May 22 – Taupin’s Top Pick

Behind every successful man stands…a talented man in the shadows? That’s certainly true of Elton John, and we’re not even making any risque double-entendres. No indeed, as talented and wildly successful as the “Rocket Man” has been, he owes a great deal of that to his long-time writing partner, Bernie Taupin. And we’re sending out birthday wishes to Taupin, who turns 74 today.

You may know a fair bit about the backstory of the pair already – how they met through an ad, with Elton being a talented pianist who could seemingly write memorable melodies at the drop of a hat, but struggled to put words to them. Taupin meanwhile was talented with words. The partnership began by Elton’s first album, Empty Sky, in 1969 and continued through his 2016 album Wonderful Crazy Night, albeit it with a break or two in the many years between. Bernie has put the words to most of Elton’s biggest and best hits, including “Rocket Man”, “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”, “Bennie and the Jets”, “Philadelphia Freedom” (one of only a few where Elton gave him a title and starting point for it) and “I Guess That’s Why They Call it the Blues”… to name just a few. So after writing some 486 songs and being awarded the Gershwin Award for Popular Song by the U.S. Congress, one might wonder what he considers his best, or his favorite song personally.

Well, turns out his pick is the same as millions of other people it might seem. “You probably never want to hear it again,” he told an interviewer when asked, “because you’ve heard it so much, but ‘Candle in the Wind’. I think it is the closest we’ve come to the perfect song.” He added it was “the perfect marriage of lyrics and melody.”

The song first appeared on Elton’s 1973 opus Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and is ostensibly about Marilyn Monroe and her tragic life. It mentions her by name (“Norma Jeane” was her real name, Norma Jeane Mortenson) and outline how the press , even then, were always looking for a scandal – “even when you died, the press still hounded you, all the papers had to say was that Marilyn was found in the nude.” However, as Taupin has pointed out frequently, the meaning to him was much broader.

“I think the biggest misconception about (it) is that I was a rabid Marilyn Monroe fanatic which really couldn’t be further from the truth,” he told AXS TV. “It’s not that I don’t have respect for her, it’s just that the song could just as easily have been about James Dean or Jim Morrison or Kurt Cobain…basically anybody, any writer, actor, actress or musician who died young and sort of became the iconic picture of Dorian Gray – a beauty frozen in time.” He added “it’s freaky how people really believe these people re somehow different from us!”

Elton for his part, loved the lyrics. He said he “understood the stress caused by constant media attention” and felt Monroe “must have been in terrible (emotional) pain”.

Another person who related to it and apparently loved the song was Elton’s friend Princess Diana. She told the singer she identified with the situation described, especially the bit about the press hounding you. As we know, Diana died young and tragically and Bernie quickly wrote new lyrics to it for Elton to sing at her funeral.

Altogether, “Candle in the Wind” has been a hit three times and is among the biggest-selling singles ever.

It was released in many areas in 1974 as a single from Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. That original version reached #11 in Britain (where it went gold at the time), #8 in Ireland and #5 in New Zealand. It wasn’t put out as a single in North America but still garnered a fair bit of radio attention.

Fast forward to 1987, and a live version was released as a single. It was from Live In Australia, recorded at his final concert of 1986, just before he needed throat surgery. His voice was huskier and more emphatic, but he had the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra playing behind him as well. It was a worldwide hit, making the top 5 in the UK, Canada and Ireland; #6 in the U.S. It helped that album become his biggest-selling live one.

Then, 1997, only days after Lady Di died, he performed the new version (substituting “England’s Rose” for “Norma Jeane”) and it was put out as a charity-fundraising single almost immediately. The public’s love of Diana coupled with their love of the song made it the biggest hit, statistically, of the decade… maybe ever! The song reached #1 in most countries, spending 14 weeks on top in the States for example. In Canada, it reached 19X platinum status. When all was said and done, it sold some 35 million copies – second, Guinness estimate, only to Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.” But even that is a guess; exact shipments or sales of Bing’s big one weren’t tracked. We know the Elton single is the biggest seller in terms of physical copies documented sold. The closest anyone’s come in the “rock era” was Bill Haley’s “Rock around the clock” at 25 million or so.

