Way back in the lost mists of time I read a magazine article describing a debate among musicologists who were trying to solve this pressing question: "What type of music was the theme from I Love Lucy?" The song has a distinctly latin beat, but what kind of latin beat? That is the question. Is it a Mamba, a Samba, a Conga, or a Rumba? No one interviewed for that article seems to have known, although I believe I read that piece while Desi Arnaz was still alive. Seems to me someone could have asked him.
As far as I know, that question has never been officially resolved, but I'm going to resolve it for you now. The theme from I Love Lucy was written and performed as a Mamba. There, now let's end the niggling. Lucky I'm a trained musicologist, or I would have been forced to just guess. There's the theme song at the top of this article. Listen carefully to the uderlying percussion and tell me what you think.
How do I know it's a Mamba? Well, first off it sounds like a Mamba. Also Mambo was the type of music Desi Arnaz was knkown for. So it stands to reason the theme song for his TV show would reflect that Mamba beat, which was very popular at the time. Further, Arnaz started out playing in Xavier Cugat's band, and Cugat was a Mambo artist as well. These are all clues worth taking into account.
There have been two major obstacles in the way of anyone attempting to definitively arrive at which style of rhythm is represented by the theme from I Love Lucy. In the first place, Mamba, Samba, Conga, and Rumba are all similar styles. Both Mamba and Conga come to us through Afro-Cuban dance, so they sound somewhat similar. Samba is a Brazillian beat, so we can dismiss that right now, along with the Bossa Nova, which also came by way of the Samba and began to surface around the time Samba was running its course. That leaves us with the Mambo, the Congo, the Rumba, and the Italian Mambo (if we are to believe Dean Martin.)
But we are not going to believe Dean Martin. There is no such thing as Italian Mamba. That was just a quasi-Mamba song sung by an italian guy who was trying to cash in on the Mamba craze that was all the rage in 1954. So Dean Martin is right out.
Take a hike, Poseur.
Complicating the puzzle even further is that you can often tell when a song is a Conga because the singer is playing the conga drum, a long cylindrical drum that originated in Africa. But that's not always the case, Desi Arnaz often played the conga drum even while he was singing the Mamba. So we can't go by that alone.
Sometimes whether a song is a Mamba, a Conga, or a Rumba has little to do with the percussion instruments being played and more to do with the dancing Here are Ricky and Lucy dancing a Mamba. I can detect a rhythm in this song showing up in places that is close to that of the show's theme music, can you?
The clip below shows us what the Conga looked and sounded like. Although Desi Arnaz is known for his Mamba playing, the drum he's beating frantically in this wild number is a Conga drum and the dance is definitely a Conga dance. You can tell it's a Conga by the hints of the cha-cha, cha-cha, cha-CHA! beat -accent on that last "CHA" as the dancers throw their hands in the air beginning around minute 2:07. (Don't look for them to actually shout "Cha Cha Cha; this is too early in the Cha-Cha craze; people didn't start actually saying "cha-cha-cha" while they were dancing until a bit later. But you can definitely hear them shouting "Way OH!" on the downbeat.
Pretty wild for 1940, right?
The Cha-Cha dance craze of the 50's was another craze descended from the Mamba AND the Conga by way of Cuba. (I should note here that teenagers of the 50's were not into the Cha-Cha; not in the least little bit. That dance belonged to the Rob and Laura Petrie generation. No self-respecting teenager would be caught dead dancing like cocktail party grownups back then. That dance was for squares.)
Oh, one more thing I neglected to mention about the theme from "I Love Lucy." It wasn't written by Desi Arnaz. It wasn't even written by anyone of Latin descent. The songwriter was one Eliot Daniel, who penned a passel of hits for a variety of recording artists such as Rosemanry Clooney, Dinah Shore, Bing Crosby , Roy Rogers, and others. He was also the composer of one of the records I listened to incessantly as a child: Burl Ives singing "Lavender Blue (Dilly Dilly). Like any good composer worth his salt, Eliot Daniel knew how to write a song so it sounded latin.
Oh, I almost forgot. This is what the Rumba looks like:
Unless you were deep into comic books as a kid like I was, you might wonder why Superman was always showing up to get Jimmy Olsen out of the scrapes he had gotten himself into, only to find Jimmy wasn't worth the bother. It's also reasonable to wonder why Superman called Jimmy his best friend in the first place, seeing as how Jimmy didn't spend that much time around Superman. Olsen worked with Clark Kent every day and never susptected Clark was Superman, so it would have made more sense if Jimmy Olsen was Clark Kent's pal. But the title of this book was "Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen." And DC was stubborn about that title.
