Fever (6 page)

Presley's turned these questions around in “Are You Lonesome Tonight?,” the hit he recorded in Nashville in 1960. He did the number partly as a favor to Parker, who admired Al Jolson's version of the song. But Presley found things in this treacle that lesser talents might have missed completely. On one level, it's an unbearably gooey romance, the kind of Presley number that makes he-men squirm. And yet, as Daniel Wolff pointed out in a 1999
Threepenny Review
article, it's one of Presley's more lordly threats, aimed pointedly at his audience and their ideas about who he really was. The session producer was Chet Atkins, the godfather of Nashville pop, who remembered: “I turned around, and the lights were all out, and I couldn't see what the hell was going on, and then I hear the guitar and the bass and the Jordanaires humming a little bit, and Elvis started to sing.”

Wolff digs right into the song's various levels of meaning:

Elvis fashions a performance which deals specifically with … the dangers of acting, in particular, and of being manipulated, in general. “You read your lines so cleverly,” he says in the monologue, “and never missed a cue.” Then, after a weighted pause, Presley gets to the actual moment of betrayal: “Honey, you
LIED.
” From here on, everything he says or sings includes this betrayal. The way he puts across that awareness is by rolling out his Mississippi accent on the word “lied.” We hear the country in his voice, and it creates a strange disturbance in the middle of the song, as if he were suddenly drawing attention to himself, to the Southerner saying the lines. As a listener and a fan, if you're still enjoying the fantasy that Elvis is speaking directly to you—that you are the sweetheart—it's a disturbing moment.

Presley's nuanced bravura, so delicately balanced between bathos and brawn, has a tragic echo considering all the ridiculous movies he was churning out. As Wolff points out, he was singing about his own career, but he was also singing about rock's larger story—where it had been and where it might go. Alongside all the other records men had been spilling their guts into, it was the kind of quixotic question that rang out both earthy and existential. And it had already helped inspire a triumphant answer from the opposite sex: girl groups. Their response was a resounding “Yes!”

CHAPTER 2

Chains

Elvis Presley may have torn apart people's ideas about manhood, but the answer from women was just as powerful, surprising, and gallant. Girl groups opened up the sexual discussion in the early sixties in ways men never dreamed, including some of the men who were “puppeteering” the recordings (like Phil Spector). Where doowoppers flirted using androgynous falsettos and platonic promises, girl group's giant “Yes!” answered more than everything had Elvis insinuated in “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” The thrill—and the threat to prevailing mores and manners—lay in the possibilities that “Yes!” held out to listeners of both sexes.

Girl groups lit up radio waves as early as 1958 (the Shirelles' “I Met Him on a Sunday”), and the wonder was that these women leapt into a spotlight no women had occupied before, and did so with such grace and aplomb as to seem prophetic, as though answering a thousand unasked questions. Girl groups ran with what the guys had been saying about love and dating and growing up. But they expanded it, lifted it up to another level, and made pop infinitely more complex and exciting. The better girl groups (the Shirelles, the Cookies, the Shangri-Las, the Ronettes, the Crystals, the Marvelettes) tapped an irrepressible urge, as though the response to male rockers' newly enlivened sexual desires had been inherent in the music since the beginning; invisible and unheard but ever-present, equally cunning and equally true.

Girl groups burst upon the pop scene fully formed, an instant classic. At a time when the female group barely existed in rock 'n' roll, the excitement around the very idea of girl groups in rock helped inspire the sound. Rather than flirting, boasting, or pitching woo, girl-group lyrics emphasized longing, desire, and ultimate fantasy fulfillment. Girl groups didn't come on to men the same way men came on to women. Instead of sweet-talking temptresses, the girl groups were more often storytellers and dreamers, as if openly singing in code to a legion of pop women—and purposely allowing guys to eavesdrop. This was a major split between male and female poses in early rock: where men more often sang directly to women, addressing other fellows only by extension, girl groups sang mostly to other women, knowing men couldn't help being won over by overhearing. “A Fool in Love” (Tina Turner) is a women's bull session; “I Met Him on a Sunday” (the Shirelles) is a conversation between two girls; “My Boyfriend's Back” (the Angels) is girls' talk as competitive threat. You can hear these singers gather strength from each other the way later sixties bands would, even if the model couldn't have been simpler: typically call-and-response, lead singer with backups. Listen to how much combined confidence the Ikettes put into their call for an ideal man to step forward in their Tina-free hit from 1965, “Peaches 'n' Cream.” No wonder they sounded ecstatic—traveling in packs, women were finally beginning to be heard. They summarized a generation's worth of rock attitude with a heady melodic verve that answered male desire with mysterious new pleasures.

