#goffin and king

[tavolgisvist]

A recording made by a Beatles’ fan at the Cavern around June 1962 was bought by Paul McCartney at Sotheby’s in 1985. He only paid £2,310 for the tape and bootleg versions do not exist. The Beatles’ set list was: ‘Words of Love’ ‘What’s Your Name’ ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ ‘Ask Me Why’ ‘Hippy Hippy Shake’ ‘Till There Was You’ ‘If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody’ ‘Please Mr Postman’ ‘Sharing You’ ‘Your Feet’s Too Big’ ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’ ‘I Forgot to Remember to Forget’ ‘Matchbox’ ‘I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate’ ‘Memphis, Tennessee’, ‘Young Blood’ and ‘Dream Baby’.

(Best of the Beatles: The sacking of Pete Best by Spencer Leigh, 2015)

[i-am-the-oyster]

In this rehearsal of Don't Let Me Down John repeatedly improvises

Oh keep your hands off my baby

Possibly a reference to this song:

I don't know if the link will go directly to the track. If not, you want to select the circle 14 from the end and go to the track Don't Let Me Down 29.09

[henriduree]

Song-Sonntag 22 25

[travsd]

On Goffin and King

I apologize in advance because for the rest of the day and surely for several days afterward your head will be full of the songs of Gerry Goffin (1939-2014) and Carole King (b. 1942) — I mean more than usual. King’s birthday is February 9; Goffin’s, February 11. Goffin and King were Jewish kids from Brooklyn who met and came together as students at Queens College. King (who has perfect pitch)…

[get-back-homeward]

This one record effectively launched the “girl-group sound”—R&B with beat, rhythm, melody and harmony—and no musical force beyond rock and roll was ever as crucial to the Beatles’ development. The Shirelles were four 19-year-old black girls from Passaic High School in New Jersey who came under the wing of Florence Greenberg, the mother of one of their school friends; Greenberg owned her own independent record label, Scepter, based ten miles from Passaic, in New York City. The tapestry of the American music business was already enhanced beyond measure by the creative partnership of blacks and Jews, and a bright new chapter opened with “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” the greatest teenage love song of the period and the first record by a black female group to top the US charts. Greenberg ran Scepter Records from an office at 1650 Broadway and West 51st Street. Her choice as Scepter’s in-house producer was Luther Dixon, 29, a black singer-songwriter-arranger; “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” was written by a composer partnership new to those who studied record labels: the husband-and-wife pairing of Gerry Goffin and Carole King, 21 and 18, words and music respectively. They numbered among an array of talented young songwriting teams who arrived each day at the same building to work for the publishing company Aldon Music. Each pairing, and a piano, were squeezed into neighboring cubicles in a modern Tin Pan Alley scenario—a Teen Pan Alley. Almost all the songs that lit up the first half of the twentieth century were written in similar circumstances twenty-three blocks south of here—tunes for musicals, films, dance fads and hits; now they were being written for seven-inch vinyl discs and the teenagers who bought them.

At 1650 Broadway, and in offices at the Brill Building across and farther down Broadway at 1619, it seemed everyone was the child or grandchild of European Jews.† There was Goffin and King, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, and Neil Sedaka and Howie Greenfield, writing songs for producers like Phil Spector and Jerry Wexler. Sedaka sang the numbers he and Greenfield wrote, but otherwise the pairings created a host of classy compositions for different performers. Often these were black girl-groups, urban teenagers who’d honed their voices and harmonies by singing gospel music in church. And they were girls singing to girls, a revolutionary departure in pop music.

Gender didn’t stop the Beatles (or other Liverpool groups) singing these numbers—a good song was a good song and that was enough for them. John grabbed “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” and Paul and George took the backing vocals, and while there’s no recording of them doing it, several say it had extraordinary power and tenderness, like another “To Know Her Is to Love Her.” To the Beatles, to John and Paul especially, the composer credit Goffin-King would become nothing less than trademark of quality, sufficient in itself to make them listen to or buy a record, and rarely were they disappointed.

Then they flipped the record over and discovered the B-side, a song called “Boys.” This wasn’t Goffin and King’s work but almost entirely the creation of Luther Dixon, who cowrote, arranged and produced. Dixon was the creator of the Shirelles sound that the Beatles loved—another name for them to sleuth on record labels. “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” works beautifully with strings, “Boys” is big-beat R&B, the backing singers up front. That’s how the Beatles did it. John sang lead and Paul and George gave full support, the two of them leaning in toward the microphone, laughing and harmonizing bop-shoo-op-abop-bop-shoo-op into each other’s faces, or sometimes, on appropriate occasions, bobwooler-abob-bobwooler. If they realized it was a girls’ song about boys, it didn’t matter. While several Liverpool groups did “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” the Beatles were one of only three to sing “Boys.” King-Size Taylor and the Dominoes did it, and so did Rory Storm and the Hurricanes: it became the latest specialty number in Ringo’s popular nightly Starrtime! spot—and he didn’t change the gender either.