At any rate, the MacGuffin that launched most of Jimmy Olsen's adventures that included Superman (which was pretty much every one of them) was a special signal watch Superman gave to Jimmy that emitted a supersonic EEEEEeeeee....EEEEEeeeee....EEEEEeeee.... that only superman's super hearing could detect. If Jimmy got in a jam he was to hit the button on the signal watch and his super pal would come flying to the rescue.
DC really knew how to separate me from my 12 cents every time a new Jimmy Olsen comic hit the stands. In the first place, what kid didn't wish Superman was his best friend? And second, all I had to do was see the cover featuring Superman's best friend trying to do him in, or trick him into admitting his secret identity, or set Superman up to be humiliated, or pull some other dastardly trick that a real friend would never pull, and I was easily sucked in. I rarely had any spare change an hour after I'd received my allowance, but I did read a lot of imaginative comic books.
The thing is, although I find nothing appealing about modern comic books, I still find the Silver Age comics that grabbed me during my pre-teen years as irresistible now as I did back then. Maybe it's because I'm nostalgic for that time, but I kinda think it's because those stories are more imaginative.
Here's something I didn't know back then about the comic books I was buying from DC: editors Jack Schiff and Mort Weisinger rarely came up with a story that could be turned into a boffo cover. Instead they frequently invented an impossible situation to put their heroes in first, and then assigned the writers to come up with a story to explain how Jimmy or Superman got into the shocking fix illustrated on the cover. As a result, quite often it would turn out that the only reason Superman was about to be done in by his best friend was because Jimmy had fallen under the influence of aliens or he had been hypnotized by some mad professor, or been accidentally hit by some weird ray that made him more powerful than Superman, or some other reason that provided the denoument for the story.
I never got any wiser. All I needed to see was a cover showing Superman in peril, and I would hand over my money, no questions asked. I was a very easy mark.
Below is a short collection of covers illustrating how easy it was to play me for a sucker:
If you ever asked yourself, "Man, how did THAT DUDE ever become Superman's pal?" Well, it's because Jimmy olsen had once travelled through time, landed on Krypton before it exploded, and spent some time as young Kal-El's babysitter. Apparently Superman feels he owes him.
Here's comic book historian Brain Cronin with the illustrated run-down:
If you were a sixteen year old boy in 1966, chances are good you wanted to start your own rock band. I sure did. But like pretty much everybody I knew, that dream never materialized. I did know a kid named Kevin who had his own band. Kevin's real claim to fame was that his older brother was already out of high school and had become a real-live hippie, long hair and everything. None of us ever saw real hippies in Anaheim, California; and truth be told, I don't know anyone who ever saw Kevin's brother in the flesh either. I may even have my chronology wrong, because "hippies" didn't appear on the scene until the summer of 1967, so Kevin's brother may have been more the stuff of legend after 1966.
At any rate, Kevin was the lead singer in an actual rock band that went by the name "The Plastic Bag," which at the time I thought was probably the grooviest band name of all time. It didn't seem possible to me that anyone could come up with a better name for a band. All the other ideas were surely already taken.
The term "garage band" had not yet been coined, which is just as well, because the one time I sat in with The Plastic Bag they were practicing in Kevin's living room and kitchen. Needless to say, Kevin's parents were not home.
When I say I "sat in," I only mean I was present to watch them rehearse. I didn't play guitar. Not that I hadn't given it a try. Once. My friend Bruce Graham had let me hold his acoustic guitar and showed me where on the fret to hold my fingers to make a chord, but the steel strings hurt my finger tips. I quit guitar right then and there. I don't think I've ever picked up a guitar since, although later in life I took up the baritone ukelele. That four-string instrument is harder than it looks, too.
I desperately hoped Kevin would ask me to sing with his band, but he never did. Neither did anyone ever ask me to join any band at any time, probably because there was little call for french horn players in rock bands in those days. I didn't know about the Beach Boys "Pet Sounds at the time because...well, because nobody was buying that album then. I'm not even sure The Plastic Bag ever played a gig. They were just four guys who rehearsed together and that was about it.
Anyway, what Kevin did do at one point was let me have the tambourine while he sang and the band played. The song was "You Can't Judge A Book By Looking At It's Cover," which I had never heard before so I assumed it was a Plastic Bag original.
