A Dream That Can Be Heard: Ella Sings Rodgers and Hart

Isn’t it romantic? 
Music in the night, a dream that can be heard. 
Isn’t it romantic? 
Moving shadows write the oldest magic word.

In the late 1950s and early ‘60s, many decades before Rod Stewart ventured into Great American Songbook territory, Ella Fitzgerald recorded the definitive series of “Song Book” albums for Verve Records. It was a change of direction for the legendary songstress; up till then, she had been best known for her 1938 hit recording of a nursery rhyme, “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” with the Chick Webb Orchestra. She now undertook to interpret works by the most beloved composers of Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, jazz, and Hollywood—Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, and Johnny Mercer—one album at a time. 

Fitzgerald’s monumental Song Book series, each volume accoutered with extensive liner notes (a practice that was previously reserved for classical music releases), lifted her from a singer of mostly big band, scat, and novelty numbers into the pantheon of iconic* American popular vocalists. Some—including Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Mel Tormé, and Johnny Mathis—called her the best. Ira Gershwin once famously said, “I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them.”

*I despise the modern cheapening of that overused word, but it truly applies here. 

Following her highly successful Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Song Book double LP, which was the first release on the Verve label (founded by the revolutionary jazz record producer and concert promoter Norman Granz, who was also Ella’s manager beginning in 1954), came her second—and probably my favorite—of the series, Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers and Hart Song Book. It was recorded 70 years ago, from August 21st to the 31st, 1956.* 

*It was quite a productive month for Ella; just five days prior to the start of these sessions, she had recorded the indispensable Ella and Louis with the great Louis Armstrong.  

Richard Rodgers (left) and Lorenz Hart

Lorenz Hart was a much-lauded lyricist at the time of his passing in 1943, to such a degree that a star-studded biopic of his life (albeit heavily fictionalized), Words and Music, was produced by MGM in 1948. Yet in the decades since, when the name of composer Richard Rodgers is uttered, the knee jerk inclination is to add “and Hammerstein” (Rodgers’ songwriting partner from 1942-60) as naturally as one adds “and Hardy” to the mention of Laurel. But for my money, Hart, who had teamed with Rodgers throughout the 1920s and 1930s, was one of the cleverest, craftiest, and wittiest practitioners of his art, at the very least on a par with the more-celebrated Porter. 

The author of over nine hundred songs, composer Richard Rodgers was one of the most substantial influencers of 20th century American popular music. He was the first artist to achieve what is now known as “EGOT” status, winning Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards during his illustrious career. He also won a Pulitzer, making him the first to receive all five awards, and he was an inaugural Kennedy Center Honoree for lifetime achievement in 1978. 

Despite a sometimes precarious and often turbulent professional partnership, the seemingly alchemical interface of words and music between the two songwriters was kismet. The seamless, melodic interplay of irony, melancholy, wit, sophistication, romance, and playful innuendo they created together was unrivaled. 

Produced by Granz and arranged and conducted by 26-year-old wunderkind Buddy Bregman—the same team that collaborated with Ella on her Cole Porter offering—the Rodgers and Hart Song Book is a two-record tour de force of American popular music. Scanning its list of tracks, the number of songs that were standards in their day is jaw dropping. Though their notoriety may be lost on modern audiences, the music speaks for itself; its quality is significant and undeniable, no matter the receiving ears and despite any prejudice. 

Buddy Bregman (pictured) had arranged and conducted Bing Sings Whilst Bregman Swings—which contained four tracks by Rodgers and Hart—just two months before working with Ella for a second time in 1956, on the Ella and Louis LP. 

Though two of the numbers from Pal Joey (“There’s a Small Hotel” and “I Could Write a Book”) are now synonymous with Frank Sinatra, who injected his trademark emotive stylings into them on the 1957 film soundtrack, Ella’s superior instrument makes her Song Book interpretations of them irresistible. But she absolutely owns Pal Joey's centerpiece, and a standout on this album, “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” by way of her pristine, detached delivery. 

She’s equally up to the demands of the witty, chutzpah-infused “The Lady is a Tramp” (yet another Sinatra chestnut), the ebullient “Manhattan” (resurrected in the credit sequence of a Mad Men episode in 2007), and the swaying, seductive “You Took Advantage of Me.” Her sleekly lilting version of the pastoral “Mountain Greenery,” her comically indifferent articulation of “To Keep My Love Alive” (in which the morbidly macabre never sounded so blithely appealing), and her sly delivery of the sardonic “I Wish I Were in Love Again” further showcase her vocal versatility.

Also worth singling out are Ella’s sublime readings of the poignant “My Funny Valentine” and the stunning “My Heart Stood Still,” and her beatific, measured rendition of the near-perfect “Isn’t It Romantic”—introduced in Rouben Mamoulian’s delightfully risqué pre-code film Love Me Tonight (1932), which starred Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. 

Ella Fitzgerald and Norman Granz, circa late 1950s.

