate and I used to sing this at all
the time in college at the top of our lungs,
and when I was getting ready for the show, I
kept thinking, wheet what. I didn't have any memory of
it being that suggestive and Valerie, I hope you're listening tonight.
I actually don't know which one we're hearing today, so
we're just gonna have to pray and see what happened.
Speaker 13: Cringe, the girls do, the girls do?
Speaker 15: Girls One start to say the girl's dolls, the girl's doves, the.
Speaker 12: Girl's dog.
Speaker 15: Sad, that's one of the stops to taste girl's dove,
the girls dogs, the girls doll, girl's dove, the girls dogs.
Speaker 11: Yeah, that was the clean version.
Speaker 14: I'm serious. I had never heard the explicit version, and
I was listening to it. I guess it was today
or maybe yesterday, and I was like, wow, oh my god.
And then when I went back to the clean version,
I was like, Okay, this is how I remember.
Speaker 2: I think that, Yeah, this is the only one that
I remember hearing. I mean, yeah, well it's it's like,
it's it's naughty, it's unclean. I won't say it's obscene.
Speaker 5: Correct, it's yeah.
Speaker 14: But go to YouTube and check out the explicit version,
which is not it's not disgusting.
Speaker 3: In twenty twenty six, explicit it's well, let let's let's
let's go back.
Speaker 2: You know, in the in the eight seventies there it
was not exactly the most politically correct time. I mean,
listen to some girls by the Rolling Stones and go
no further.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: So, now was it right or wrong? I'll let you decide,
But it was not. How should I say? It wasn't
out of character for the time, And I'm not saying
it was right. And I always thought that song. In fact,
let me say, I like that song much better than
my Sharona a million miles. But aside from that, if
you take it at face value, yeah, it's you know,
pretty male Chauvens pig, you know. But if you take
it from the other perspective, as like a parody or statire,
that they're trying to sound like that but making fun
of that sort of mentality.
Speaker 14: But they're not.
Speaker 2: Okay, I'm not excuse. I'm not apologizing for them. I'm
just saying that that could also be that the the
irony and the humor that and that was also prevalent
back in that that time too, that it was not.
They weren't really saying it was a good thing. They
were making fun of it by you know, making it
sound like they liked it, but they're saying, see how
stupid it sounds. If that makes any sense, I don't know.
Speaker 3: I one of those It's open to interpretation, which I
think makes for a good song.
Speaker 2: He never returned my calls to find you know, I asked,
never got back to me.
Speaker 14: Well do yourself have a favor and do check out
the explicit version.
Speaker 5: That we're all going to be googling it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, now now that I'm.
Speaker 3: Going to have this huge spike, they're like, what is
going on here? Yeah?
Speaker 14: So meanwhile I'm trying to google the explicit version lyrics
and they're like blocking me.
Speaker 5: So I don't know, maybe they're not old enough.
Speaker 2: So uh.
Speaker 14: So Dutge Viger Doug Viger wrote this song with Johnny
Cash's voice in mind. All right, I know, no, Like,
how does that make sense?
Speaker 5: No? Yeah?
Speaker 14: So incidentally, the b side of Good Girls Don't was
a song titled Frustrated and was again about Sharona albren.
It describes how he had a crush on her, but
she was keeping him at arm's length, although they did
go on to have a relationship later, so it seems
like he really had it bad for her. I mean
three songs that and who knows how many more, but
at least three songs that he wrote about her. The
Necker an American power pop band formed in La in
nineteen seventy eight and members were Doug Fieger, Burton, a
Avier Prescott Niles, and Bruce gary My. Sharona reached number
one in several countries as it as as did its
album Get the Neck. Their next two albums were less successful,
and they broke up in nineteen eighty two. They did
reunite in nineteen eighty six, nineteen eighty, nineteen eighty six,
nineteen ninety four, and nineteen ninety six. They permanently disbanded
in twenty ten after the passing of Doug Figer. So
why wasn't the band more popular? There was definitely a
few problems. Somebody on Reddit posted a pretty good explanation. One,
they were hyped by Capitol Records as the next Beatles. No, No,
Too High, That's the Kiss of Death exactly, Like, who
thought that was a good idea their songs? Number two,
their songs were sleazy sex songs, and number three they
were misogynous. I'm not sure that the second two thoughts
were valid, considering it was the seventies and all the
bands had sleazy sex songs and were misogynous.