But Oh, the tambourine! That was an instrument I could play!
It had not been lost on me that every one of the Monkees except Davy Jones could play an instrument, but Davy was still front and center singing and playing tambourine. Watching the Monkees play "Valerie," I knew I would never be able to pull off Mike Nesmith's impossible flamenco riff on the guitar, but I could sure as heck smack the tambourine as well as Davy Jones. Maybe better.
Which brings me to to some of my favorite songs of the swinging 60's that featured the tambourine. Let's start with Valerie. There are countless equally good examples I could have gleaned from the Monkees -Daydream believer comes immediately to mind. But I've always liked the instrumental hook on Valerie, Mike's guitar intro, and Mickey's rolling tom-toms, and the hornsm, so this is the one I'm picking.
I recommend listening to all these clips with headphones because it's not always easy to hear the tambourine to full effect without them:
Next up we have the quintessential tambourine classic, "Green Tambourine." This was a monster hit, not least because it combines the tambourine with the sound of the then-unfamiliar sitar and generous use of the vibraslap. Few people had ever heard any songs with this combination of unusual instruments before, and it stayed on the Billboard top 100 for a stunning 13 weeks.
You can watch the Lemon Pipers performing live here, but the sound is not as good as the album cut above. The trade-off is that in the live video you get some boss green lighting to remind you that for some reason the tambourine -and everyone in the group- is bathed in the color green. And there's an echo effect when they say the word "play."
And in case you don't know what a vibraslap is, it's a percussion instrument that dates back to biblical times. It was originally made from the jawbone of an ass, but unfortunately for us purists, they are made of wood and metal today. So it's hard to find an original jawbone unless you're inclined to kill and skin a donkey just for the sake of your art. I'm not, but hey, you do you. Either way, here's a video showing you what a modern day vibraslap looks like, as well as a plasticky-looking replica of the an ancient jawbone of an ass. And this cool cat here will show you how to slap either one of 'em:
And now, let's get back to playin' the hits!
When you think of groups making skilled use of the tambourine, Martha and the Vandellas probably don't come immediately to mind. But the sound is crisp and bright in Nowhere to Run. Oddly, no video clip I have found of the Vandellas performing live seems to feature any of them holding a tambourine, and you also don't hear it in those live performances. The reason that's unusual is that normally when a group performs their hit on TV, they are lip-synching to the recording and, if they're musicians, fake-playing their instruments. Since the tambourine is clearly heard on the Vandella's album and not in their live performances, I can only assume they are playing live in these televised appearances. So why no tambourine? I don't know, but I'm guessing it was a studio musician who played it on the record.
Here's the Vandellas from the album:
And here they are performing live on what looks to be Hullaballoo. You'll notice the decided lack of a certain sine qua non in this performance. That's the missing tambourine.
For an apt comparison, here are the Crystals lip-synching to their hit "And Then He Kissed Me." You can hear the tambourine on the recording they're lip-synching to, but none of the girls is holding a tambourine in the actual video.
I'm not nitpicking here, because of course we also don't see Phil Spector's Wall of Sound orchestra anywhere on stage either. Nevertheless, this isn't the best version of the song to hear the tambourine on. When you listen to the Crystal's album cut, the tambourine is as crisp and bright as the tambourine on the Vandella's album. To hear a better version of the Crystal's song, click here. This is a great example of what made Phil Spector so indispensable: in spite of the fat sound of the horns and the full strings and woodwinds, you can still hear the tambourine above the fray. That there is some good sound engineering.
I almost wasn't going to count "Hey, Mr Tambourine Man" by the Byrds, because even though it is about a tambourine (or at least a guy with a tambourine), the sound of that instrument can barely be heard
-not in the live performance, and nowhere on the record, either. It would have been better if the guy playing the tambourine (I don't know his name; I've never spent that much time with the Byrds) would have held the tambourine up to the microphone when he struck it. It's a shame that the most well-known song about a tambourine is so pooly enginered that the listener can't even hear the instrument that the song is about. Needless to say, Bob Dylan, who wrote "Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man" didn't play a tambourine when he sang it, either.
Anyway, if I don't include the Byrds in this list I'll probably hear from some irate Byrds fans, so here you go. Prove me wrong:
Now let's get back to some serious partying! Here's the First Family of Funk with one of the best dance numbers of all time. The white guy in the back has to set aside his sax now and then in order to pick up the tambourine, but playing the tambourine in a funk band is what the Good Lord put us white guys on earth for.