One more fan of the song? One might guess Debbie Harry. Her Blondie song “Die Young, Stay Pretty” seems to borrow the theme fairly closely. She said she noticed “the only way to be eternally oung was to die young and stay in people’s minds” frozen in time.

Taupin now lives in California and expresses himself more through visual, mixed media art than with songs. Perhaps once you wrote the words to one of the two biggest selling songs of all-time, there’s a feeling that there’s nowhere to go but down in the field!

 

March 21 – Angelina’s Uncle The Original ‘Wild Thing’?

We wish Chip Taylor a happy birthday today…and we might have to get in line behind Angelina Jolie to do so! The songwriter and country musician is 84 today and could be known to his family, including niece Angelina and brother Jon, as James Voight. He changed his name along the way on the recommendation of a record company which figured “Voight” might be too hard for DJs to pronounce right. They might not have had to figure it out much; although prolific as a performer, he’s never quite become a radio fixture. However, his work has, by way to two hits he wrote – a rock standard and a country-ish song that was a hit twice over.

Although his dad was a pro golfer and “Chip” had some interest in being the same, it wasn’t his real talent it would seem. So music entered his life early, and stuck with him. He says “I always liked music in the house…dad played Bing Crosby music, he loved Al Jolson, the Inkspots, things like that.” The lad was OK with that but really liked country. His parents would let him stay up late to listen to radio, he told British publication Spectropop, but living just outside of New York City, “the local stations, I didn’t like. So, once in awhile, late at night, I could get stations I did like, like Wheeling, West Virginia.”

He started a country band in high school, and was signed to his first record deal while still in his teens, then using the name Wes Voight. In 1959, his single “I’m Ready to Go Steady” was among the first stereo recordings released, and he’d have minor brushes with near-success at the start of the ’60s. However, it seemed songwriting was his forte, and he became successful at that in the early-’60s, first being a freelance writer then being hired by CBS-owned April Blackwood Music. He wasn’t really a Brill Building writer – “all those writers were more sophisticated than me” – but knew many of them and enjoyed the time. “It was all good times. We were all friends,” he said adding that “I had a life I really loved.” He married at 23 or 24 and was obsessed with betting on horse races and writing music. “I’d take the train in the morning with the Racing Form, pick my two bets at around 10 o’clock in the morning and then it would be music for the rest of the day.”

If he wasn’t as sophisticated or prolific as some of his contemporaries, he had a distinctive feature that got him noticed – “it’s that sort of hybrid of Southern Blues and country music that makes me different than most of the writers in New York”. He figured his songs sounded like they came out of Memphis more than the Big Apple.

In the decade he wrote songs that would go on to be recorded by Willie Nelson (“He sits at your Table”), the Hollies (“The Baby”) and Janis Joplin (“Try Just A Little Bit Harder”) but even that might not have made him memorable to this day were it not for two other songs – “Wild Thing” and “Angel of the Morning.” The latter was written with Connie Francis in mind, but she turned it down as being too risque, but it was soon found by Merrillee Rush and became a smash hit in 1968 – and again in 1981, when Juice Newton did one of over 70 covers of it in all. Both singles ended up in the top 10 at home and #1 in Canada, a rare feat indeed.

“Wild Thing” is less typical of Chip’s sound, but he says he “composed it very quickly, within a couple of minutes (I) had the chorus… a ‘sexual kind of feeling’ song emerged.” And was soon found by British garage rock band The Troggs who had their biggest hit with it, making #1 on both U.S. and UK charts and becoming something of a rock standard for bar bands ever since. Rolling Stone list it as the 257^th greatest song of all-time.

With that success, it must soften the blow of having his own recordings not get much notice, though he did have a 1975 country hit of his own with “Early Sunday Morning.” Taylor’s kept busy since, recording regularly, this century often Americana music with Carrie Rodriguez and he’s been running his own record label, Train Wreck. Which certainly is not a description of his career!