—Tune In, Ch. 18 (January to March 1961)

Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow | The Shirelles (1960)

[guessimdumb]

Aretha Franklin - Oh No, Not My Baby (1970)

Maxine Brown's 1964 version sounds much more sweet and innocent, but Aretha adds her own touch, sounding a bit older and wiser.

[kdo-three]

The Chiffons - One Fine Day (1963) Carole King / Gerry Goffin from: "One Fine Day" / "Why Am I So Shy" (Single) "One Fine Day" (LP)

Rock/Pop | Girl Group | Brill Building Sound

@Archive (left click = play) (320kbps)

FLAC File @Archive (left click = play) (648kbps) (Size: 9.88MB)

Personnel: The Chiffons: Judy Craig: Lead Vocals Patricia Bennett Barbara Lee Sylvia Peterson

Studio Personnel: Carole King: Piano Carl Lynch: Guitar Charles Marcy: Guitar Artie Kaplan: Saxophone Sid Jekowsky: Saxophone Joe Grimaldi: Saxophone Dick Romoff: Bass Gary Chester: Drums Buddy Saltzman: Drums

Produced by The Tokens

Recorded: @ Laurie Records Studios in New York City, New York USA May, 1963

Single Released: May, 1963 Album Released: September, 1963 Laurie Records

'One Fine Day' is considered a prime example of the "Brill Building Sound"

[balthazar-sketti]

"The Porpoise Song"

The Monkees, 1968

[courseyoulovemeyoudontknowme]

Seven Pounds (2008, Gabriele Muccino)

26/08/2024

[ilovedig]

1966, King, Goffin and Michael Nesmith

I listen for your footsteps (Sweet young thing) And your knock upon the door

1968, Ringo Starr

I listen for your footsteps coming up the drive Listen for your footsteps, but they don't arrive Waiting for your knock, dear, on my old front door

Related? I'm not sure, but it's not the only time I've heard a Monkees song and thought it was inspired by a Beatles song until I realized the Monkees song came first.

[davidhudson]

Happy 82nd, Carole King.

With Al Nevins and Gerry Goffin.

[tavolgisvist]

Diana Mothershaw, who worked at Rushworth’s, remembers Paul McCartney coming into the store regularly in 1962: “He loved Carole King’s ‘It Might As Well Rain Until September’ and he would go on about Goffin and King. He and John wanted to be songwriters like that.”

(Best of the Beatles: The sacking of Pete Best by Spencer Leigh, 2015)

to this

[krispyweiss]

Livingston Taylor at Grandview Heights High School, Grandview Heights, Ohio, March 22, 2025

Whenever he finds himself “moderately discouraged” by the news, Livingston Taylor picks up his acoustic guitar and sings “Over the Rainbow.”

He did so again at his March 22 show at Grandview Heights High School, getting the auditorium to sing along in a sublime moment of Liv’s shades-of-older-brother-James’ vocals floating softly under some 300 hushed voices before rising to the top for the resolving question: Why can’t I?

So ended Taylor’s latest performance for Six String Concerts, the Central Ohio nonprofit concert series he helped launch by headlining its first gig all the way back in 1988.

There was something appropriate about a college professor - Taylor taught stage performance classes, counting Susan Tedeschi and Molly Tuttle among his students, at Berklee College of Music for more than three decades - working his craft in a high school. And Taylor, dressed in a sweater vest and bow tie with a rainbow guitar strap, made the most of his 85 minutes, with a combination of hilarity (“I don’t get this look by not teaching college,” he said), originals like “Kitty Hawk, December 1903” and such covers as “Getting to Know You,” Laura Nyro’s “Sweet Blindness” and other “Wizard of Oz” numbers like “If I Only Had a Brain” and “The Merry Old Land of Oz.”

The setting was so intimate, Taylor delivered much of his between-song banter off-mic as he walked between the U.S. flag and Ohio burgee flanking the stage like a comedian doing a bit. He was self-deprecating and reflective as he talked about the fleeting muse; his favorite songwriters (Rogers and Hammerstein, Goffin and King among them); and gave the audience permission to leave early if the single-set format left them antsy or bored.

“I’m glad to have you as long as I can,” he said.

The same could be said for the fans who raptly absorbed such originals as “Everybody’s Just Like Me” and laughed heartily at “Olympic Guitar,” in which Taylor doubles as a musical athlete who got a chance at a medal after Leo Kottke was injured, and the TV network’s color commentator.

Taylor, 74, also played piano, where he offered the new - and utterly devastating - “Too Old to Dream,” and banjo, on which he played “Henry” and a medley of “Jailhouse Rock,” “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before,” “You’re So Vain” and “New York, New York,” thus showcasing numbers that “should never, ever, be played on the banjo.”

But Taylor is a master of making things work that otherwise shouldn’t, whether revealing the hidden beauty in the theme from “Arthur” and “Here You Come Again” or by illustrating how humor can easily fit into the generally serious genre of folk music, as when the titular “Railroad Bill” goes rogue and refuses to save a kitten stuck in a tree:

I’m the writer, goddam, I got the pen in my hand/and you’re supposed to listen to me, Taylor sung before switching roles.