I've always worried about Cynthia ruining her voice with all that screaming: "All the squares go home!!"
Was it worth it, Cynthia? Seriously, was it?
That was the mono version, which was good enough for radio play and 45s. But if you really want to hear that song wail, listen to the stereo version here (and make sure you're still wearing heaphones:
The Four Tops get credit for some hard jangling tambourine interludes, even though none of them played the tambourine on stage (that was done in the studio). Also there's a nice counterpoint with that galloping wood block. This has the determined feel of Edwin Starr's "25 Miles." If you have somewhere to go that requires a lot of walking at a brisk pace, this would be excellent to march to. You don't need a coach yelling in your ear with the Four Tops on hand.
Mark Volman of the Turtles gets kudos for handling the tambourine like a boss. Too bad you can't hear any of it at all in this video. Again, Mark, that tambourine is not a mere prop. It's not a toy. It is a serious musical instrument that deserves your respect. Generations of people died so you would have the right to perform a parody song with that tambourine, so the least you could do is hold it up so we can all hear what you're doing with it. Put that jangly thing next to the microphone when you hit it! Please!
Is nobody even listening to me?!
No tambourine is detectable in the album cut on Elenore, either, although the Turtles get points for being one of the first pop groups to use the Moog Synthesizer. Some people think that's a theramin they're hearing, but it isn't. It's a moog. Jump HERE to minute 1:06 to hear it on the album cut.
No list would be complete without at least one number from the Beatles. Like the Monkees, there are plenty of songs to choose from that feature the tambourine. "Hey Jude" comes to mind, but the tambourine is way too subtle for a song that begs to be rocked out with. I love "Hey Jude" for Paul's use of the piano, but I prefer the tambourine on "Daytripper" because it's a happy song. We also get to hear that distinctive rattlesnake jangle rather than just the standard strike, strike, strike rhythm. We can tell this song is a cut from a studio recording because, although the tambourine is prominently heard, none of the boys have a free hand with which to use it. From the scafolding and the dancers, I'm guessing this performance was taped for NBC's Hullaballoo.
Poor Stephanie Crough. She had one job as a member of the Partridge Family: just stay quietly in the back and hit the tambourine in time to the music. Instead she's too quiet, staring off into space in a near-catotonic state while seeming to forget she's supposed to be performing. The only thing the producers of that show needed to do was call me and I would have stepped in and taken over in a New York minute. Cast me as the long-lost weird hippie Uncle; I wouldn't have cared. Just let me have that juicy gig.
This brings us to The Cowsills. The Partridge Family was originally intended to be a show about the Cowsills, starring the Cowsills themselves as the Cowsills. Unfortunately, the Cowsills were too busy being the Cowsills -making records, touring the country, and getting rich- to take time out to make a TV show. So instead of Susan Cowsill, who not only had scads of personality, but could actually play the tambourine like a ninja master, we got...Stephanie Crough. I hate to speak ill of the dead (Stephanie left the planet six years ago at the age of 52), but good heavens! Wasn't anybody in charge of that show?
And now, for the penultimate offering, I give you that one-hit wonder, "Game of Love" by Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, featuring a crisp, clean tambourine complimented by a clear, deep, thumping bass, perfect drumming, and some surf guitar licks thrown in for free. This song smells like 1965.
And finally, if you didn't know Elvis Presley was a tambourine virtuoso -well, you don't know The King as well as you think you do, me bucko:
Extra Bonus Clip: There is no tambourine visible in this Manfred Mann version of "Do Wah Diddy Diddy," but Paul Jones is shaking two maracas in each hand, and I say that's close enough to qualify. I'm adding this song to the list because it makes me happy.
Whoo-eee! After listening to these incredible tracks I think I'll go dig my tambourine out of storage, crank up the living room stereo, and get back to busting those sweet tambourine moves I was once so proficient at. I could use the exercise, and if Sly and the Family Stone ever come up to Northern Idaho for a reunion tour, I'll be ready to spell that other white guy so he can devote his full attention to playing the sax.