At the time of its initial release, the Rodgers and Hart Song Book double LP was highly praised by critics, including Dom Cerulli of DownBeat, who gave it a five-star review. It reached a peak position of #11 on Billboard's Best Selling Popular Albums chart in March of 1957. In 1997 it was reissued on CD by Verve and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999. All eight volumes of the original series, plus alternate takes and outtakes, were released in a massive 16-CD box set, The Complete Ella Fitzgerald Song Books, in 1994. 

Ella’s Song Book series was part of a handful of final triumphs for Tin Pan Alley and other architects of the Great American Songbook. Rock ‘n’ roll existed at the time, but it would be a few years before it completely took over the hearts, minds, and airwaves of the American public. Sinatra created some of his finest albums in the late 1950s and Broadway was still producing some memorable musicals in the early ‘60s, but the Great American Songbook had pretty much gasped its last by the time psychedelia, then hard rock, took hold in the late ‘60s. Not long after, rock became the currency of popular music, and Broadway became Andrew Lloyd Webber-ized. Once The Dean Martin Show and Bing Crosby’s TV specials ended in the 1970s (the former due to Dean’s disinterest, the latter due to Bing’s death), the way the world defined and disseminated its popular music was, for better or worse, forever altered. Ella’s magnificent Song Book LPs still stand as a lasting testament to a stylish, departed era. 

© Jon Oye, 2026 

Album cover and Time magazine are from my personal collection. 

Buddy Bregman photo source. 

Ella and Granz photo source.

The Ideal Hawksian Woman: His Girl Friday

"He treats me like a woman."

"He does, does he? How did I treat you, like a water buffalo?"

Released in January of 1940, His Girl Friday, starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, is a touchstone of screwball comedies. It's also a trenchant satire of the newspaper business and political corruption. I don't claim to have enough cinematic knowledge or erudition to say it's the best, but if forced to choose a favorite comedy of all time, His Girl Friday would probably be my pick. 

Charles Lederer wrote the screenplay (with a big assist from uncredited cowriter Howard Hawks), adapting it from Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's 1928 play (and 1931 film), The Front Page, about a couple of hard-edged newspapermen, Walter Burns and Hildebrand "Hildy" Johnson, who were parting ways after years of journalistic partnership and combative friendship. It was directed by Hawks, whose idea it was to change the Hildy Johnson character from a male to a female (Hildegard), and to make her Burns' ex-wife—revisions that turned an inspired script into cinematic brilliance. 

Rosalind Russell, Cary Grant, and Howard Hawks, His Girl Friday publicity photo (1940).

Hailed as an auteur by cutting edge French film critics in the early 1950s, the equanimous Howard Hawks may have been the quintessential 20th century American filmmaker. A product of the Hollywood studio system and a cinema veteran whose career began back in silent pictures, Hawks believed that the ability to tell a story well was what made a director good. And he didn't use that word, "good," lightly—to him, it described a person who did their job skillfully, adroitly, and professionally, attributes that nearly all of his leading characters had in common throughout his career, which spanned six decades. It was also an apt description of Hawks, who was himself the consummate, dependable professional. He was adept in virtually all genres, including gangster/crime drama (Scarface, 1932), comedy (Bringing Up Baby, 1938; His Girl Friday, 1940; Monkey Business, 1952), action-adventure (Only Angels Have Wings, 1939), noir (The Big Sleep, 1946), western (Red River, 1948; Rio Bravo, 1959; El Dorado, 1966), musical comedy (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 1953), and . . . gangster musical comedy drama (A Song is Born, 1948).

Hawks' contemporary in the directorial field, John Ford, like Shakespeare, was acutely aware of how tenuous the boundary separating comedy and tragedy is, and Hawks seems to be telegraphing that paradoxical relationship in His Girl Friday, in which the two extremes intermingle ominously. One moment we'll laugh out loud, but in the next we're reminded of what's happening in the story: a man named Earl Williams (portrayed by John Qualen), who may or may not have committed a murder due to insanity, is scheduled to be hanged in the morning. His execution has been expedited, thanks to the political opportunism of the city's corrupt mayor (Clarence Kolb) and the inept but equally corrupt sheriff (Gene Lockhart), both of whom are running for re-election. Everyone around Williams—the warden, a self-absorbed psychiatrist, the sheriff, the mayor, and the "gentlemen of the press"—are coldly indifferent to him and his plight, concerned only inasmuch as his execution will benefit them in their jobs. In fact, there's quite a bit of routine cruelty in HGF, from the callous gallows humor of the members of the Fourth Estate (in the presence of a female acquaintance of Earl's, who later attempts suicide) to the casual insensitivity of the government officials to the disrespectful, disposable way Walter (Cary Grant) treats nearly everyone. That may to some degree be a result of Hawks' penchant for cool, detached professionalism, but it could also be a nod to that fine line between comedy and tragedy that we're aware of in the back of our minds but prefer not to think about. 

Walter, Bruce, and Hildy.

