Fever (12 page)

“The Tears of a Clown” was way ahead of its time. During its 1970 chart run, it sat beside “Lola,” which told the story of a man seduced on the dance floor by a transvestite—or was it a man who'd had a sex change? Or a macho woman with a low voice? The transvestite was not a common image at the time; there was no RuPaul, only the occasional weird female impersonator who went on
Ed Sullivan
and tricked you into thinking he was Barbra Streisand or Peggy Lee.

Well I left home just a week before

And I never ever kissed a woman before

But Lola smiled and took me by the hand …

Said little boy I'm gonna make you a man

It's a wonder the Kinks broke through with “Lola” at a time when even David Bowie had something to learn from it—or fashion a persona around. “Lola” expressed something that the seventies would spend a lot of time unraveling: a young man's inability to get a handle on what manhood was all about, and what his sexual impulses were telling him. If early rock had presented the dance floor as a metaphor for everyday life, a playground for ideas, and a gateway to romance, this song posited the dance floor as a trap, a deliriously happy place to discover that things are not what they seem, where one's feelings can be flipped around in unexpected and frightening ways. Combined with “The Tears of a Clown,” it spelled out how much rock manhood was still sorting itself out.

As if this weren't enough, Robinson wrote one of the more self-conscious gender songs in rock's catalog, and it's not a number many people know him for. “(You Can't Let the Boy Overpower) The Man in You” didn't crack Top 40 back in 1964, but it's vintage Smokey, from the fatherly advice (since we already heard Mom's) right down to the details: “No matter how old a man he's partly a boy in his heart,” and “When it comes to the way you treat your woman, you can't let the boy in you overpower the man…”

As both writer and singer, Smokey Robinson's work is emblematic of the new ideas about gender that emerge in the wake of Elvis Presley and girl groups. Robinson doesn't have any Hollywood analogs; there few major motion picture stars with the androgynous qualities he revels in (never mind
black
stars), and his presence in Motown's pantheon created a daring new sensibility in the gender polarities of the day. If he was a man who used his feminine qualities to win over women, surely he influenced women who adopted male tactics as they sought political parity. Robinson is the master of gender imagery during this period, a songwriter who sang like an angel, and a man with enough confidence to exploit his feminine powers.

*   *   *

All of Motown's girl groups, and the white outfits they were formed to compete with, galvanized the British Invasion boy bands in unpredictable ways. The best girl groups mixed a sweetness of spirit with a toughness of energy that provided major inspiration for the early Beatles' blend of hairy-chested beat and coy melody. Even when the Crystals were idolizing the outsider in “He's a Rebel,” or the Shangri-Las were deploying motorcycle noises for the “Leader of the Pack,” the tone of these records was remarkably close in spirit to the young Elvis Presley: a light self-consciousness that made all the danger and sexuality irresistible. “Leave Us Alone,” by Reparata and the Delrons, announces defiantly to parents: “Leave us alone/You were young once too/And we're no different than you” capped off with an imperious “Tra-la-la-la, la!” Those wonderful “tra-la-la”s in and of themselves epitomize the genre's sincere threat all decked up in naïveté.

So seductive was this tone and worldview, girl groups would be the only hit sound to compete with the British Invasion once the Beatles hit America in February of 1964, and it continued to thrive right up through the heyday of psychedelia in 1967, when Martha and the Vandellas' “Jimmy Mack” hit the charts. The British Invasion brought guitar bands to the forefront of rock, but they did it by adapting the girl-group concept as the premier pop format. The hallowed sixties “microcosm of community” was women's work; following the example of the Shirelles, the Cookies, the Marvelettes and the Ronettes, even the rowdiest of men (John Lennon, Keith Richards, Keith Moon) felt more comfortable making music in ensembles than they did on their own.