When girl groups appealed to men directly, the effect went beyond singular address: one of the earliest girl group hits, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” (the Shirelles, 1960), is sung directly to a man with a giant wink—the song is really aimed at Men, sung by a representative of a larger sisterhood. Its implicit message is about sharing the loneliness and shame felt by jilted women; by comparison, “Be My Baby” (the Ronettes, 1963) is so winningly candid, so inexorable, that it rises above one-on-one to become a fantasy about how women wish they could approach men, instead of waiting for them to make the first move. It's the giant “Yes!” all girl-group material points toward.

Whatever their perspective, the triumph of girl-group records proved they were never for girls only. Guys bought these records, too, and for the same reasons women bought rock 'n' roll by men: to keep tabs on what women were talking about, what they were saying about guys, and measure their experience against developments in the music. If the Beatles are any indication, the best girl-group material meant as much to men aesthetically as anything by Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, or Buddy Holly.

Scratch the surface of the girl-group concept and you find a tangle of contradictions—some liberating, some constricting, all of them enticing. Granted, there was a long way to go before rock arrived at Madonna, Courtney Love, and PJ Harvey. The girl-group oeuvre contains plenty of frail personalities who fell apart just because a guy didn't give them the time of day (“It's My Party” by Lesley Gore) or had too good a time acting possessive (“Keep Your Hands Off My Baby,” Little Eva) or because she overidealized a guy when she should have been wary (“I Can't Let Go,” Evie Sands). But girl groups transcended their era because the music lifted them to more alluring ways of saying “Yes!” than anybody of either sex had expected, and the better girl groups didn't let women's stereotypes define them. Just when the Shirelles' “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” began to sound like assent despite the high cost of regret, Motown's Mary Wells checked in with “Two Lovers” (a teaser title) or Lesley Gore piped up with “You Don't Own Me,” a laundry list of insulting macho behavior worthy of Sinéad O'Connor.

Sex had always been a very direct matter in rhythm-and-blues music—Ray Charles singing “I Got a Woman” (“way across town … she's good to me”) or Etta James responding to Hank Ballard and the Midnighters' 1954 “Work with Me Annie” with “The Wallflower.” Country and western has a mistaken reputation as a rather chaste style, despite unambiguous women complaining about men's runaround habits in Kitty Wells's 1952 “Honky Tonk Angels,” an answer to Hank Thompson's “The Wild Side of Life.” But in mainstream pop, sex had always been dressed up in respectability or some allegory of innocence, pointed toward perfect love and, ultimately, marriage. By the mid-sixties, this was changing: sex had traveled from the sidelines to the rock-pop mainstream as an overt theme, with an unmistakable pulse of sexual pleasure—and risk—coursing through every beat. Most critics cite “Norwegian Wood” or the Rolling Stones' “Let's Spend the Night Together” as the turning point. But can there be any doubt that the Ronettes were expressing carnal bliss in “Be My Baby”? Even songs with an innocent veneer, such as “He's Sure the Boy I Love” by the Crystals, from 1963, have an urgency, a craving that cannot be explained—not to mention satisfied—by mere hand-holding.

Of course, the heyday of girl groups predated the mass proliferation of birth control by a few years, forcing girl groups to phrase their collective “Yes!” in artful and subversive ways. In the best girl-group records, sex has already taken place; the songs explore the new emotional territory that sex opens up (the Crystals' “There's No Other Like My Baby” and “He's a Rebel,” and certainly the Shirelles' “Baby, It's You”).

