Category Archives: Pop

For Insomniacs Only



	Peter Noone (far left), the one-time lead singer for Herman’s Hermits, opens the holiday shopping season at The Galleria on November 23.

Patience may be a Christmas lesson drilled into wide-eyed kids yearning daily for Santa, but for salivating holiday shoppers, it’s merely an old-fashioned term at which they scoff. Christmas bells officially begin ringing at the ungodly hour of 1 a.m. on Friday, November 23, at the Riverchase Galleria. So much for the long winter’s nap. Thanksgiving leftovers won’t even be cold by then.

The only thing remotely old-fashioned about this yuletide shopping spree is the presence of Peter Noone, more famously known as Herman, one-time lead singer for the 1960s hit-makers Herman’s Hermits. With 23 Top 10 hits and 52 million records sold, the band was among the monarchy of the British invasion that included The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Dave Clark Five, and a host of other limeys.

Herman’s Hermits’ classics such as “I’m Into Something Good,” “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter,” and the frivolous “I’m Henry the VIII” glued a generation of teens to AM radio and television shows such as “Hullabaloo” and “Shindig.” Along with their repertoire of irresistibly catchy pop hits, Herman’s Hermits were renowned for being one of the few British acts that sang in a heavy British dialect. “You had to have your own sound back then. You couldn’t sound like The Beatles or The Dave Clark Five. That’s why we did the first English accents on rock ‘n’ roll records,” Noone explains on his website.

Noone was 15 years old when Herman’s Hermits began topping the record charts. The squeaky clean Hermits image that alienated more serious, worldly teenagers was apparently no put-on, according to Noone in a 1999 interview with the Globe Correspondent. An admitted innocent, Noone recalls, “I hung out with the guys that knew what was going on, like The Beatles and The Stones. They were much more fun than the guys in my band.”

Peter Noone’s last show in Birmingham was 10 years ago at the Alabama State Fair, with local players enlisted as Hermits for the evening. Noone was every bit as enthusiastic and endearing as his showbiz persona, though the choirboy image took a couple of blows. Local drummer Leif Bondarenko recalls that Noone personally delivered a case of beer to the band before the show. Don Tinsley played bass that night, and recalls Noone’s penchant for cursing. “A very good-natured cuss word every other word,” Tinsley laughs.

12-String King

By Ed Reynolds

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	The Byrds in 1965: (left to right) Michael Clarke, David Crosby, Chris Hillman, Roger McGuinn, and Gene Clarke.

Through his widely influential band the Byrds, Roger McGuinn inspired a generation of rockers with his often-imitated 12-string electric guitar. A dedicated folk music addict, McGuinn turned up the volume and added an irrepressible backbeat to the storytelling genre perpetuated by folk pioneers Pete Seeger and Bob Gibson, among many others.

After seeing the Beatles’ A Hard Days Night, the Byrds ditched their acoustic act and borrowed $5,000 to purchase electric guitars, amplifiers, a drum kit, and matching black suits with velvet collars. John Lennon prompted McGuinn to adopt the Rickenbacker guitar, but it was McGuinn who got Lennon hooked on sporting tiny sunglasses. The rest is rock ’n’ roll history.

Black & White: Tell me what started the Folk Den you offer on your web site.

Roger McGuinn: There were a lot of folk music songs getting lost in the shuffle. And in the commercial music scene there wasn’t a lot of interest in traditional folk music anymore. The old folk singers are gettin’ kinda old, and I wondered what would happen in a few years when they’re not around anymore. So I thought I’d do my bit to keep those songs alive by recording them and putting them on the site (www.rogermcguinn.com) — one a month. And I’ve been doing that every month for six years. Folk had experienced tremendous popularity in the middle ’60s, and I think that it had become overly commercialized at that point. Rock ’n’ roll came along, the Beatles. We didn’t help folk much by mixing it up with rock ’n’ roll in the Byrds. Gradually people kinda forgot about it to the point where now they don’t even know what it is. If you say “folk,” they immediately think of some kid with an acoustic guitar who’s playing their own songs that they just wrote last night. They don’t know what you’re talking about when you say “traditional songs.”

B&W: Was being a fan of [early folk pioneer] Bob Gibson what got you interested in folk music as a kid?

McGuinn: That’s right. I was in high school, and I was into rock ’n’ roll at the time. Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent, Carl Perkins, that whole rockabilly sound out of Memphis. I hadn’t listened to folk music at all. Maybe I’d heard a little bit of Burl Ives when I was a kid but I didn’t pay much attention to it. Bob Gibson came to our high school and did a 45-minute set on a five-string banjo. Blew me away. I just loved it. I couldn’t believe it. It was so energetic and he’s doing all these fancy picking things on the banjo. These great melodies and stories and songs. I went, “What’s that?” I asked my music teacher, and she says, “That’s folk music. There’s a school that just opened up in Chicago. You ought to check it out. It’s a folk music school.” So I went over there to Old Town School of Folk Music and enrolled. I studied there for three years before I got my first job as accompanist for the Limelighters.