Hildy (Rosalind Russell), Walter's ex-wife and a first-class "newspaperman," is leaving him and The Morning Post (the paper he runs) so that she can remarry and retire to a pastoral life upstate in Albany with her betrothed, a milquetoast insurance salesman named Bruce Baldwin (deftly played by Ralph Bellamy, who essentially reprises his role in Leo McCarey's scintillating 1937 screwball comedy The Awful Truth, which also starred Grant). Walter ostensibly needs Hildy to get an interview with Williams before the controversial hanging as she and Bruce are due to catch the northbound train, but he has an ulterior motive of winning her back—professionally and possibly romantically—by baiting her with this big story. He hopes her inherent love of being a reporter and sense of justice won't allow her to walk away and that if she does write it, it will lure her back to the Post. But just in case, as time is of the essence, Walter plays on Bruce's sympathies, manipulating him into trying to persuade Hildy to stay long enough to do the interview and write the story ("Hildy, we could take the 6 o'clock train if it'd save a man's life!"). It doesn't work (Hildy sees right through Walter's ploy), but she agrees to do it in exchange for his buying a life insurance policy from Bruce. 

Hildy and Walter in their element.

Only Cary Grant could play a cunning, white collar scoundrel in a position of power and somehow not only manage to be incredibly funny but also maintain a level of likeability, and he does just that in HGF. Part of the reason we're willing to forgive him for being such a "stinker" (aside from his sheer charisma—it is Cary Grant) is because the woman he needs to have in his orbit can give as good as she gets from him. Over his 35-year career in movies, Grant shared the screen with some very talented female costars, among them Katharine Hepburn, Irene Dunne, Ginger Rogers, Ingrid Bergman, Deborah Kerr, and Doris Day, but none ignited anything like the firecracker onscreen chemistry that Rosalind Russell created with him in HGF. In the tradition of strong Howard Hawks leading ladies, Russell's quick-witted, sharp-tongued Hildy Johnson is not only capable of going toe-to-toe with the self-interested and charmingly brutish Walter Burns, she's also the best writer in a press room filled with the top beat writers (all of them men) in the city. She's good; her counterparts at the rival newspapers know it and they respect her for it. She's "one of the boys" in the best possible sense, in an era when such a thing was all but impossible, yet she maintains a sensitive and sensuous femininity. 

Hildy with fellow reporters: one of the boys.

Williams: "I'm not Guilty. It's just—just the world!"

But Hildy also possesses a bit of Walter's manipulative nature. After bribing the prison warden so she can get an exclusive interview with Williams in his cell, she craftily steers Williams' responses in a direction that will serve the type of story she has already decided she's going to write. While her machinations are designed to free Williams, her ultimate goal (and Burns') is to unseat the unscrupulous mayor and sheriff. While Hildy has a more humane (read: feminine) side, she and Walter are nevertheless two of a kind; they belong together. Poor nice guy Bruce doesn't stand a chance. On top of all that, she's physically tough-as-nails enough to chase down and tackle (in 1930s high heels) the fleeing warden, to get a scoop from him after Williams inexplicably escaped from police custody. It's almost unfathomable, but Russell was something like the sixth choice to play Hildy—a role she seems to have been born to play. 

The Sound and the Fury: “Rocket 88" at 75

Jackie Brenston / Ike Turner handbill, April 1951. 

The pivotal rhythm & blues hit "Rocket 88" was recorded and released in March of 1951—75 years ago.* Many music writers and historians consider it to be the first rock 'n' roll record, though whether it was or not is entirely subjective. The form had been gestating for several years, perhaps decades, and there's really no way to pinpoint a "first." With forerunners dating back at least to the mid-1940s—Sister Rosetta Tharpe's "Strange Things Happening Every Day" (1944), Louis Jordan's "Caldonia" (1945), Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup's "That's All Right" (1946), Roy Brown's "Good Rockin' Tonight" (1947) and Wynonie Harris' more upbeat cover of same (1948), Jimmy Preston's "Rock the Joint" (1949), Fats Domino's "The Fat Man" (recorded in 1949 and released in 1950), and a few others—the field is wide open for potentially legitimate claims to the title of The First Rock 'n' Roll Record. 

*According to author and critic Peter Guralnick, the disputed recording date was March 7 and the record was released three weeks later. 

Oldsmobile "Rocket" 88 print ad, circa 1951.

Named after a then-popular model of Oldsmobile that's now widely regarded as the original "muscle car," "Rocket 88," performed by Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats (actually Ike Turner and His Kings of Rhythm—more on that later), is basically a revved-up rhythm & blues / jump blues number on high octane. The lyrics are sexually suggestive, a practice that would become fairly common in the just-over-the-horizon rock 'n' roll genre, but it was nothing new to the world of popular music (e.g., Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, et al.), let alone the blues tradition of employing creative euphemisms. The record was certainly an early influence on rock 'n' roll. And when listened to chronologically alongside other early 1950s #1 songs on Billboard's R&B chart, it stands out sonically and viscerally. The effect can almost be compared to the way the Beatles' "I Want to Hold Your Hand" sounds in the context of its early '60s Billboard Hot 100 #1 predecessors. It was definitely a game changer. At 75, it still motors along with a fresh, rambunctious, furious energy. 