February 11 – Gerry Was Carole’s King Of Words

Yesterday we looked at Carole, half the duo. Today, we remember the male half of a pair who, in the words of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, “owned the franchise to the soundtrack of early-Sixties lives.” Gerry Goffin was born on this day in 1939. The female half of that pair would be Carole King, who for years was Gerry’s partner, both romantically and in writing.

Both of them grew up in New York City, and they met at college while Gerry was studying chemistry. They both aspired to be musicians, but as Gerry would say years later, “I never knew what I wanted to do…neither did Carole, really. She never assumed she would make it. That’s the furthest thing from your mind when you’re a wannabe.” However, they fell in love, married in 1959 and soon began writing songs together. King was a great composer with a knack for catchy melodies; he was a man of words who wrote lyrics but struggled with music. It was a match made in heaven seemingly. Soon they got a job being staff writers at a company called Aldon Music. Before long, they’d written a #1 hit for the Shirelles, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?”, which was followed in short order by another, Bobby Vee’s “Take Good Care of My Baby.” Once they had momentum, the hits kept rolling out. Within a few years they’d written songs recorded by The Drifters, Herman’s Hermits, The Chiffons and others. Among the classic tunes from that era Goffin and King wrote were “The Locomotion” ( a #1 hit for two different artists- Little Eva in the ’60s and Grand Funk in the ’70s), “Go Away Little Girl” (a hit for both Steve Lawrence and Donny Osmond), the Monkees “Pleasant Valley Sunday” and “Natural Woman”, a top 10 for Aretha Franklin which Carole herself recorded on her massive Tapestry album. Surprisingly, while the hits kept rolling from their pens, Goffin said he felt “dwarved and inadequate” as a writer when The Beatles and Bob Dylan came to fame.

The fairytale romance, and superstar writing tandem came to an end with the ’60s. He says he wanted to be a hippie – long hair, drugs and lots of lovers – while Carole “did it modestly. (Also) she felt that she had to say things herself. She had to be her own lyricist” – something she showed she was up to doing very well with Tapestry.

Goffin kept writing lyrics after that, and while no one matched the hit-making capability of King with him, he did quite well in the ’70s writing songs like Diana Ross’ “Theme From Mahogany” and “Saving All My Love For You” (a hit in the ’80s for Whitney Houston) with Michael Masser and Gladys Knight’s “I’ve Got To Use My Imagination” with Barry Goldberg.

Gerry re-married twice after splitting up with Carole; in all he had five kids, including one – Louise – with Carole. Louise is also a musician, playing guitar and writing some as well as performing at times with Bryan Ferry, Tears for Fears and even her mother! Goffin passed away at age 75 in 2014, by which time no less than 114 songs he’d written the words to had made Billboard charts.

Upon his passing, Carole called him a “good man and dynamic force” and as a writer, “his words expressed what so many people were feeling but didn’t know how to say.” The Songwriters Hall of Fame and Rock & Roll Hall of Fame both knew what to say to him: “Welcome.” He was inducted into both along with Carole.

February 3 – Jim And His Plane Which Became A Train

People often call George Martin the “Fifth Beatle.” Then again, some refer to Billy Preston as that. But there’d be no arguing who the “Fifth Pip” was, if that was something people pondered. That would be Jim Weatherly, who we remember three years after he passed away near Nashville. Weatherly might not be a household name…but some of his music is and he helped Gladys Knight become that. And, indirectly, numerous other musical types will benefit through the path he forged.

Weatherly was born and grew up in Mississippi. As a teen he loved music, and football. He actually played quarterback for the Ole Miss college team in two championship seasons and was named an “All American” in 1964. However, he decided to focus on music for a career instead, and moved out to L.A. There, he got a recording contract with Verve Records, but seemed to excel more in writing songs than recording them.