Speaker 2: YEP, that's kind of what I was saying. Yeah, not
condoning it, just that's just the way it was.
Speaker 14: A demo was recorded at one of the reunions and
released in twenty.
Speaker 5: Twelve, which was their last album.
Speaker 14: The reviews that I read were good, and maybe they
grew up and left their twelve year old boy selves behind.
I don't know, that's all I got. I do like
the harmonica in there, by the.
Speaker 5: Way, there's not much so really, I like the rest
of the instruments, so it was not traumatizing for me,
So thank you for that.
Speaker 14: You're very welcome. It was fun for me too. And
Doug Figer did play the harmonica on that, by the way. Yeah,
it was really shocking to me. I had no idea
there was two versions of that.
Speaker 5: Wow, yeah, neither did I. Well, thank you, Mercedes. We're
almost to the end. We just have one more little
break and then we'll be back with the last song.
Speaker 4: Hudson Riverradio dot com.
Speaker 5: Hudson Riverradio dot com, and we're back. We're almost at
the end of the torture session where the rock and
roll history show Crombones are torturing me with harmonica songs,
except I know the one that we're up to that
is Brian's choice, and I actually really really love this song.
Speaker 3: So I thought you would. I kind of had a
feeling you would, so I picked one that has one
of my trademark bummers at the end. So okay, yeah,
we can bring everybody down and exit on a low No.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I like the song anyway, So all right, take
it away, Brian, No thanks.
Speaker 3: Do you mind if I nerd out just a little
bit before we hop into the song?
Speaker 5: Go for it.
Speaker 3: So we've all seen harmonica players on stage, I think,
whether you love them or not, the common technique you'll
see them use two hands and cup the harmonica and
they're holding a microphone in between their two hands, and
they're actually using their hands, and the microphone is part
of the instrument, like an extension to the harmonica to
get different sounds and all that.
Speaker 5: Well, that makes sense.
Speaker 3: The nerd in me is like, well, years ago, it's like,
all right, how do they do that? What are they using? Well,
the microphone that most of the time you'll see them
using got nicknamed the bullet because of the shape. It's
kind of curved like a cone shape, like a rounded curve,
you know, like the nose of a bullet. That microphone
was first made in nineteen forty nine. It was by
the Shore Company s h U r E. They're still around.
They're still making most of the microphones that you see
when people do podcasts and all that kind of stuff.
It was the Model five twenty. It was originally designed
for radio use like ham radio, police radios, the military
public address systems. It was built specifically to be very durable.
You could bash it around, you could expose it to
the elements, you could leave it outside, all that kind
of stuff, and it just could take that kind of abuse.
And it was geared towards the human voice, the frequency
range of the human voice, and musicians just wound up
loving it. They would use it on drums, they would
specifically use it on harmonicas because it fit into your
hands so well, you know that that cup kind of shape.
They still make it, they still make it in green.
It's now the Shore five twenty DX. The newer models
they make one that instead of a stand hook up,
it's got a volume knob on it, so you can
actually adjust the sound while you're playing it. All that
kind of stuff. So if you are a nerd like me,
go ahead and look up the Shore X. But the
other one that harmonica players would use when they couldn't
afford or get their hands on a shore five point twenty.
They would take the microphone out of an old telephone
headset and use the mouthpiece microphone because that was a
cheap carbon microphone that had a very gritty sound. Again,
it was geared towards your voice and low volume, so
it was easy to distort. It was gritty again, it
was very durable. It was cheap, especially if you walk
by a payphone with a pair of plyers and help
yourself to one and kept walking.
Speaker 14: Su I have seen so many of them back in
the day, like open, it.
Speaker 3: Would not surprise me. Wow, yeah, yeah, So the old
telephone headset. You'll actually see some old bluesper players actually
holding that headset upside down with the mouthpiece cupping it
like they would the bullet microphone with the earpiece just
hanging down. So keep your eyes open. That kind of thing.
You'll see that in pictures every once in a while.
But again it was about that gritty kind of distorted,
very distinctive sound and using your hands to shape the sound.
You could shape you know, proximity effect the bass, the
trouble get that really high whiny pitch that Gail absolutely loves.