Here's what the song's co-writer, Ike Turner, had to say about it years later in an interview with Canadian broadcaster turned author Holger Petersen: 

"I don't think that 'Rocket 88' is rock 'n' roll. I think that 'Rocket 88' is R&B, but I think 'Rocket 88' is the cause of rock 'n' roll existing . . .  [producer] Sam Phillips got [radio DJ] Dewey Phillips to play 'Rocket 88' on his program—and this is like the first black record to be played on a white radio station—and, man, all the white kids broke out to the record shops to buy it. So that's when Sam Phillips got the idea, 'Well, man, if I get me a white boy to sound like a black boy, then I got me a gold mine,' which is the truth. So, that's when he got Elvis and he got Jerry Lee Lewis and a bunch of other guys and so they named it rock 'n' roll rather than R&B and so this is the reason I think rock 'n' roll exists—not that 'Rocket 88' was the first one, but that was what caused the first one." 

However you categorize it, this was a historically significant, highly influential record. Little Richard borrowed from it for his 1958 hit "Good Golly, Miss Molly," for one, while the distorted guitar sound anticipated the fuzzbox, which became popular when the recording was rediscovered in the 1960s (think the Beatles' "Think for Yourself"). Nick Tosches wrote that, though "Rocket 88" could not be described as the first rock 'n' roll record "any more than there is any first modern novel—the fact remains that the record in question was possessed of a sound and a fury the shear, utter newness of which set it apart from what had come before." 

The label credit denotes that "Rocket 88" (stylized as Rocket "88") was performed by Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats, but in reality, while Brenston sang the vocal and played tenor saxophone, the band was Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm, with Ike on piano and the famous distorted guitar played by Willie Kizart.* The raw, careening tenor sax solos were blown by 17-year-old Raymond Hill. Willie "Bad Boy" Sims was behind the drum kit. Brenston and Turner co-wrote the song, the melody of which, Brenston said, was based on that of "Cadillac Boogie" by Jimmy Liggins (1947). Varying accounts have the song being rehearsed at the Riverside Hotel in Clarksdale, Mississippi, written on the way from Mississippi to the recording session in Memphis (Memphis Recording Service), or crafted while in the studio. Sam Phillips, who soon after founded the famous Sun Records with royalties earned from "Rocket 88" (Brenston sold his half of the rights to him), was the producer; he licensed the song, along with the B-side, "Come Back Where You Belong," to the recently established Chess Records in Chicago for commercial release. Turner blamed Phillips for botching the label credits in the process of delivering the master recording to Chess. 

*As the story goes, the guitar amplifier was damaged when the band was changing a flat tire on Highway 61 en route from Mississippi to Memphis to record the song. After arriving at the studio, wadded newspapers were stuffed inside the amp's housing in an effort to keep the broken woofer cone in place. The unintentional result was a distorted guitar sound, which Phillips liked and thus left on the recording. 

The mid-1950s incarnation of Ike Turner and His Kings of Rhythm. Jackie Brenston is in the back row, far left; Raymond Hill is to the right of him. Turner, wearing a white jacket, is in the center.

Following the Success of "Rocket 88"—it spent three weeks atop the Billboard R&B chart, plus two at the top of their Most Played Juke Box R&B Records chart—there was a clash of egos between Turner and Brenston, resulting in Brenston leaving the band to go solo, then joining Lowell Fulson's group. He returned to the Kings of Rhythm a couple of years later, with Turner allegedly barring him from singing "Rocket 88." By the 1970s, Brenston had left the music business. Ike became a session musician, a production assistant for Sam Phillips at Sun Studio (as well as the Bihari brothers at Modern/RPM Records), and a freelance talent scout, discovering, among others, Howlin' Wolf, Little Junior Parker, Bobby "Blue" Bland, and Little Milton. In 1956, he met aspiring singer Ann Bullock, who by the early 1960s he had made the lead singer and star of his band, under the stage name Tina. Ike and Tina were married in 1962 and proceeded to write another chapter of R&B / rock 'n' roll history.

The 1954 Essex reissue of Bill Haley's version of "Rocket 88," originally released on Holiday Records in 1951.

An original Chess pressing of "Rocket 88" on 7-inch 45 or 10-inch 78 is something of a holy grail among record collectors. Bill Haley & His Comets (then called Bill Haley & the Saddlemen) covered the song, country swing / rockabilly style, in June of 1951 on Holiday. That record is also much-sought-after by collectors. 

© Jon Oye, 2026 

Records and print ad are from my personal collection. 

Brenston/Turner "Rocket 88" handbill photo source. 

Ike Turner and His Kings of Rhythm photo source. 

Quotation sources are linked.

