Manfred Mann - 5 4 3 2 1

This is a nice cut from an early Manfred Mann LP. It's all very professional, very commercial, but there's more to it. It has a spark that was lacking in professional, commercial pop music from just a couple of years earlier. Manfred Mann are not unique in this. Something was happening in pop music beginning in 1963 and coming to full fruition in '64 or '65. There had been a dead spot that started in 1958 or so and lasted almost five years. Then, all of a sudden, "it's alive!!!"

You can see it clearly if you listen to the first recorded efforts of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, any of the bigs, and also in the work of the also rans. Their early material was on the dull side. Then listen to the work of the same bands in 1964 and '65. What had been competent and professional and all kinds of other boring adjectives suddenly became not only proficient, but also wildly enthusiastic and a lot more creative. This phenomenon was observable in America too. After the dull days of Neil Sedaka, Fabian, and Frankie Avalon (relieved, of course, by the fabulous work that was restricted to the black charts), there suddenly appeared the Beach Boys and all kinds of records backed by the Wrecking Crew in L.A., and the similar studio outfits in New York, New Orleans, Memphis, and Muscle Shoals. Dr. Frankenstein had found the right formula of chemicals and energy fields. It was all alive!!!

And no, it was not the Beatles who drove this revolution. They were influenced along with everyone else, benefiting from the work of Phil Spector, Bobby Robinson (Fury Records), Ike Turner, Al Bell (Stax Records), and a host of others, who had been filling up the mid-range of the pop charts with the wonderful antidote to that bland, awful pop music at the top of the charts. Young musicians in America and Europe, and also in places like Japan, Brazil, and Indonesia, were listening closely to those records. The rest is history! 

Manfred Mann were underrated, a common fate for English Invasion bands. They were serious musicians, detail oriented, and very entertaining. Go find a greatest hits CD and buy it. You won't be disappointed. 

Tarheel Slim - Number 9 Train (Fury 1016)

Number Nine Train

The guitar moved forward in the mix all through the 1950s, while the sax began a gradual process of being squeezed out. This cut was released in 1958, and there's not a saxophone in sight. In the place usually occupied by the horns, two or three guitars stir the roux all through the song, while one fellow cuts loose towards the end with a killer guitar solo. 

I don't read much about it, but recording technology and the electrification of the guitar had a lot to do with changing instrumentation over the course of the entire 20^th Century. While guitars were straight-up acoustic, the banjo was a necessary part of a jazz band. It was the only stringed thing loud enough to cut through the horns. Horns make a terrible racket. If there's a sax player in the group, sometimes you just have to tell the guy, “please, don't aim that thing at me.” The horns could drown out a guitar, no problem.

Then came decent guitar amps and better microphones in the Thirties, and the guitar moved up at the expense of the banjo. Before long, the banjo was a rare thing to see in a jazz outfit. The guitars were still regular hollow wooden boxes with lousy pick-ups on them. They were okay for chords, and could generate some volume, but feedback was a problem, and horns still took most of the solos.

The clarinet was popular there for a while for reasons somewhat analogous to the banjo. They have such a high, penetrating sound that they could be heard over any racket that the band could make. 

That was it throughout the Forties. In the early 1950s, Les Paul and Leo Fender simultaneously introduced very good solid body electric guitars with much better pick-ups. And Leo also came out with some new amps that could just blow like hurricanes. It was a few years before the guitarists got the nerve to really push those amps, but guys like Guitar Slim really started to have some fun. Distortion lost its stigma and was no longer considered to be a problem. By the time Number Nine Train came out, guitars were taking over.

The drums were still a problem. The mics of the time just weren't up to the challenge of accurately recording drums. On a lot of mid-1950s rock and roll records, the drum part was recorded by putting a mic inside a cardboard box and playing a simple part on the box. All of that had been sorted out by the early 1960s, and thereupon rock and roll took over the world.

I love songs like Number Nine Train, and I love artists like Tarheel Slim, and I'm grateful to record producers like Bobby Robinson, of Fury Records and many other smaller labels. This is one of his records. Bobby had a great ear and the energy to put the whole show together and sell it. Without guys who can do that, we're all just sitting under a tree strumming the blues for the birds.