There you go. You know what, when in need, you
make deal with what you can get your hands on,
and it worked. So for my pick for a song tonight,
we are going to take a trip down Under and
I cannot do Australian accents, so I expect the emails
to come. We start off with three brothers and some
friends who formed a band. Andrew Farris played keyboards, John
Farris played drums, Tim Farriss played lead guitar, their friend
Gary Beers played bass, Kirk Pengilly played rhythm guitar and saxophone,
and their friend Michael Hutchins was on lead vocals. And
the band if Anybody.
Speaker 5: Wants to Guess was named in excellent excess.
Speaker 3: It was called the Farris Brothers because they was three
Faris brothers.
Speaker 5: I'm still mad at Michael Hutchins, for all.
Speaker 1: He had the sexiest voice.
Speaker 5: Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, don't worry, we'll bring everybody down. We'll make
everybody said later, no.
Speaker 4: Where he's there.
Speaker 3: So they had their high school band and a couple
of them were a little older than high school, and
the paris Is wound up moving to Perth in Western Australia.
The band followed. They played out there and then they
wound up moving back to Sydney and recording some demo
tapes and played out wherever they could. They were outside
a pub called the Royal Antler when they were approached
by a guy named Gary Morris, who happened to be
the manager of another Australian band called Midnight Oil. You
may have heard of them, Yeah, yep, so I talked
about them. It's got to be years ago at this point,
it's been ages. So the Faris Brothers began opening for them,
as well as other groups around Sydney. It was Midnight
Oil who came up with the much improved name for
the band, In Excess spelled iXS for those who may
not know. The idea came from a mashup of the
British band XTC and the Australian jam band called IXL
and I say okay.
Speaker 5: Mus exactly EI EIO.
Speaker 3: Anymore, that's it okay. Their first performance as in Excess
was in September of nineteen seventy nine. They toured the
Australian pub circuit and they wound up making a good move.
They hired a really good manager who actually got them
a five record deal right off the bat with an
Australian label, Deluxe Records. A five record deal you would
never get nowadays, not going to happen. The company gave
them a budget of ten thousand dollar redues for their
first album, and so to stay under budget, they would
perform a scheduled gig at night and then go to
the studio where they booked overnight time, which was cheaper
than booking during the day, so they did that musician's time,
the musicians hours, play at night, work all night, and
then go sleep During the day. They worked on a
bunch of material which was mostly released only in Australia,
just way too much to cover here. They worked hard,
so I'll give them credit for that. But in Access
made their way to the United States in March of
nineteen eighty three. They played their first performance in the
US in San Diego to an audience of twenty four people,
not twenty four thousand, not twenty four hundred.
Speaker 5: It's like a classroom, twenty.
Speaker 3: Four people, yup, yup. But they brought with them a
solid reputation and a good performance, which got them gigs
opening for the Kinks. They opened for The Stray Cats,
for Hall and Oates for Adam and the An for
Men at Work. So they brought their reputation with them
and it served them well. By the end of nineteen
eighty three, they were headlining their own shows in New
York City. Their big breakthrough single was what You Need
in nineteen eighty five. I remember that one quite well.
The nineteen eighty seven album Kick is by far their bestseller.
That has a number of hits on it as well.
And in nineteen ninety they had another successful album titled X.
The album has the track that We're going to torture
Gale with today. It's called Suicide Blonde. Hutchins and Andrew
Farriss wrote the song, and it was Hutchinson's then girlfriend
Kylie Minogue who did the locomotion right.
Speaker 8: She did.
Speaker 3: Mean, She's got a lot of her own stuff, but
she made it big in the US with I think
it was the locomotion, wasn't it like in the late eighties.
I don't remember, but they were going to a debut
of a movie that Kylie was in and for the
event she wore a wig and she called the suicide Blonde,
which is apparently a joke about dyeing your own hair,
like dying suicide. I guess you die the wig Blonde.
So there is a blues harp intro in the song
and parts of it that were played by Charlie Musselwhite,
who is a very known Chicago blues player, and he
was also the inspiration for Elwood Blues played by dan
Aykroyd in the Blues Brothers movie and that whole act,
so that was kind of based on him. He happened
to be on tour in Sydney and the band asked
him to come to their recording session and he did
so to set you up with that trademark downer, which
you guys also mentioned. Suicide Blonde was the last song
that Michael Hutchins performed live in concert. That was on
September twenty seventh, nineteen eighty seven, in Pittsburgh. So let's
partially torture Gale even though she likes the song.