1965-66: Bob Dylan and the Birth of Rock Sans Roll

You don't have it? That is perverse, don't tell anybody you don't own f***ing Blonde on Blonde!

—Barry Judd, High Fidelity

Part 1.

In the early 1970s, when a wave of 1950s nostalgia hit the American public and struck a chord with the Silent Generation, the phrase "the golden age of rock 'n' roll" was all over the mass media, and so was the music. Suddenly, performers who had become passé in the "Swingin' Sixties," like Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Bill Haley, Little Richard, Bo Diddley, Fats Domino, and Jerry Lee Lewis—the accepted founders of rock 'n' roll—were en vogue once again. A Rock 'n' Roll Revival festival in 1969, the 1972 Broadway musical Grease, and George Lucas' 1973 surprise hit film American Graffiti fed into a collective longing for what was perceived to have been a less complicated time in the not-too-distant past. 

Beginning a few years later, however, as the first wave of baby boomers reached middle age, that 1950s musical zeitgeist was marginalized and eventually nearly forgotten in favor of the era that spawned what is now called "classic rock," which seems to currently represent the genre's golden age.* As Oscar Levant said, "Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember." 

*I've never known Gen-Xers to use terminology like "golden age," but have heard more than a few members of that self-consciously cynical cohort wax nostalgic about the '90s. 

Poster promoting the Toronto Rock 'n' Roll Revival concert, held in September 1969. The concert (and the ensuing D.A. Pennebaker film, released in 1971), featured many seminal rock 'n' roll stars of the previous decade.

Though it was never singled out, let alone given a lofty-sounding name, the pop-rock music of the mid-1960s has been similarly marginalized in more recent years. Tucked between the British Invasion and psychedelia, this brief but visionary epoch doesn't fit neatly into any existing streaming or radio subgenres, shrouding it from mainstream visibility. With no curated outlets spotlighting it, much of the material from that period is virtually nonexistent to modern, algorithm-guided audiences. Exacerbating its plight is a comparatively overwhelming enthusiasm, particularly among baby boomers, for what immediately followed it: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Monterey Pop Festival, the Summer of Love, Woodstock, the rise of FM radio, prog rock, and heavy metal, the Velvet Underground, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Cream, the Doors, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Led Zeppelin, et al.—the dawn of classic rock. 

Over the past forty years, give or take, the late 1960s through the 1970s has represented, thanks to the commercial engines that tend to drive our perception of popular culture, the de facto golden age of rock. A lot of great music came out of that decade-or-so. Yet I can think of no more innovative, creative, and interesting time in the history of the genre since Elvis, Scotty, and Bill got together with Sam Phillips than the ~fifteen-month stretch that predated the perceived classic rock era: roughly from the summer of 1965 into the fall of 1966. Before that fleeting but wildly transformative span of time, there was rock 'n' roll. Afterwards, it was rock. 

The radical conversion that young people's music underwent mid-decade was the creative equivalent of advancing from suborbital flight to space travel. It was then that popular music, fueled by the social, political, and cultural turmoil that was brewing at the time (in some cases with an assist from mind-altering chemicals) started being about something more than just romantic love. Likewise, the sound, the shapes and textures of the music, as well as arrangements and often instrumentation, began to vary, develop, and expand beyond the parameters of what was known up till then. 

The Beatles at the New Musical Express Annual Poll-Winners' All-Star Concert at the Empire Pool in Wembley, London on May 1, 1966. It would be their final scheduled live performance in Great Britain. 

Bob Dylan released the rock benchmark LP Highway 61 Revisited (whose centerpiece was the revolutionary single, "Like a Rolling Stone") in August of 1965. The Beatles' Help! came out in the same month. The Yardbirds' Having a Rave Up hit the streets in November. Rubber Soul, a Beatles turning point, was out on December 3rd, as was the Who's first LP, My Generation, followed later that month by the Byrds' second highly influential folk-rock long-player, Turn! Turn! Turn! Simon and Garfunkel's The Sounds of Silence and the hard-rocking, blues-driven Them Again both appeared in January of 1966. The Young Rascals' and Love's eponymous debuts were available in March. The Rolling Stones' first all-self-composed LP, Aftermath, came out in April and the Beach Boys' transcendent masterpiece Pet Sounds arrived in May. Dylan's double-LP pièce de résistance, Blonde on Blonde, dropped in late June,* a week before Freak Out!, the Mothers of Invention's maiden voyage. The Yardbirds' "Roger the Engineer" (US version: Over Under Sideways Down) and John Mayall's Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton both emerged in July, as did the Byrds' third consecutive great album, the proto-psychedelic Fifth Dimension. Then came the Beatles' game-changing Revolver (its UK incarnation is, in my opinion, their best), which featured the bold, avant-garde "Tomorrow Never Knows," in early August—not to mention their May 1966 single, "Paperback Writer"/"Rain" (the B-side of which also explored new sonic territory). And the Kinks' Face to Face was on the streets in late October, with Buffalo Springfield's self-titled first LP following closely on its heels. Not only were these extraordinary records (and timeless ones—most still sound fresh and vital today, all nostalgia aside), but nearly all of them were also steps forward creatively for their respective artists, in an era that was off the charts as far as breaking new musical ground. 