However, he kept playing football recreationally, which happened to “make” his career in music! He played with actor Lee Majors in an adult league and they became friends. Major was dating none other than Farrah Fawcett at the time, but she was far from a star then. Weatherly called them up one night and talked to Farrah, who said she was taking “the midnight plane to Houston” that night, to go back and spend time with her family. Weatherly loved the phrase and wrote a song around it (ironically then, “a superstar but (she) didn’t get far” was thus written about Farrah Fawcett, who in fact did go far …and onto millions of teen boys walls …a few years later) . It was originally good, and kind of country-ish. But Cissy Houston wanted to record it, and someone at the record company decided a train would be more evocative than a plane and Georgia trumped Houston – ironically given her name! Smart moves! Although Cissy’s version flopped, it did get noticed by Gladys Knight. The rest, as they say, is history. She and the Pips recorded it and made it a Grammy-winning smash, ranked as the 29^th best song of the 20^th Century by the RIAA. She must have wondered if the song was a fluke, and met up with Weatherly.

The pair hit if off, and Buddah Records (whom Knight was signed to then) gave Weatherly a contract of his own. He had some minor success. “The Need To Be” was a top 20 hit in North America in ’74, a year after the “Midnight Train to Georgia”, and he had another country hit with “I’ll Still Love You.” But mainly, his success came through his writing, particularly for Knight. “He’d start playing his guitar, and I’d start humming, and was magic,” the singer said. He wrote their hits “Neither One Of Us” and “The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Me” as well, and moved to Nashville. There, a number of artists recorded his songs including Garth Brooks, Lynn Anderson, Neil Diamond and Glen Campbell who got to #4 on country charts with his “A Lady Like You.”

Although he’d be named to the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Mississippi Music Hall of Fame, his career slowed in this century. Nevertheless, he made an impact for musicians everywhere when he successfully sued Universal Music for royalties he was due. He argued they had badly underpaid him royalties for “Midnight Train to Georgia,” they countered not so much by disputing it as saying they had put a one year limitation on the contract and he’d passed the Statute of Limitations. The courts disagreed and ruled writers or musicians could sue for unpaid royalties any amount of time after the fact.

Weatherly passed away this day in 2021, from natural causes at his suburban Nashville home. B.J. Thomas said of him “One of the great ones, (he) wrote a lot of beauties.” Knight said the day after his passing “I’m missing Jim Weatherly already. He was about life, and love…we were just made for each other. We grew our lives together.”

Of course, Weatherly is far from the most famous musician to have died on Feb. 3 because this day in 1959 was “the day the music died” with Ritchie Valens, Buddy Holly and , as we see in today’s other post, the Big Bopper dying in a plane crash.

October 18 – Artists Had That Lovin’ Feeling For Cynthia

“They didn’t just write us a hit, they wrote us a career.” So said Bill Medley, half of the Righteous Brothers, about Cynthia Weil and her husband Barry Mann. Weil was born on this day in 1940 and before she passed away earlier this year, would be inducted into both the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and have her name on over 100 songs awarded by BMI for being played over a million times on radio.

Weil grew up in New York City and studied dance and acting at St. Lawrence College. But she married Barry at age 21 and around the same time they both took jobs at Aldon Music. They worked in the famous Brill Building, writing songs alongside other ’60s greats like Carole King (who actually inducted her into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2010), Gerry Goffin and Neil Sedaka. For the most part, she wrote the lyrics while Barry composed the tune. And write they did, creating dozens of songs that would be picked up by many of the top artists of the ’60s , ’70s and ’80s including “Kicks” by Paul Revere & the Raiders, “On Broadway” for the Drifters and then later a hit for George Benson, “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” by the Animals, “Here You Come Again’ by Dolly Parson and later, “Running with the Night” by Lionel Richie and the movie hit “Somewhere Out There” by Linda Ronstadt and James Ingram which won the Song of the Year Grammy in 1988. Her songs were also recorded by the likes of Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, Gladys Knight and the Monkees. All of which would be enough to have her name long remembered – as Paul Stanley of Kiss said, as a kid “invariably, songs that I oved, I would see her name on it.” The Rock Hall later would point out “from pioignant ballads to certified bangers (they) could write anything.” But on top of the ones already mentioned, there’s that career for the Righteous Brothers!

She and her husband wrote their two 1960s smashes, the #1 hit “Soul and Inspiration” and the one that was for many years the most-played song ever on American radio – “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling”. Producer Phil Spector shared the credit on that one, but there was enough credit to go around with it being played 14 million times or more and being honored by the Library of Congress for it being “culturally, historically or aesthettically significant.”

