Note: This is the original script and may deviate from the finished show after production.
Hey there, Cousiiiin! Welcome to the next episode of How Good It Is, and today we’re getting cozy with the Five Satins. Do it to me, Jenna!
I’m Claude Call, and I’m proud to be amongst you. And I have got some fun trivia for ye today. I want you to tell me what’s…let’s use the word “significant”…about this song from 1972. I’ll tell you this much: it came from Italy and was a Top Ten hit there and in a few other European countries. Have a listen:
[Prisencolinensinainciusol]
If you know a little about the language, this might come easy to you. But if you don’t, well then I’ll have the answer for you near the end of the show.
It’s probably the most famous song of the doo-wop era, and may, in fact, be the reason it’s called “doo-wop music”. The Five Satins originally formed in 1954 in New Haven, Connecticut, and consisted of six members: Fred Parris, Lewis Peeples, Stanley Dortche, Ed Martin, Jim Freeman, and Nat Mosley. Which of these five wasn’t satin isn’t clear. They didn’t have a lot of success, so they broke up briefly and reorganized, with Dortche and Peeples leaving, and taking on Al Denby as a new member. In 1956 they recorded “In the Still of the Night” and the rest, as they say is history.
Actually, that’s not quite the case, I’m a little bit ahead of myself.
At the time the song was written, Fred Parris was in the US Army, and he was assigned to guard duty. One day he saw a pretty girl go by, and that got the wheels turning for him. Parris also had in mind a former girlfriend of his who he missed and hoped would come back to him. She moved from Connecticut to California, and the story goes that they never saw each other again, and chances are, that woman never knew that the song had anything to do with her. At any rate, that’s where the storyline of a man remembering a specific evening in May wherein he holds a girl close to him comes from.
Now, Parris was stationed in Philadelphia, but he still called New Haven his home. So he would commute back and forth whenever he got the chance. Under the best of circumstances, that’s a four-and-a-half hour train ride, so he had plenty of time to stay occupied, and that’s exactly what he did, composing this song while on that train. The group found a space to record in a building on Whalley Avenue in New Haven, but it turned out that there was too much street noise for them to get a clean recording, so they looked around and eventually found the basement of St. Bernadette’s Church. Being in a basement helped insulate the space from outside noise, and the room had good acoustics for recording.
Marty Kugell, who was the group’s manager, produced the recording and backing up the singers was Doug Murray on bass, Curlee Glover on piano, Bobby Mapp on drums and Vinny Mazzetta played that saxophone solo. Mazetta, I should note, was an altar boy at St. Bernadette’s and it was he who convinced the pastor to let them use the church basement. It’s also worth noting that only four of the Five Satins actually appear on that recording: Al Denby (low tenor), Eddie Martin (baritone), Jim Freeman (bass) and Fred Parris sang the lead, of course. Why only four members? Well, that’s who was available at the time. Because Fred Parris wasn’t the only one in the military, the group’s makeup was a little bit fluid around that time. And it turned out that groups with “Four” in the name, like the Four Lads and the Four Coins, were actually starting to fall out of favor with the public, who were turning to the Five Crowns and the Five Royales. So Parris went with the number Five to keep up with trends, and stuck with the name for consistency.
On the same day that the Five Satins recorded “In the Still of the Nite,” they also recorded this uptempo number:
[JONES GIRL]
I’m kinda loving that sax just honking away at you out there, aren’t you? That song is called The Jones Girl, and it’s a play on the Mills Brothers hit “Jones Boy” from 1954. Now, there’s a story out there—and it’s one I’ve told here about several other songs—that when the single was released, The Jones Girl was the A side, but someone flipped the record and the B side was the one that caught on and became the hit, but in this case it isn’t true. Based on my research, every copy I’ve seen of “In the Still of the Nite”—and it’s spelled N I T E on the original Standord label to distinguish itself from the Cole Porter song of the same name—has that song as the A side. Later on the spelling changed and we also get “I’ll remember” tacked on in parentheses.
Now, we have this hazy image of certain songs being huge hits back in the day, and that’s how they endured and became our cherished memories. But the fact is, when “In the Still of the Night” was first released, it was not a smash hit; in fact it didn’t become a hit at all until Standord Records fell on hard times and cut a deal with a larger label, Ember Records that it got a chance to do anything. Still, it only peaked at number 24 on the Billboard Hot 100. It’s also possible that the song didn’t do as well as it could because shortly after it was released, Fred Parris was deployed to Japan and had to watch from thousands of miles away as a mostly-different group was assembled to perform the song on tour across America. Their replacement lead singer was Bill Baker, who took the Five Satins back to the pop chart with “To The Aisle” in September 1957.