*For some reason, the U.S. release date of Blonde on Blonde was long thought to have been May 16, 1966 (coincidentally—or not—the day Pet Sounds was released), but evidence shows that it was out no earlier than June 20th. 

The Rolling Stones pose for the UK cover of Aftermath in early 1966. Photo by Guy Webster.

R&B had come a long way since the mid-1950s, when it was still referred to as "race" music, and the popular music being created by Black artists in 1965-66 was arguably more vibrant than it had been at any time since the flourishing years (some would say golden age) of jazz in the 1920s and '30s. James Brown was still proving he was The Hardest Working Man in Show Business, touring relentlessly and releasing three LPs between November 1965 and March 1966, plus the evergreen hit "I Got You (I Feel Good)" in October of '65. Berry Gordy's Motown hit factory in Detroit was at its peak. Stevie Wonder (Uptight, May '66) and Marvin Gaye (Moods of Marvin Gaye, also May '66) were moving forward creatively, while Smokey Robinson and the Miracles released the hit laden Going to a Go-Go in November of '65. The Supremes (I Hear a Symphony, February '66; The Supremes A' Go-Go, August '66), the Four Tops ("Reach Out I'll Be There," August '66), and the Temptations (Gettin' Ready, June '66, and an early portent of funk, "(I Know) I'm Losing You," November '66) were all at or near their zeniths in popularity. Gloria Jones, whose 1960s recordings would fuel the Northern Soul movement in England in the early 1970s, released her first album, Come Go with Me, on LA's Uptown Records label in 1966. Artists at Atlantic and Stax-Volt, like Sam & Dave (Hold On, I'm Comin', April 1966), Wilson Pickett (The Exciting Wilson Pickett, August '66), and Otis Redding (Otis Blue, September '65 and The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul, October '66) et al., were also raising the bar for soul music (Aretha Franklin was still about a year away from stardom), further solidifying the genre's legacy as a significant commercial and artistic presence. 

The first album by Northern Soul pioneer Gloria Jones was issued in 1966.

Return of the Prodigal Band: Beggars Banquet

 Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.

—Matthew 5:13

Nineteen sixty-seven had not been kind to the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Brian Jones were all arrested on drug charges between February and May, and their year-end LP, Their Satanic Majesties Request—an uncharacteristically trendy foray into psychedelia (hey, everybody was doing it)—was roundly lambasted in the press as an anemic attempt at imitating the Beatles’ game-changing Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released that summer. Critic Jon Landau, writing for Rolling Stone magazine, called Majesties “an insecure album in which [the Stones] try too hard to prove that they too are innovators, and that they too can say something new. [. . .] The new ideas are presented in such an undeveloped state that they do not achieve a valid identity of their own.” (Today, Majesties doesn't sound all that bad—it was probably just a matter of poor timing that sentenced it to its undeserved but lingering reputation of being the poster child for rock 'n' roll missteps.)

Prior to the drug busts and Satanic Majesties came Between the Buttons, in January—an album that isn’t without its merits (both in its UK and US iterations), but which suffers somewhat from an overall feel of vacillation and irresolution. It’s as though the band self-consciously tried to absorb as many contemporary influences as possible,* but rather than properly digesting and repurposing those sounds in their own Stones-like image, they only slightly reprocessed them, resulting in an album that comes off as a scattershot semi-entity, some aspects of which sound even more dated today than Majesties.

*Especially the Kinks. Oddly, though, other than the (psychedelicized) Bo Diddley-influenced “Please Go Home,” there’s not much trace of the blues or R&B—hitherto the Stones' raisons d’être. 

As had been the case in 1967, the Stones didn't completely avoid trouble in 1968, a year that is remembered primarily for its violence, assassinations, and political and racial unrest. Their August single, “Street Fighting Man,” was purportedly inspired by an anti-war rally at London's US embassy, in which Jagger had participated, as well as protests in the US that had turned violent, though Keith Richards claimed a couple of years later, “it really is ambiguous as a song.” The 45 was released in the States within a week of the clash between police and protesters outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and, fearing the song might incite further violence, several Chicago radio stations refused to play it. Fueling the flames, the picture sleeve featured a photo of police apparently kicking a fallen demonstrator at a political rally; the sleeve was quickly withdrawn and is now a collector's item. 

It wouldn’t be the last time that year that the Stones would have to bend to The Establishment’s perception of propriety. The cover art for their next album, Beggars Banquet, was initially slated to be a photo of a grimy public restroom, complete with toilet, and its graffiti-covered walls. At the behest of the record company, and despite a dispute from the Stones, the released cover would instead end up being a simple white mock banquet invitation.*

*The cover as it was originally intended was finally released on a reissue of the LP in the 1980s, as well as CD releases.