The Beatles were such girl-group fans that they insisted on meeting songwriting partners Gerry Goffin and Carole King on their first trip to New York. Lennon and McCartney wanted to be the next Goffin and King, and Beatle covers of girl-group numbers dramatized their view of pop history. Through songs like the Cookies' “Chains,” the Marvelettes' “Please Mr. Postman,” and the Shirelles' “Baby It's You” and “Boys,” the Beatles diagram the songwriters and personas they idolized, equating this material to the best of what men were doing (Smokey Robinson and the Miracles' “You've Really Got a Hold on Me,” Chuck Berry's “Roll Over Beethoven” and Buddy Holly's “Words of Love”) for a true democracy of gender ideals. Before Beatlemania, the standard Beatle live set included Little Eva's “Keep Your Hands off My Baby,” Ann-Margret's “I Just Don't Understand,” and the Shirelles' “Mama Said” and “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow”; Paul had even sung Marlene Dietrich's “Falling in Love Again (Can't Help It).”

And the girl-group influence on guy groups extended to their worship of Phil Spector's production. Spector made his first trip to England with the Ronettes in 1964, who opened for the Rolling Stones at the suggestion of the Stones' manager, Andrew Loog Oldham. While there, Spector oversaw production of the Stones's “Not Fade Away,” the Buddy Holly number that became the band's first American top-ten hit. The Beatles' enthusiasm for Spector's work can be measured by how they steered clear of recording Spector material. Like Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, this was one hero whom they perceived as out of their considerable reach. (Lennon would later record a reverential “Be My Baby” for his
Rock 'n' Roll
sessions with Spector in the early seventies.)

So just what did all these guys hear in the seductive girl-group material they covered? The secret theme of girl-group numbers sung by men is how men inflected these female stances with something besides the masculine. They heard contrary messages in what females listeners heard as their own, and reworked the sounds to express not just male adolescence but male confusion about maleness. The Beatles, with their androgynous long hair and phallic guitars, fully brought gender conundrums to pop's forefront: suddenly, the guy-group sound was as strikingly similar in spirit to girl groups' as it was strikingly different in effect.

Guys covering girl-group material was a new development in pop. Tina Turner could change the lyrics and sing “Save the Last Dance for Me” to her beau, and British groups covered American material with completely different ideas about how it might be performed, interpreted, and understood. But can anybody imagine Bobby Darin or Eddie Cochrane or Chuck Berry singing Connie Francis's “Stupid Cupid”? Brenda Lee's “I'm Sorry”? Naturally, no guys stepped up to play the Shirelles' biggest hit, “Soldier Boy,” but the Beatles got a lot of mileage by giving the Shirelles' “Boys” to Ringo; and their version of “Baby It's You” hits new depths of feeling without sounding the least bit feminine—and the young John Lennon took homophobic pains to avoid the effeminate taboo. You don't hear men translating something from the feminine perspective in these tracks; you hear identification with something less gender specific, more universal, and more expansive than, say, Fabian's “Turn Me Loose” big-shouldered desire. (Actually, Elvis Presley himself did a song called “Soldier Boy,” but it was a simple rewrite of the Shirelles' narrative, a promise from a bunkmate about how women prized lovers in uniform.)

In the hands of many guy groups, British or otherwise, a lot of this girl-group material transcends gender. On one hand, girls are expressing something fundamentally female; on another, the sexual themes connect with both guy fans and guy groups. As it turns out, the intentions behind some classic girl-group material were slippery. Goffin and King wrote “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?”—one of girl groups' defining moments—specifically for Johnny Mathis. King's “It Might as Well Rain Until September” (1962) was intended for Bobby Vee.

Of course, this gender recontextualization wasn't limited to the girl-group genre. Otis Redding wrote and recorded “Respect” before Aretha Franklin made it hers, and Gladys Knight and the Pips had done “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” before Marvin Gaye nailed it. In fact, even the earliest of girl-group hits, “Oop Shoop,” by Shirley Gunter and the Queens, was a bigger hit for men. “Oop Shoop” hit the R&B charts in October of 1954 and rose to number 8, but the Crew-Cuts' cover of the same song immediately knocked Gunter off her throne and went on to the pop charts. So the old line about girl groups being mere pawns in a men's game doesn't get at the ambiguities at the core of rock's gender debate. Men may have held more power, but their regard for female musical energy says a lot about the extraordinary effect rock's women had on men.