A lot of girl-group stories are presented as maudlin morality plays, with marriage the summit of romance and teen sex the dreaded danger zone for fallen ideals. But like a lot of Hollywood women's movies from the 1930s and '40s, the music's tension was all about how fantastic and taboo sex is all at the same time, even when it's cloaked in the most innocent of metaphors. As Jeanine Basinger observes in
Women in Film,
“In these movies, women seemed to feel that it was desperately important to be married, yet marriage was an economic disaster in which women had to start baking pies professionally or taking in washing. Women were supposed to be sexually desirable, knowing how to tempt and satisfy men, but they were also supposed to be innocent and pure. How was that going to work? Women needed to be glamorous and lavishly dressed to gain the attention of men and the envy of other women (this latter being particularly important), but they were greedy little beasts if they coveted expensive clothes and jewelry … None of this made much sense, but then neither did a lot of other things I saw.”

Like the Hollywood women Basinger refers to, girl-group charm lay in the way they hewed to female stereotypes while subtly undermining them. At the same time that Doris Day was saying “No!” to Rock Hudson on the big screen (at least not until marriage), Barbara Ann Hawkins of the Dixie Cups was coyly protesting her intention to “wait” in “Chapel of Love.” In its surface respect for demure, old-fashioned values, coupled with an ironic subtext celebrating the fun this couple already shared in bed, “Chapel of Love” works as a reverse metaphor for premarital sex. What better way to announce to their peers that they were going all the way than to simply say “We're going to the chapel”? Anybody who heard that song and still believed this couple was simply making out in the pews flunked out of Pop Metaphor 101.

*   *   *

The girl-group era began with a man named George Goldner and his production of the Chantels' song “Maybe” in 1958. Earlier performances that pointed toward the girl-group sound included Shirley Gunter and the Queens' “Oop Shoop” in 1954, the Hearts' “Lonely Nights” in 1955, and the Bobettes' “Mr. Lee” in 1957. Goldner and his partner, Richard Barrett, had knocked around the music business as songwriters, performers, and producers for most of the fifties. Barrett had been a member of the Valentines; Goldner introduced Frankie Lymon to Barrett, and the two produced “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” for Lymon and the Teenagers at the end of 1955. In addition to working with Little Anthony and the Imperials, the Crows, and the Dubs, the team worked as songwriters and producers for the female group the Chordettes, who had made light pop singles since 1954, scoring first in 1956 with “Born to Be with You,” the next year with “Just Between You and Me,” and peaking with “Lollipop” in 1958. But their sound was so saccharine that even a potentially suggestive image like “Lollipop” (written by one of Phil Spector's later songwriting partners, Barbara Ross) was squeaky clean.

The Chordettes were a polished act in the Tin Pan Alley tradition of the Andrew Sisters, with orchestral backing to give them respectability. This was an unreconstructed version of the big-band image of a “girl group,” and songs like “A Girl's Work Is Never Done,” by Barrett and D. Raysor, provided the simple sugar coating women were expected to put on the patriarchal expectations of the day.

Having mastered the old-style female ensemble with the Chordettes, Goldner and Barrett went on to conceive a different kind of girl group, one that stemmed directly from R&B, with the Chantels. The Chantels were a female doo-wop ensemble in a style crowded with corner boys, yet they made records as inexplicably fascinating as any of their male peers'. Simply putting a female twist on the style challenged doo-wop's male ideal. The Chantels forced listeners to reconsider doo-wop as something more than a man's domain, and the reality of a girl group holding forth on guys' turf laid out cultural possibilities in an entirely new way.

With “Maybe,” a song about desperation, the group's lead singer, Arlene Smith, infused her vocal with so much determined naïveté that she transformed all the anxiety of a doomed relationship into a fervent wish for its revival. It was more than simple teenage desperation, though: Smith's vocal had resolve beyond its years, and “Maybe” held out ambitious hopes for all women. Instead of singing simply to her dream lover, it was as if Smith sang “Maybe” to all the women who longed to participate in rock, and by doing so, opened a giant door for them. The strength of Smith's attack inspired all the great girl-group singers and sounds that followed. Even the nerviest of singers, Janis Joplin, couldn't resist it: when she set loose her cosmic growl on the song in 1969 (on her second release,
I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again, Mama!
), the original Chantels record bubbled back up to number 113.