The proposed original cover for Beggars Banquet.

In the spring the Stones had convened at Olympic Studios in London with Jimmy Miller—the producer of their latest single and bona fide rock classic, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”—in tow to record Beggars Banquet, an album that would herald a return to the blues-rock form from which they had sprung in the early '60s, but with a grittier, more contemporary, world-weary edge. For many, including yours truly, it was with this record that the Stones found their real musical identity and became the force of nature that has ever since come to mind when the name The Rolling Stones is uttered. As Banquet recording engineer Glyn Johns put it, the album marked the Stones’ “coming of age . . . I think that the material was far better than anything they’d ever done before.” If the Beatles were reborn with the release of Sgt. Pepper, the Stones were also with the release of Beggars Banquet. It transformed them from a great singles band (and, IMHO, a merely above average cover band) to a great album band, setting their own course and beholden to no one.

It’s no coincidence that this transformation occurred just as Jimmy Miller entered the Stones’ orbit. Starting with Banquet, he would produce five of their finest albums, four of which—Banquet, Let it Bleed, Sticky Fingers (not entirely produced by Miller, but close enough), and the gold standard for double LPs, Exile on Main St.—are generally counted among the greatest rock albums ever made. They are the four highest ranking Stones LPs on Rolling Stone Magazine’s 2012 list of 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. As Phil Brown, an engineer at Olympic Studios said, “Jimmy Miller was this incredible kind of energy and drive and force. He made the session feel like you wanted to be there and make music. But he wasn’t a hands-on producer. There was more of an overall control, a bit of a vibe” [sic].

Keith Richards, Jimmy Miller, and Mick Jagger. Photo: Robert Altman - Getty Images

The fact that the ouster from the group of the talented but troubled multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones occurred soon after this burst of rock 'n' roll excellence began probably was just a coincidence. Nevertheless, the arrival of the gifted 20-year-old guitarist from John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, Mick Taylor—Jones’ replacement—elevated the overall quality of the Stones’ collective performance to a whole new level, and helped transform them into a great live band (and, IMHO, an excellent cover band, particularly when performing Chuck Berry numbers) in 1969, by which time they were fully firing on all cylinders. Beggars Banquet would be the last Stones album released during Jones’ lifetime.

Banquet’s leadoff track, “Sympathy for the Devil,” the recording of which was documented in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1968 film, One Plus One (AKA Sympathy for the Devil), was emblematic of the tumultuous times in which the album was created. It originally included Mick Jagger's line, “I shouted out, ‘Who killed Kennedy?’,” but when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated while the sessions were taking place—from June 4th through June 10th—the lyric was changed to “Who killed the Kennedys?”. The fierce performance (the energetic samba rhythm coming about under producer Miller’s influence) lays the groundwork for the album, yet it gives no hint as to what lies ahead for first time listeners.  

Pax Pacifica: Donovan’s Reef

This post is part of the John Ford Blogathon, hosted by Krell Laboratories and Bemused and Nonplussed. Oh, and there are spoilers.

John Ford turned fifty-five in 1949, and if his contribution of that year to the all-time roster of cinema classics, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, is any indication, retirement seems to have been on his mind. It’s hard to imagine him not seeing something of himself in Captain Nathan Brittles, the august and honorable but curmudgeonly and slightly antiquated commandant of Fort Starke, whom Ford gives an exalted sendoff, courtesy of Brittles’ extended U.S. Cavalry family.

In 1953’s The Sun Shines Bright, often cited by Ford as one of his personal favorites among his own films, he puts noble, patriarchal old Judge Billy Priest out to pasture as a parade of admirers—Priest’s extended family—passes his home in his honor. A parade of a different type passes the defeated Mayor Frank Skeffington in Ford’s The Last Hurrah in 1958. Unlike Brittles or Priest, Skeffington does have an immediate family, a son. Yet, besides a nephew, his cadre of political cronies—brothers in arms through many campaigns, as it were—comprise his real family . . . not unlike Ford, whose Field Photo Farm he used as a gathering place for former members of the Field Photographic Division of the Office of Strategic Services (a forerunner of the CIA), who had served under Ford’s command during World War II. 

The overarching mood in each of these films is elegiac, melancholy.  

Five years after Hurrah, at the age of sixty-nine, Ford was considered by just about everybody but the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd to be a spent force, a former purveyor of beloved, if sentimental, historical fare and Westerns, despite his well-received, reflective elegy to the Old West and scathing exposé on western myth of the previous year, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. By this time Ford—once one of Hollywood’s elite directors, with six Academy Awards to his credit—needed the star power of his perennial leading man and alter ego John Wayne (whose career Ford had set on its upward course with 1939’s groundbreaking Stagecoach) to guarantee box office success for, and studio interest in, a film project. Yet he seems to have come to terms with his own perceived antiquity in the generally upbeat Donovan’s Reef.