But Ember Records used the song wherever it could, packaging it into oldies collections so that it got a lot of recognition later on. And as a result, the song began to grow in reputation. In 1960 and 61, there was a small doo-wop revival that brought the song back to the charts briefly, which makes “In the Still of the Night” one of only three non-Christmas song to reach the Hot 100 three separate times by the same artist with the same version each time. What were the other two? Gee, that would have made a pretty good trivia question, wouldn’t it. But I’ll tell you now: they were “The Monster Mash” by Bobby Pickett, and “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen.
By 1969 Fred Parris was working at a company called Roskin Distributors when he was tapped to re-form the group for a doo-wop revival show at Madison Square Garden in New York City. After the show, he was so besieged with requests to perform that he wound up quitting that job.
Now, before I move into other covers and such, I think I need to go back a little bit and expand on a couple of points I’ve made. First: I’ve been throwing around the phrase “doo-wop” a bunch, and I mentioned at the top of the episode that “In the Still of the Night” could be responsible for the genre getting that name. It’s because of the background singers, singing “Doo-wop, doo-way” in the bridge. But it’s only fair to mention that there’s another contender for that title, and it would be “When You Dance” by The Turbans, in which you can hear a “Doo-wop” chant. I gotta tell you, I think the edge goes to The Turbans on this one, given that “When You Dance” came out about six or seven months before “In the Still of the Night”, and the “Doo-wop, di-di-di-di-di doo-wop” chant is a little more prominent. But “In the Still of the Night” is definitely the more famous of the two.
Which brings us to my other point, about Ember Records publishing the song everywhere they could. Giving the song extra recognition meant that it was not only popular on the oldies record collections, it wound up being popular on oldies radio stations. And for a long time, the powerhouse station for that brand of music was WCBS-FM in New York City. For about thirty years, on Thanksgiving weekend that station would run a Top 500 of All Time Countdown, as voted by the listeners. And for thirty years, “In the Still of the Night” was consistently at the top of that list.
As far as covers of the song, there are nearly 70 of them, and a bunch of them came in the first couple of years after the record was released, including an instrumental version by Santo and Johnny that did make it onto the Hot 100 but it only peaked at Number 58. But perhaps the most notable version is an a capella recording by the group Boys II Men, which was released in December 1992 and made it to Number 3 on the Hot 100. It was used in the soundtrack to the television series, The Jacksons: An American Dream. That version debuted at Number One in New Zealand, it peaked at Number 11 in Australia, and it did well in several European countries. But for all that, it still seems to have been eclipsed by its predecessor in popular culture, having been used in the Martin Scorsese film The Irishman, in the TV series Gotham, and of course it’s part of the soundtrack to the film Dirty Dancing.
The original members of the Five Satins have all since died, with Fred Parris being the last surviving member, passing in 2022 at the age of 85.
[BUMPER]
And now it’s time to answer that trivia question. Back on Page Two I asked you to tell me what was significant about this 1972 hit from Italy:
[Prisencolinensinainciusol]
The title of the song is Prisen-colin-ensin-ain-ciu-sol, and I don’t know for sure if I’m pronouncing that right, but in a minute you’ll see it doesn’t matter. By the time he wrote this song, Adriano Celentano had been one of Italy’s biggest rock stars for over ten years. This song was composed by Celentano creating a drum loop of four beats and then his improvising the lyrics over that drum loop. And given the way he delivers those lyrics, and the chanting in the chorus portion, the song kind of anticipated hip-hop a little bit, at least enough that it doesn’t sound like a track from 1972 but could easily date from 10 or even 20 years later.
But here’s the thing: the intent of the song was to explore communication barriers. Celentano has said that he was developing the theme of the inability to communicate when people are speaking different languages. And in this respect, he succeeded wildly, because the song isn’t in Italian. Or French. Or any other language. In fact, except for the times you hear him chant “All right,” the entire song is unintelligible gibberish. Celentano’s intent was to demonstrate what English sounds like to people who don’t speak English proficiently. And if you look up the song on YouTube, you’ll see a huge number of comments coming from people whose native language isn’t English, agreeing that this is exactly what English sounded like the first time they heard it.
[OUTRO]
And that, Cousin, is a full lid on yet another edition of How Good It Is. If you’re enjoying the show, please take the time to leave a review in your podcast app, or better yet, share it with a friend. Who knows, maybe you’ll both find yourself dancing to a song that’s entirely nonsense lyrics. And you know, I realize that by now most listeners have shut off their players or whatever, so if you’re still with me, thanks for listening to me riffing in the credits. I’m on the socials as How Good It Is Pod, and that’s the Gmail address as well. The theme music for the show is by Jenna Getty, and everything else you can blame on me. Thanks so much for listening, I’ll talk to you soon.