The Beatles also covered Phil Spector's “To Know Her Is to Love Her” for BBC radio, which was originally a hit for his Teddy Bears (led by singer Annette Kleinbard). The Donays' “Devil in Her Heart” was a platform for George Harrison's supine delivery, as was the Cookies' “Chains.” Lennon tore up the Marvelettes' “Please Mr. Postman,” making it a political gauntlet—a guy who sounded like he was ready to kill his postman to get his girl. And all this material influenced what Lennon and McCartney began to write: “This Boy” is the kind of doo-wop echo girls would have wanted a guy group to sing to them; other songs, like “Tell Me Why,” “I'm Happy Just to Dance with You,” and “Yes It Is,” have a distinct girl-group feel. But the Beatles were only the most visible girl-group admirers. Elvis Presley sang “Bossa Nova Baby,” which was first done by Tippie and the Clovers in 1962; the Hollies released “I Can't Let Go” in March of 1966, a mere four months after the Evie Sands original; Herman's Hermits redid Goffin/King's “I'm Into Something Good,” which had been recorded by Earl-Jean McCrea, an ex-Cookie; the Mindbenders sang “Groovy Kind of Love” by the Bluebells; the Byrds sang “Goin' Back,” the Goffin/King hit for Dusty Springfield; and the Moody Blues remade the Bessie Banks song “Go Now” for their first American hit.

But if the girl-group genre persisted right through the British Invasion, the practice of men covering female material transcended it. Vanilla Fudge hopped on the Dixie Cups' “Take Me for a Little While,” and even got Shadow Morton to produce the song for them in November 1968; Dr. John retooled the Dixie Cups' “Iko Iko” (though not much) in April 1972. As late as 1970, Blood, Sweat and Tears scored with the lost Brenda Holloway number mentioned earlier, “You've Made Me So Very Happy.” And one of the key echoes of girl-group sounds can be heard in the
Rocky Horror Picture Show
song “Time Warp,” a progression lifted straight from “Top Down Time” by the Rockaways, from 1964.

*   *   *

In a coincidence that was lost on nobody, Phil Spector made the flight with the Beatles on their first trip to America for
The Ed Sullivan Show
in February of 1964. Through the opening for Rolling Stones, Spector hooked up to meet the British pop set, who were enormous fans of his sound. Although he wouldn't work with the Beatles until 1970, his presence on that plane is a pop talisman, a passing of the torch from the reigning Svengali to a younger crew of admirers.

To get to the bottom of how the British Invasion viewed women, you have to look at rock's most reputed misogynists: the Rolling Stones. The band's reputation as hoodlums came from well-orchestrated media campaigns by their manager and producer Andrew Loog Oldham: by pissing on garage walls the Stones became readymade tabloid figures just as their music caught on. Jagger's stage act was a mating dance that eroticized his ideas about manhood; it quickly became a brazen flirtation with his entire audience.

Like Presley, Jagger presented himself as a sexual object, both expressing and enacting carnality onstage more radically than whites had ever dared before. Even at its tamest, Jagger displayed an androgyny that was scandalous for its time. Instead of moving with a brawny macho swagger, Jagger was a dancer, a stud and a tease, and his success gave the first hint that rock would embrace androgynous males before it would consider androgynous females. Jagger's persona led one of the era's most notorious groupies, Pamela Des Barres, to declare that “he personified the penis,” and yet this was in the context of long hair, a dancer's physique, and a distinctly un–John Wayne–like theatricality. Compared to the Stones' stage act, the Beatles' collarless jackets and ensemble bows could seem prim even when they sounded robust.

“(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction” (1965) was a taunting rant from a guy complaining he can't get laid—enough. There's even a sly twist on macho antagonism when Jagger criticizes the salesman on TV for not being a “real” man “'cause he doesn't smoke the same cigarettes as me.” But “Satisfaction” has always been an overrated song that never fully defined what the Stones were about.

While the Stones were more direct about their sexual intent than the Beatles, theirs was never a single-issue campaign to paint women as second-class. The band's misogynist reputation came more from their carefully constructed public image than from the songs themselves, although “Stupid Girl,” “Under My Thumb,” and “Get Off of My Cloud” put across the idea that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards prized control. In fact, the Stones' attitudes toward sex simply mirrored the black blues singer's more permissive, celebratory treatment of sex, which had always coexisted with a whole host of retro-sexist assumptions. In the hands of different singers, and to the ears of different listeners, Willie Dixon's “I Just Wanna Make Love to You” can be sexist retort, simple carnal exultation, or gentle seduction.