B&W: How did you and Tom Petty get to be pals?

McGuinn: When I first heard Tom Petty I was looking for songs for an album I was gonna be doing. And Tom was just coming out with his first album. I didn’t know who he was. My manager was playing me songs from different writers. One of them was [Petty’s] “American Girl.” And it sounded so much like me, I kidded my manager and asked, “When did I record that?” And he said, “It isn’t you. It’s this new kid Tom Petty.” So I said I wanted to meet him, because I loved what he was doing. And he came over the next day to the house. We got to be friends, and we’ve been friends all these years.

B&W: Tell me about your years working with Bobby Darin.

McGuinn: That was cool. Bobby was a very talented guy. He was very multi-dimensional. He could play the vibes and dance and play piano and guitar and sing and tell jokes. He was an old school kind of showbiz guy. Almost a Vaudevillian. One of the things he did was incorporate a folk music segment into his act. He was scouting around looking for somebody to back him up on that. He was in California at the Crescendo Club to see Lenny Bruce. I was with the Chad Mitchell Trio at the time, and we were opening up for Lenny Bruce. So he saw me and offered me a job and I took it, ’cause it was better money.

B&W: That must have been an experience, opening for Lenny Bruce.

McGuinn: Yes it was. Lenny was so amazing. I’d say the guy was a genius. He was very bright. You never knew what he was gonna do. He was kind of coming off the top of his head all the time. And there was always this mystique that he was kind of stoned or something (laughs). He was really amazing. We looked upon him with a great deal of amusement. It’s funny, he was actually put in jail for some of the stuff he said on stage.

B&W: I didn’t realize that you wrote songs with the Brill Building crowd (legendary New York songwriting group that included Carole King, Neil Sedaka, and Neil Diamond, among others).

McGuinn: Yes. Bobby (Darin) had rheumatic fever when he was a kid, and his heart wasn’t very good. At one point, performing became difficult for him, so he decided to concentrate on his other business, which was a publishing company he’d bought into. We all moved to New York, and he hired me as a songwriter at the Brill Building. My job was to go to work everyday, like a nine to five thing, and write songs.

B&W: Are the descriptions of life in the Brill Building pretty accurate — the cubicles with a piano in each?

McGuinn: Absolutely. That’s what it was. A cubicle about 12 feet by six feet. Almost a jail cell with a piano in it (laughs). Barely enough room for an upright piano and a couple of chairs. You’d sit in there with another guy, he’d work on piano, I’d play guitar, and knock out songs all day.

B&W: From reading your statements on your web site, you seem to always be up on the latest technology. Were you ever involved with developing guitar gadgets?

McGuinn: Not really. The only thing I ever did with that was use after-market stuff and kind of build it into my guitar. I would take the VOX treble booster — it came in a chrome package — and I took the electronics out of that and installed it into my Rickenbacker. I did kind of develop what later became the pig-nose amplifier [a small practice guitar amp]. I had one of those back in ’65; I’d just make them for my friends and give away.

B&W: Tell me about the Rock Bottom Remainders.

McGuinn: I met Carl Hiason. He wrote a book called Sick Puppy, and named the dog McGuinn — after me! I went to a book-signing of his because I wanted to meet him. We got to know each other a little bit. He mentioned that he sometimes played with this band with [columnist] Dave Barry and Stephen King, and asked would I like to do that sometime. And I said, “Yeah, that sounds like a ball.” So he lined it up and then we all did it. I was going to do it this year, but I got too busy with Judy Collins going on the road.

B&W: How did you come to testify at the Senate hearings regarding MP3.com?

McGuinn: MP3.com was an outfit that I hooked up with a couple of years ago. They saw my Folk Den and said, “Why don’t you bring some of this stuff over here, make some CDs, and we’ll pay you 50 percent on ‘em.” So I said, “Good deal,” because record companies never pay more than 10 percent or something like that. When all this lawsuit stuff came out and the hearings and everything, like Napster and that whole furor about that, the record companies got a vigilante mentality, and they were going after everybody that had the word MP3 in it. So I went to the Senate to defend MP3.com because I thought they were the good guys ’cause they were paying royalties to the artists.

B&W: How long have you been doing solo shows?