Speaker 5: I love this song. So the joke's on you, guys.
Speaker 3: Well there we go. So suicide I've blong by an excess.
Speaker 2: S S S.
Speaker 3: S.
Speaker 15: This is a lot of hair like she lashes.
Speaker 2: Finish far again.
Speaker 16: The last of the manors, so love the shows so wrong,
you want to rencos so you too, shirts, Sun.
Speaker 17: Strip to the close, stand all what the world? And
you gets me her shirts, Squeeze my sad.
Speaker 12: Moment, glor to you, Glory to you.
Speaker 16: Guys, all other shirt put into your hair, sham your.
Speaker 17: Front on me to read that right across them, but
go to see the clo said shot tell your world.
You wanta makers, the Simon, love the sessions, the Salama, you.
Speaker 16: Want to makea s the Salamon, love the pencils.
Speaker 12: The sum you want to macas the sun, you want
to make lets everything you want.
Speaker 16: Love all.
Speaker 3: That's a catchy one. And yeah, the harmonica is kind
of buried in there so.
Speaker 5: I can see good thank you for the palette cleanser
at the end of the show.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so they have a pretty long history. You know.
They crossed paths with Nile Rogers, who's known for his
chunk of chunk and guitar sounds, so they picked up
on that and they did stuff together. So there's a
lot more to the story, but we just don't have
time for everything. But I thought that was a cool song.
I had trouble narrowing it down how much I wanted
to torture you tonight, so I'll save the other ones
for another time.
Speaker 5: I love that song, I just love it all right, So.
Speaker 3: Here's the downer. In August of nineteen ninety two, Michael
Hutchins and his then girlfriend who was not Kylie, We're
riding bikes in Copenhagen in Denmark, and a taxi was
trying to get around them on a narrow street because
lots of streets in Europe are super narrow, and apparently
Hutchins didn't know that the taxi was behind him, and
the driver got out and assaulted him to the point
where Hutchins wound up falling backwards and hitting his head
on the pavement. He got a skull fracture from that
and some brain damage, and like many stupid rock stars,
he refused medical care for several days. He wouldn't go
to the hospital for a couple of days. By the
time he did, he had lost his sense of smell,
He lost most of the sense of taste, and that's
when he really started to have trouble with depression and aggression.
He had some personality changes and it got to the
point where he was fighting with people. He fought with
every single member of the band, guys who had been
his best friends for twenty something years at this point,
and he wound up like getting into physical altercations with
him from changes which were likely attributed to that head
injury that he had. But they kept working up until
nineteen ninety three when they decided to take some well
earned time off. Michael Hutchins would continue to work as
an actor and a model, but he was still battling
depression and he had issues with drugs and alcohol. He
wound up having a daughter with Bob Geldoff's estranged wife,
Paulie Yates in nineteen ninety six, and unfortunately, Hutchins was
found dead on November twenty second, nineteen ninety seven, in
his Rich Carlton Hotel room in Sydney. He was only
thirty seven and Excess was back on the road to
support an album that was going to be coming out soon.
The coroner ruled his death a suicide by hanging, but
there was and still is, some speculations as to whether
his death was accidental, whether he was partaking in other
activities that one may do. We can put that to
bed now. Pauli Yates, the estrange Missus Geldoff was supposed
to bring their daughter, along with the three daughters she
had with Bob to Australia to visit Hutchins, but Bob
Geldoff had taken legal action to prevent that from happening,
from preventing the girls from leaving the UK. Hutchins was
just absolutely heartbroken when he got that phone call telling
him the news at about five am in the morning
because of the time difference, and he was furious and
he was absolutely heartbroken. He wound up calling Bob Geldoff
himself and just had a loud argument, screaming, crying, all
that kind of stuff on the phone, so loud that
the neighbors in the hotel could hear what was going
on through the walls. Hutchins then called an ex girlfriend distraught,
asked her to come over, a different ext girlfriend, not Kylie,
not the one from the bike riding, and she did.
She got there at about ten thirty in the morning,
but he didn't answer the door, so she assumed he
had finally fallen asleep. She left a note for him
and then left. Shortly before noon. It was housekeeping that
went into his room to clean up and do the
room and the housekeeper is the one who found him dead.