He said, you asshole/why should I listen to you, you should be listening to me instead/he said I’m a railroad man and if I was real, I’d separate your face from your head

While that thankfully didn’t happen, one thing did: on a Saturday night in Ohio’s capital, where protests were the order of the afternoon, Taylor - at least temporarily - separated Mr. and Mrs. Sound Bites’ more-than-moderate discouragement their brains in a much-needed respite from a world going mad.

Grade card: Livingston Taylor at Grandview Heights High School - 3/22/25 - A

3/23/25

[mywifeleftme]

360: Dusty Springfield // Dusty Springfield's Golden Hits

Dusty Springfield's Golden Hits Dusty Springfield 1966, Philips

These early Dusty Springfield singles really get the “Wall of Sound” production treatment, despite Mr. Spector’s absence from the credits: mixed loud as hell like the kids liked it, screaming string charts, backing vocals en regalia, and a big beat knocking around underneath. Folks love to cite her as the second artist of the British Invasion to hit the U.S. charts, and for cultural reasons that may be significant, but her early sound was indistinguishable from American acts like Lesley Gore and the Shirelles. I don’t know many of the details about her career, but it seems like whoever was managing her was hell-bent on breaking her in the States. Call it a credit to English ingenuity (and specifically arranger Ivor Raymonde) that they were able to give Springfield a knock-out sound that passes for the contemporary Hollywood (or Detroit) product.

Dusty Springfield’s Golden Hits, her first major compilation, is Brill Building / girl group-style music par excellence, with a murderer’s row of hitwriters from both sides of the pond (Bacharach/David, Goffin/King, Beatrice Verdi/Buddy Kaye, etc.). Practically anyone could’ve had chart success with these songs and this packaging (and a number of these were subsequently hits for others), but Springfield had a cannon of a voice on her that makes the best of these numbers undeniable. Those who place her voice with the Arethas and Dionne Warwicks wish she’d been guided towards soul or sophisticated torch songs from the start, but I personally love it when someone vocally overqualified for bubblegum is made to tear into a good bop. “I Only Want to Be With You” is buffeted along by the force of her voice, the violins shrieking like a 33rpm record dragged up to 45; “Little By Little” could’ve been written for a Motown powerhouse like Darlene Love (but scarcely improved on by her); “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself” moves from the sound of a girl sadly combing her hair before her vanity to Sampson bringing down the temple.

There’s plenty of treacle here, and “Wishin’ and Hopin’” probably set feminism further back than “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss),” but this is a worthy addition to any ‘60s pop library.

360/365

[singeratlarge]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Billie Joe Armstrong, Michael Bay, The Beatles’s 1967 single “Penny Lane,” Jim Brown, Narciso Casanovas, Arcangelo Corelli, musician Andrew Crowley, Buddy DeFranco, Vicente Fernández, Fred Frith, Rowdy Gaines, Taylor Hawkins, Hal Holbrook, Paris Hilton, Arthur Hunnicutt, Michael Jordan, José José, Isaac Kappy, Alicia Key’s 2004 single “If I Ain’t Got You,” Larry the Cable Guy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Mickey McGill (The Dells), Loreena McKennitt, Lola Montez, Chanté Moore, Huey P. Newton, Jerry O’Connell, Banjo Paterson, Lou Diamond Phillips, Puccini’s 1904 opera MADAME BUTTERFLY, Denise Richards, Rene Russo, Ed Sheeran, Sivakarthikeyan, The Temptations 1969 CLOUD NINE album, Buck Trent, Margaret Truman, Henri Vieuxtemps, and the consummate vocalist and songwriter Gene Pitney. He brought depth to simple pop songs, crafting choice cuts for Rick Nelson, Roy Orbison, Bobby Vee, and (famously) “He’s a Rebel” for The Crystals. Like Bryan Ferry, Gene had a powerful and unique vocal technique that seizes ownership of any song or style. I also compare Gene to Harry Nilsson because they were branded as songwriters but had hit records from songs they didn’t write. Gene’s popular arc in the USA ran from 1961-68, but he continued to draw international audiences, particularly for his Italian language records (I’m a big fan of “Lei Mei Espatta”). His career intersected with Marc Almond, Burt Bacharach, George Jones, The Rolling Stones, Phil Spector, and other eclectic notables, and he kept touring literally till the day he died in 2006.

Please enjoy my cover of Gene’s “Every Breath I Take” (written by Goffin/King). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PZcTHaYjfA Another GP “deep cut” I recommend is “Somewhere in the Country,” a densely orchestrated goth-folk-pop track akin to early Bee Gees. Meanwhile, HB to GP—thank you for your amazing music!

#genepitney #bryanferry #thecrystals #marcalmond #ricknelson #royorbison #rebel #harrynilsson #burtbacharach #georgejones #rollingstones #philspector #bobbyvee #goffinking #johnnyjblair

[guessimdumb]

Earl-Jean - I’m Into Something Good (1964)

This Goffin-King song was made famous by Herman’s Hermits, but this is the wonderful original by Earl-Jean McCrea of the Cookies.

The Cookies - I Never Dreamed