When the British Invasion hit America's shores in 1964, Freddie and the Dreamers were front and center. Billed as part of the Mersey Beat, the Dreamers were actually from Manchester, England, but that wasn't the only secret they were keeping from their fans. While every other member of the group was 20 or 21, Freddie himself was almost 27, too close to the dreaded age of 30 that someone had determined was the line between grownups and everyone who was cool. 26 was way too old to be a teen idol, so Fred Garrity simply lied to reporters, claiming he was 21, the same age as the other members of his band. At 5'4 inches tall with nerdy young looks, he could pull it off. Plus, he was just the right size to attract young female fans, who have always been more apt to ogle non-threatening "boys" from the pages of 16 and Tiger Beat than manly-man types who didn't fit the androgynous look the typical 13 year-old teenybopper went for.
What made Freddie and the Dreamers stand out from the pack was they had a gimmick. The band members flailed their arms and legs in unison as they performed. One day a reporter asked Fred Garrity what the name of that dance was they were doing, and right off the top of his head he came up with "it's called the Freddie." Not long after that, the Dreamers cut a single kids could dance to called "Do The Freddie" and it started selling immediately No fools, they.
Freddie's Shtick also included letting out with annoying, high-pitched giggles in the middle of his songs, accompanied by surprisingly high leaps into the air. According to the entry in The Encyclopedia of Popular Music, those leaps resulted in Freddie twisting an ankle on more than one occasion.
Freddie also liked to mime using the microphone as if it was an electric shaver. He did this at every live performance, so if you happen to watch Youtube videos of the Dreamers' appearances one after the other on Merv Griffin,Hullaballo, and other shows of the time, that bit gets old really fast. Sometimes he even mimed shaving his arm pits. Oh, and one more thing: for some reason whenever Freddie gives the audience a surreptitious glance at his suspenders, the girls go crazy. I have no idea how that bit originated, or what it even means.
Although teenage girls couldn't get enough of Freddie's antics, those bits don't age very well today. I cringe when I watch these videos But the music holds up really well, particularly their biggest hit, "I'm Telling You Now." Here they are performing that hit on the Ed Sullivan show:
When I mentioned to my wife I was writing a piece featuring The Freddie, she told me something I had not known. In the film "Troop Beverly Hills," Shelly Long teaches The Wilderness Girls how to do a bunch of sixties dances, including The Freddie. Connie would know about this because, like a lot of women, she has watched that movie countless times, while most men have only seen it once -if at all. Connie is now up for another viewing, so I guess she and I will be watching "Troop Beverly Hills" together real soon.
I came across the video below of Freddie Garrity just two years before he died of Emphysema. He seems to be trying to hide his right hand from the camera which looks like it has signs of palsy. I learned a lot about Freddie and the Dreamers I hadn't previously known from this short interview, and I would not have recognized the man if I wasn't told this was him.
Allow me a last word of advice: If you're ever dancing at a wedding and you start doing The Freddie, you will be the only person there who gets the joke.
Big Bad John is still widely considered among the best country songs of all time. Co-written with Roy Acuff, Big John was the biggest hit Jimmy Dean ever had in a recording career that spanned several albums and even a TV variety show. (this was long before Dean quit recording and went into the pork sausage business.)
This is the story of a huge, muscular miner who kept to entirely to himself. His large bearing and natural reticence resulted in the other miners being afraid to even approach him to speak. Then one day he quietly gave his life for the others.
Big John was a huge hit, spending two weeks as number one on the country charts and five in the number one slot on Billboard's top 100. After it slid from first place, it remained in the top forty for practically forever. You coudn't listen to the radio in 1961 -pop, country, or easy listening-without hearing this monster hit played repeatedly throughout the day. Listeners couldn't get enough. It was one of the most requested songs of all time.
But, as often happens, that kind of success wasn't enough for Jimmy Dean, so he came out with a follow-up to that song that, if you were unfortunate enough to have heard it, completely ruins the sweet melancholy you felt after hearing the original.
For you young'uns, I suggest you listen to the original first. Here it is:
Now a warning: Once you hear the sequel, you'll wish you hadn't. You're gonna hate yourself for listening to it and you're gonna hate me for showing it to you.
Sorry, gang, but that's what I'm here for: to document the music industry's garbage as well as its treasures.
UPDATE: Oh my gosh! Jimmy Dean wasn't done! I just found ANOTHER sequel, this one about the son of Big John and the Cajun Queen.
Here is Little Bitty Big John. Ugh.
We should all be grateful Jimmy Dean quit the music business and became a pig farmer. There's no telling how many more horrific sequels he might have tortured us with.