McGuinn: Oh, since ’81. Ramblin’ Jack Elliot got me into it. I was on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour with Bob Dylan, Ramblin’ Jack, and Joan Baez. One time Ramblin’ and I were hanging out, and he said, “You know Roger, the best fun I ever had was when I’d just throw the guitar in the back of the Land Rover and hit the road and play all these little places, and it’s so much fun.” And I was in a band situation where you got trucks and all these logistics of people and you got to worry about the drummer being drunk and stuff like that. So I was looking to get out of that. It was too much trouble and it wasn’t as much fun as I wanted to have on the road. I wanted to take my wife with me and do it like Ramblin’ Jack said. It’s my favorite way to tour.

Roger McGuinn will perform on Saturday, October 20, at the Kentuck Festival in Northport (Tuscaloosa) Alabama. Call 205-758-1257 for details.

Brian Wilson’s Big Night Out

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July 4, 7 p.m., on the TNT cable channel.

Brian Wilson’s renowned songwriting abilities have ensconced his name among the giants of popular American music. Wilson addressed a generation drunk on the celebration of life but lost in a land of alienation and self-doubt. Appropriately, the former Beach Boy penned stunningly melodic twists on standard three-chord rock ‘n’ roll while revealing through achingly beautiful ballads an unparalleled grasp of loneliness and fear.

On July 4, TNT premieres An All-Star Tribute to Brian Wilson, a concert taped at Radio City Music Hall. Featured in the telecast is an ensemble of performers and actors saluting Wilson through interpretations of his songs and anecdotes about the power of his music on their respective lives.

The tribute opens with the Harlem Boys Choir singing in celestial harmony on “Our Prayer” from the 1968 Beach Boys album 20/20. The show immediately descends into embarrassingly sacrilegious performances of “California Girls” and “Help Me Rhonda” by Ricky Martin, whose shameless mugging and inane gestures make one pine for Mike Love’s endless summer of onstage charades. Paul Simon’s version of “Surfer Girl” is predictably boring. Simon has an uncanny knack for rerouting gorgeous melodies down his own improvisational jazz-influenced alleys.

The Go-Go’s finally coax the sun back onto the stage with a bare-bones, loud guitar rave-up of “Surf City” as singer Belinda Carlisle’s shimmering hips and guitarist Jane Wiedlin’s green hair inject a blast of rock ‘n’ roll that easily obscures the quartet’s penchant for singing flat. David Crosby, songwriting legend Jimmy Webb (“Wichita Lineman,” “By the Time I Get to Phoenix), and an impossibly sexy Carly Simon offer a haunting rendition of “In My Room.”

The big surprise of the evening is Vince Gill, introduced by David Crosby as the “purest and best voice in all of popular music.” Gill’s version of “Warmth of the Sun,” written by Wilson and Mike Love hours after the assassination of JFK, is nothing less than angelic. Billy Joel relates an endearing generation gap story about his teenage daughter Alexa’s discovery of “Don’t Worry Baby.” Dedicating the song to her, his over-blown vocal vibrato proceeds to pummel the delicacy out of Brian Wilson’s Phil Spector-influenced masterpiece. One wonders why Joel didn’t simply let Alexa sing it.

Old film clips of Beach Boys performances and recording studio clowning are disrupted by “candid” studio banter from tapes supposedly representing Wilson’s voice during recording sessions. But the voice is a little too much like David Crosby’s to be believable. Testimonials from Dennis Hopper, Cameron Crowe, and host Chazz Palminteri frequently sound like cue card lines read at the Academy Awards, though famed Beatles producer George Martin offers fascinating insight into the rivalry and mutual influence shared by the Beach Boys and The Beatles.

An emotionless, stoic Brian Wilson finally emerges toward the show’s end to sit at his piano and sing “Heroes and Villains,” offering a dedication loaded with twisted brotherly affection and macabre Beach Boy reality: “I’d like to dedicate this show to my brothers Dennis and Carl, who both died.”

Wilson, who never once smiles, encores on “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” with Elton John, adding hilarious irony to the pair’s history of troubled lives as they sing together, “We could be married. And then we’ll be happy.” As the song concludes, the stage fills up with the entire cast of performers, with everyone joining Wilson, now standing and playing bass though still looking befuddled, for rowdy versions of “Barbara Ann,” “Surfin’ USA,” and “Fun, Fun, Fun.”

As the stage clears, Wilson momentarily discards his robot-like persona and quips, “Now that we’ve broken your eardrums with all that noise, we’ll send you home with a nice little love message.” Backed by the impeccable California band, The Wondermints (whose amazing vocal harmonies and precision playing flawlessly recreated a Beach Boys ambience that made up for some performers’ shortcomings), an orchestra, and the Harlem Boys Choir, Wilson closes the show with an amazing version of “Love and Mercy” from his first solo record, Brian Wilson.