He had tied a belt around his neck and then
he tied the other end of the belt to the
door closer, the automatic door closer at the top of
the door, and he was on his knees facing the door.
So given all the circumstances of everything going on, it
was not the happy time that he was trying to have.
It was suicide. So we can kind of put that
to bed. I say it as it is. The now
former Missus Geldoff herself died of a heroin overdose in
two thousand and To his credit, Bob Geldoff took in
the now four year old daughter that Hutchinson Yates had
had together, and he would later adopt her so she
could continue living with the three half sisters that she
grew up living with, So I give him credit for that.
The band continued to work without Michael. They worked with
a series of different singers. They even had a TV
show for a period of time where they were auditioning
singers to try to make a reality show to find
a permanent replacement front man. As of now, they have
nothing on their calendar as a band, but each member
is keeping busy they each have their own projects. Gary Beers,
the bass player, actually makes guitars and basses on his own.
He does electronics and all that kind of stuff. And
most of them are doing independent music projects, so they're
not bored, but they don't seem to be on the
calendar for going out as in excess anytime soon. So
we got what we got, and there you go. There's
the downer And now I give it back to.
Speaker 5: Gail as I said, Brian, thank you for the Palette
Cleanser song, because I really you really liked that song, Mercedes,
didn't you have something you wanted to note?
Speaker 1: Yes, I have a little addition to my song.
Speaker 14: I finally did get find the lyrics and it was,
in fact the explicit version that.
Speaker 5: We heard, so very explicit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it wasn't that bad.
Speaker 14: It wasn't that bad. But the clean version the radio
editors is the one that my roommate and I used
to sing at the top of our lung. So we
were not sitting. We were not sitting Writian slip.
Speaker 5: We were not.
Speaker 1: Saying some of the lyrics that were in what we
just hurt.
Speaker 14: So I apologize for that, but I'm glad I could
figure that out and clear it up for everybody.
Speaker 5: Okay, Well, everybody's songs were interesting. I seem to have
survived in about the same mental sanity I was when
I started, which isn't saying much.
Speaker 2: We should have tried harder. What you said, We're.
Speaker 3: Gonna have to do this again next week?
Speaker 5: Yeah, definitely, no, no, no, no, once once is enough.
Speaker 3: I think we should each get a harmonica and all
pick a different song, but we should all play our
song at the same time.
Speaker 5: Great love, but you'd all be in a different key
exactly exactly.
Speaker 3: That doesn't push you over the edge. And nothing.
Speaker 2: Well, we could join the Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra, no charter members.
Speaker 5: It's so funny because Neil's wife, who is also a
friend of mine, the look she would when a few
of us would go out sometimes, and this one lead
vocalist had this habit of going off key once in
a while, and it was fairly predictable as to when
he would go off key, and when that time was approaching.
Neil's lovely life would be watching my face because she
would first into laughter when she saw the look on
my face when this guy would hit a wrong note.
Speaker 2: This is the caliber of people I used to play with.
By the way, this is why I wore ear plug.
Speaker 14: We're talking about a band that you might have been in, yeah.
Speaker 18: Possibly allegedly, yes, yes, And it was just so great
that I was so amusing for Dawn.
Speaker 5: I good memories, guys, and.
Speaker 2: All the dogs in the neighborhood would start howling.
Speaker 3: That's yeah, that's how you know you made it.
Speaker 5: Or something. Well, I will give it back to you, Brian,
to take us out.
Speaker 3: All right, Well, good job, thank you for It's nice
to sit back and watch every once in a while.
I do appreciate it. And those were good selections. They
were really interesting across the board. And there's so much
more you can do on the topic and the blues
and all that. It's so many rabbit holes we can
go down, and we will at some point there and
we'll find new ways to torture Gale. A lot of.
Speaker 5: You guys need you guys need better hobbies.
Speaker 3: I think we can enjoy this for a little while.
All right, Thank you cram Bones, and thank you all
for joining us for the Rock and Roll History Show.
Don't forget to check out all the other shows we
do here at Hudson River Radio because there is something
for everybody. We'll be back next week with another brand
new episode. Until then, blow until your heart's content and
peace out everybody, rock.
Speaker 12: Cop Bottom and Rum.
Speaker 5: Okay, Bye bye. Pudson River Radio dot Com a Subsidiaria
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