Outside of writing songs, she and Barry also wrote a Broadway play, They Wrote That, in which Mann played various songs they’d written and she spoke about what was behind them and she penned two mystery novels late in life.

Weil passed away this past summer and a memorial was held in L.A., hosted by Tony Orlando who told the attendees (including other writing greats like Carole King and Carol Bayer Sager) it “was not to be mournful, but a sunny celebration.”

Besides Mann, she’s survived by their one child, Jenn Mann who is a well-known psychologist and psycho-therapist.

October 3 – Undercover Alan More Than A One Hit Wonder

When you’re in a small “club” that includes Neil Diamond and Carole King, you’ve done pretty well. So then, we remember Alan O’Day today, on what would have been his 83^rd birthday. O’Day isn’t anywhere near as famous as those two, but he is among the few songwriters who’ve written #1 songs for other stars as well as themselves.

O’Day seemed set early on to live a life in music. He was playing a xylophone and making his own songs up by six, three or four years later he was playing ukulele to impress his friends at school. By high school, he was in two bands, one he started, The Shoves, influenced by his musical heroes back then – Elvis, Fats Domino, Ray Charles, Little Richard. One of his bands made it onto a local TV talent show then, and Johnny Otis took notice. He recorded a song or two Alan had written, but they didn’t end up getting released. But it no doubt gave the lad confidence in his skills in music. After high school, he got work doing music editing for a small studio in his hometown of Hollywood. Around that time as well, his then-current band, The Archers, got to tour as the backing band for Dobie Gray.

As the ’60s wore on, he started to drift away (to borrow a term from Dobie) from performing and concentrate on writing songs, one or two of which Dobie had already done. By 1971 he was a staff writer at Warner Bros., and quickly penned his first hit song, “The Drum”, which was a top 30 hit for teen heartthrob Bobby Sherman. In the early-’70s he was very prolific, writing songs recorded by artists including Steppenwolf, David Clayton Thomas, Anne Murray, Dave Mason and many more. “Easy Evil” of his has been done by several dozen artists ranging from Tony Orlando to Dusty Springfield to Long John Baldry. But his first real big break was a song he wrote when inspired by the Beatles character “Lady Madonna” and partly by a girl he knew from his childhood neighborhood who was …socially awkward to say the very least. “Angie Baby” became a #1, gold-selling single for Helen Reddy.

He’d have one more big hit from one of his songs in that time period, “Rock & Roll Heaven” for the Righteous Brothers.

O’Day recorded a solo album in ’73, but it flopped, so he kept writing. However, in 1977, WB started a division called Pacific Records. Somehow he was the only artist they signed or put out! But their one artist did well for them. His song “Undercover Angel” was a #1 hit in both the U.S. and Canada and sold past two million copies. He pretty much disappeared from the radio after that, at least here, despite recording another album in 1979, which included his own version of “Angie Baby” and one more lesser hit in Australia, “Skinny Girls”. But in North America, he’s clearly marked as simply one of the big One Hit Wonders of the decade.

Although he didn’t create many more hit records after then, he kept busy. He did music for Jim Henson, writing 100 or so kids songs for the Muppet Babies TV show, and later, music for National Geographic shows as well. He’d also collaborate with a popular Japanese composer/producer, Tatsuro Yamashita, and together they wrote several Japanese hits like “Magic Ways.”

In the 21^st Century, he’d moved to Nashville and begun working as a producer and once again had a tune that was noticed – “Nascar Crazy”, a sort of theme for that car race circuit.

His career seemed to be finding a second wind in country but sadly before it really took off, he died of brain cancer at age 72, in 2013. A one hit wonder, perhaps, but a pretty good resume for that… and one that gets him mentioned with the likes of Carole King. Not too bad for someone who was so largely “undercover” .

July 4 – Addrisis, And Their ’68 Hit, Flew High

Lenny Bruce, circuses, the second-biggest song of the 20^th Century… they have one thing in common, oddly enough and that is a connection to a couple of guys many music fans have never heard of – the Addrisi Brothers. The younger one, Dick Addrisi, turns 82 today, so happy birthday to him!

