Happy New Year!
While they’re often mistaken for a doo-wop group, The Coasters were actually a rhythm-and-blues vocal group, whose greatest successes came when they were teamed with the composers Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, and when they had humorous material to work with.They made such an impression on other artists that it was a small wonder when, in 1987, they became the first group inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. (Yeah, I know I’m kinda splitting hairs, here: the previous year was all individuals plus the Everly Brothers. But I’m sticking by this assessment.)
Their peak years, chart-wise, were between 1958 and 1960, when all of their Top 40 singles were released. In today’s episode we talk about three of them: Yakety Yak, Charlie Brown, and Along Came Jones. After these three came two more: Poison Ivy and Little Egypt, which were more clever than funny.
There have been numerous configurations of the group since the first day, so you could argue that the one in the photo above, which is responsible for most of the hits, was the magic bullet. Through many personnel changes, The Coasters never quite reached the same level of success.
As if you didn’t know this already: you can listen to the show via your favorite podcatcher, or you can just click on the player right here for listening or downloading:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 13:00 — 10.4MB)
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The Doors got their name from the title of an Aldous Huxley book called The Doors of Perception, which in turn came from a William Blake quotation: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
Considering that this is a podcast that’s relatively new, it’s pretty cool to see that I’ve already got some regular visitors who visit this site from different spots around the world. I often see Canada, Poland and the UK in my analytics (don’t worry, I don’t see anything more specific than that), but this week I’ve also seen India and Peru. In recent weeks I’ve seen the Philippines, China and Japan. That’s very exciting to me!
As a reminder: in this week’s episode, we’re going to look at the song that carried The Doors from wannabe Beat Poets to the firmament of Rock and Roll Stars. See you on Saturday!
When Jimmy Webb got his heart broken, what did he do? Why, he did what any other red-blooded American would do: he wrote a couple of hit songs and made a million bucks off the incident!
