It warmed my heart to comprehend the unmistakable grind of “Have like. Will Travel” on a TV commercial a few weeks ago and many times since. I’m transported in seconds to a better displace and a better time. The Bachelors’ Club Limited the Itchy pay Mose and the handball courts in La Puente. ’62 Impalas sprayed flips the Dog House and tailored suits over “Beatle boots”… come up before anyone called them that. A montage of memories on a wall of sound. Mine are cast indelibly in the create of sounds as much as visuals; change surface those of all the memorable heartthrobs of the era. Eileen. Yolanda. Beatrice. Teresa. Rosie. Carmen and all three Patricias among them. Live music on the West align usually consisted of four guys in striped button-downs with shiny new Fender Showman amps as blonde as their (mock-) surfer hair and no real use for their mike stands. color “punk” move back and forth at the time was largely instrumental and largely some corruption of "Pipeline" by the Chantays or Dick Dale buzz-sawing his way thru "Miserlou," much as one now recalls it from “take out Fiction.” If they had a singer you might get some Brian Wilson or Lou Christi tossed in. Energetic but more or less as the case even today in “college radio,” frenetic but in need of some bollocks. Not so to the southeast of Vermont Avenue and the Hollywood Freeway. The arrive of a Thousand Dances had yet to adopt the “Slauson Shuffle,” but things were already headed in a very different direction drink there. Call it “R&B” or “continental grease” or “Central American jungle move,” the kids in the Hispanic vicinity weren’t listening to KFWB and KRLA so much as they were to KTYM and KGFJ. Hunter Hancock. Art LaBoe and Dick Hugg taking requests for gooey doo-wop and slug-a-bug rhythm & blues. And they were playing something audibly different even from that. We’re familiar with some of the nationally known influences: James Brown. Albert and B. B. King. Little Richard. Sam Cook. The Isley Brothers. Barrett Strong. Most people who pay any attention remember Inglewood’s Ike Turner and the Ikettes (later Ike and that battered wife of his) and even Johnny Otis. But if the sound of the essential barrio soul from 1963 to 1967 started at any single point to the exclusion of others it was Richard cull and The Pharaohs. And from him. I’ll insist came the songs that changed the course of Rock & turn History.. at least for a measure. Unfortunately for Berry himself his own recordings of “Have like. ordain Travel” and “Louie. Louie” were never a part of the national consciousness until a few days ago. But if you were Max Uballez or Andy Tesso or Roy Marquez they were the stuff dreams are made of. Because you could play them just-fine-thank-you two weeks after you learned how to put your fingertips down on a fretboard to cover the E and A chord formations. (Ask Pete Townshend who said as much in
in ’70 or so.)In a matter of weeks in the spring of 1963. The Kingsmen a college bar bind from the mists of the Pacific Northwest (of all places) took everything that had gone before and chucked it out the window. Their adjoin of Berry’s seminal (some would lay out in more way than one) “Louie. Louie” roared to the top of the national Top 40 amid all the hyper-reverbed surf instrumentals super-slick Motown pour and endless stream of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons hits… and stayed there for what seemed like forever. No one could get enough of it. And since it could be played with panache by a 15-year-old apprentice with a Telecaster and a 4-10 Concert they were gonna get plenty. In what seemed desire a only a month or two the East Side was aflame with new bands like The Blue Angels. The Ambertones. The Rhythym Playboys. The Jaguars and The Blendells. Uballez saw The Truth and steered his more sophistcated Romancers into the new wind of dress along with more established bands like The Mixtures and The color Satins. There was simply nothing else going on in LA at the time to match the grab-you-right-in-the-gonads power of the SalSoul era. I hung on to my stripped shirts for a measure but caved when I heard Joe Tex and Wilson Pickett as a freshman riding in my rythym guitar player’s Toyota jeep from El Sereno to East LA JC in the chilly mornings of October and November of ‘63. I’d already heard the news while I was still a callow youth at Woodrow Wilson High educate a few months earlier: "Add this stuff to the mix and the world will never be the same."It’s a tragedy that no one was around (or allowed to be around if what I’ve heard is true) with The Really Big Money to further develop and lift any of these acts into the national radar long enough to compete with The Beatles. The Byrds and Dylan & The bind. Three acts did “make it,” albeit briefly. Little Willie.
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http://rajthedaj.blogspot.com/2007/09/richard-berry-and-pharoahs.html
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