Dick and Don Addrisi were born into the circus, so to speak. They were from suburban Boston and their parents ran a once-popular traveling trapeze & acrobatics squad, The Flying Addrisis. Apparently the lads initially followed in their parents flying footsteps and joined the troupe, but their real aspirations were to soar in music rather than under the big tent.

Somehow they knew Lenny Bruce, who was a fan of the act. He helped them move to California and make a few connections, and soon they had a record contract. They harmonized well and fashioned themselves somewhat after the Everly Brothers, but they didn’t quite connect despite putting out a number of singles from 1958 (“I’ll Be True”) on. After awhile they decided to concentrate more on writing – Don was a music school grad – and less on performing. That really paid off in 1968.

Although they wrote quite a few songs recorded by other artists, they really hit paydirt with “Never My Love”. It became an easy-listening smash for The Association, and has been covered at least 147 more times by artists ranging from Anita Bryant to Blue Swede to the Four Tops. BMI list it as the second most-played song of the entire 20^th Century, behind only “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” and just ahead of “Yesterday.”

Perhaps that success got them in the door at Columbia who signed them to a new recording deal which led to the first of three albums (four if you include a later one of outtakes) they released in the ’70s. It contained the hit “We’ve Got To Get It On Again”, which made it to #25 at home and #15 in Canada. They’d come close to major success but not quite reach it once more, with “Slow Dancing Don’t Turn Me On” in 1977, a U.S. top 20 hit.

They continued writing songs until Don’s death in 1984 from cancer. Dick disappeared from the limelight but apparently worked as a talent scout and agent for artists and sometime later moved to Argentina, where he’s believed to live to this day.

May 16 – Nicky Gave Us Mickey

Without him, Britain’s Glam movement wouldn’t have been nearly as “glam”, and people might not have been quite as good to Tina Turner. But he’s hardly a household name, except perhaps in his Nashville home, where people will be wishing Nicky Chinn a happy 78th birthday!

Chinn was born and raised in London, and apparently was a talented musical mind early on. He was writing movie score music by the late-’60s when he met Mike Chapman, a waiter at an establishment he hung out in! They found they clicked on several levels and could write some pretty catchy tunes. He says “we were best friends and musically we saw things exactly the same way.” They soon connected with The Sweet, and became their writers of choice and even record producers through their hey day which included 13 top 20 singles through the ’70s in the UK, including ones like “Wee Willie”, Blockbuster” and their North American breakthrough, “Ballroom Blitz.” That happens to be the record Chinn says is his favorite of all the ones he’s written. “It’s got everything,” he says, “it’s got drama, it’s got a wonderful vocal performance, wonderful performance by the band.”

Although the almost “in-house” writing team for The Sweet, other acts called on Chapman and Chinn as well, including Exile, for whom they wrote “Kiss You All Over” and Suzi Quatro, for whom they wrote several hits including the one which was her North American break, “Stumblin’ In.” Although the output of hits slowed in the ’80s,

Chinn still scored several biggies, including “Heart and Soul”, originally recorded by Exile but made a hit by Huey Lewis, Tina Turner’s “Better Be Good To Me”, and one-hit wonder Toni Basil’s one hit – “Mickey.” He says that’s the only hit he’s written that perhaps surprised him. “It wasn’t a pop era in America and I didn’t think radio would play it,” he admits, noting Basil was a “completely unknown artist” at the time. Surprise or not, it hit #1 in the States, Canada and Australia.

Of late, Chinn’s written some country music as well as Selena Gomez’s 2010 hit “Live Like There’s No Tomorrow.” While some songwriters work randomly, or wait for divine inspiration, Chinn says he had a formula for songs. “I always start with the title. I go in (to a recording session) with a list of titles and say ‘which ones do you like?’ … (it) gives you a theme, an idea where you’re going, whether it’s up-tempo or a ballad.”

So why hasn’t the three-time Ivor Novello winner ever found any titles he liked and record them himself? “I can explain it very easily. I can’t sing!” When you can write like Nicky, that’s quite OK.