Often dismissed as a brawling romp (which it is, up to a point), Donovan’s Reef, scripted by James Edward Grant and Ford veteran Frank S. Nugent, unfolds much like Ford’s The Wings of Eagles, with liberal doses of broad, free-for-all slapstick, transitioning into a serene, if not sober, reverie. Ford’s image of the dustbin of history, the purgatory of social impotence into which old soldiers are relegated, however laudatory their sendoffs (think of Spig Wead in Wings and Marty Maher in The Long Gray Line), has morphed into permanent residency in a tropical paradise, albeit a flawed one (as will be discussed below)—a Valhalla of sorts, according to film scholar Peter Wollen. The mood is lighthearted, especially for later Ford. The mortal enemies of Liberty Valance, John Wayne and Lee Marvin, have become friendly combatants who are bound by a shared birthday (significantly, December 7^th) and having fought side by side in the Pacific in the Second World War. 

Ford and Wayne on location for Donovan's Reef.

The film opens with “Boats” Gilhooley (Marvin) diving off a merchant ship after realizing he’s been shanghaied, and swimming to the nearby island of Haleakaloha, French Polynesia, which, we come to realize, is his annual destination on December 7th, where he carries out the time-honored tradition of a birthday brawl with his old Navy buddy, “Guns” Donovan (Wayne). Later it is revealed that, following World War II, Donovan and his (and Gilhooley’s) former commanding officer, “Doc” Dedham (Jack Warden), made their homes on Haleakaloha, which they had defended against the Japanese, guerilla style, during the late war. Doc’s wife passed away while he was overseas and, though he had a young daughter back home in Boston, opted to stay in the island chain, where his physician’s skills were desperately needed by the natives. Donovan built a saloon—the Donovan’s Reef of the title—and Doc married Manulani, the granddaughter of the last hereditary prince of the islands. He had three children with her; she died giving birth to the third. His daughter by his first wife, Amelia (Elizabeth Allen), now an adult, stands to inherit enough stock from her great aunt to give her a controlling interest in the family shipping business if she can prove her father—to whom the shares were bequeathed—to be of less than acceptable moral character, “by Boston standards.” Donovan and Gilhooley get wind of her coming to Haleakaloha to meet her father.

As in all of Maine native Ford’s works, Boston is a breeding ground for all manner of screwballs, and it is presumed by those close to Doc that Amelia is a racist. Thus, a plot is hatched—unbeknownst to the doctor, who is currently on the outer islands ministering to the sick—by Donovan, Gilhooley, the local Catholic priest, Father Cluzeot (Marcel Dalio), and the governor of the island, Marquis Andre de Lage (Cesar Romero) to lead Amelia to believe that Doc’s children by Manulani belong to Donovan until Doc returns and can tell her in his own way that they are his. The kids and their belongings are removed from his house and are taken, in an almost funereal procession/parade, to Donovan’s living quarters above his saloon.

Next to the Governor, who is not much more than a scheming Lothario and a comic, benign descendant of Raymond Massey’s martinet of an island governor in Ford’s The Hurricane, Amelia is the nearest thing to a villain in Donovan’s Reef. But before all is said and done we, and the plotters, eventually realize that our/their presumption of racism on her part was unfounded. She and her eccentric, haughty assemblage of relatives are certainly no match for the controlling, bigoted WASP brain trust of the “New England City” of The Last Hurrah.

De Lage (Cesar Romero) attempts to charm Amelia 

(Elizabeth Allen) onto his list of conquests.

Nevertheless, other forms of racism do exist within this island community, a quasi-paradise at best: remnants of French imperialism, racism toward “half-castes,” de Lage’s Amherst-educated Chinese assistant’s prejudice toward his own “barbarian” countrymen. Ford also reminds us, through Amelia’s substituting “Donovan” with the first Irish name that comes into her head—a motif that would show up the following year in Cheyenne Autumn—that Irish-Americans were discriminated against for many years. There is jealousy: Miss Lafleur (Dorothy Lamour, another callback to The Hurricane), sees Amelia as a threat, and treats her with disdain. There is nepotism: the pampered, pompous Governor de Lage is cousin to the French minister of foreign affairs. It is a microcosm of society, warts and all.

Yet “pax” (a running gag between Donovan and Amelia*) can be achieved there. At a time when the world was in the deepest throes of the Cold War and religious unrest was beginning to rear its head in the Middle East and Northern Ireland, there is coexistence between various races and religions in Ford’s paradise. Catholicism lives peaceably alongside traditional Polynesian beliefs and rituals. One of the markers in the church graveyard bears a Star of David. Native leis decorate the cross that marks Princess Manulani's grave on Christmas Day. Multiple races, cultures, and nationalities inhabit the islands, and all are allowed to live as they choose. While the white, Western minority is unmistakably the ruling class, according to the then-accepted post-WWII model, it rules with a soft touch, with benevolence and tolerance. 

*Pax Americana is a term that was used by then-sitting President John F. Kennedy. Amelia mentions the Kennedy family late in the film.