Behind The Record (stories about songs)

[Soundofus]

With this topic, I would like to start stories about songs. I encourage you to post here all the stories you know behind songs.
What it has to be :
- Songs being adapted from a song written in the past and not credited to the original author.
- Songs based on a classical piece of music.
- Controversy about songs
What it shouldn't be :
- Covers correctly credited
What is expected :
- No songs posted without a story about.
- No playlists

Today I will start by what is behind the famous song Whole Lotta Love by Led Zeppelin

In 1963, bluesman Willie Dixon wrote a song called : You Need Love which was recorded by another famous bluesman Muddy Waters.
Muddy Waters

In 1966, for their debut album, The Small Faces, British band, recorded a song called You Need Loving, credited to band members Ronnie Lane and Steve Mariott. Willie Dixon didn't get any credits.
The Small Faces

In 1969, for their album II, famous band Led Zeppelin, recorded the hit Whole Lotta Love credited to Led Zeppelin members : John Boham, John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant.
Led Zeppelin
The song had a part of the lyrics of Willie Dixon and the way to sing of The Small Faces. As well, Willie Dixon as The Small Faces, were not mentioned or credited when the recording has been released.

Your story now 🙂

[brian_mansfield]

I could do this for days, @Soundofus
The first one that pops to mind, because I just read about it, is Elton John's 1972 hit "Crocodile Rock."
spotify:track:6WCeFNVAXUtNczb7lqLiZU:small

"I wanted it to be a tribute to all those people I used to go and see as a kid," Elton once said of the musical throwback. "That's why I used the Del Shannon-type vocals and that bit from Pat Boone's 'Speedy Gonzales.'"
spotify:track:6rBb7xcuswLyZ1Aco8kG8v:small
But that bit — the falsetto la-la-la part — got Elton and co-writer Bernie Taupin in some trouble. Buddy Kaye, who wrote the song that Pat took to No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1962, filed suit in 1974, prompting an out-of-court settlement.
Pat's parents lived just a couple of miles from me when I was a kid — in fact, he co-wrote my school's alma mater — but I'd never heard "Speedy Gonzales" until just a few weeks ago. (In retrospect, I didn't miss much.)

[heartscore]

@Soundofus Great topic, this story comes to my mind about a controversial song:

In 1980 The Dead Kennedys were invited to join the "Bay Area music awards", an event of the music industry. They were asked to perform their underground hit "California über alles" and they were asked as a "New Wave band", though DK wanted to create an alternative to the established New Wave Movement. So they took the chance to show the world why they were different:
They started to play the desired hit „California über alles“, but then they suddenly stopped and their leader Jello Biafra said to the audience: „We’ve got to prove we’re adults here … We’re not a punk rock band, we’re a New Wave band!”. The band weared white shirts with a sprayed „S“ across the front and now they pulled black ties out and created a Dollar-sign. They continued the performance with the song „Pull my strings“, a song, which they had never played before and would never play again anymore (so it was the radical opposite of a „Hit“). The song itself is a harsh parody and critic on the music industry and a direct affront against all New Wave bands. The line „drool, drool, drool … my payola“ first points to the band The Knack, which their successful single „My sharona“, while the world „Payola“ describes the way record companies pump money into radio-stations to get more airplay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola
The Dead Kennedys were never invited again to the „Bay Area Music Awards“. Fortunately this legendary performance was recorded live and published later on the sampler „Give me convenience or give me death“.

https://play.spotify.com/track/63vGwrzfRPfxBLDqmeLNY6

https://play.spotify.com/track/1HOMkjp0nHMaTnfAkslCQj

https://play.spotify.com/track/5szJ8SMwQVEvvdk65w6M6g

[brian_mansfield]

Eric Carmen's 1975 hit "All By Myself" incorporates parts of two other pieces of work.

spotify:track:2FSaEOwQId0LYu5o49dbrG:small

The verses are based on the second movement of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor.
spotify:track:5ilW2hUZEtLgLcPsJvn9rm:small

Carmen borrowed the chorus' melody from "Let's Pretend," a song he recorded with his group The Raspberries.

spotify:track:3tF4TjrAO9dxg0AzBRmk5R:small

[brian_mansfield]

Jackson Browne once told me that, if you listen very closely to the sub-melodies in the final verse of "Lawyers in Love" ... 
spotify:track:26lCNg8WekUoDbLhEbUyXZ:small

... you can hear bits of "Born Free" and "Miss America," the song Bert Parks used to sing at the end of the pageant.
spotify:track:6NpQDcFRSuBPGoyiEvxyBX:small

spotify:track:0cDT9CBUATYpUi2J39FvDE:small

You have to listen real close, but they're there.

[heartscore]

@brian_mansfield and he gave no credit to Rachmaninov? Naughty ... When listening to this song I was shocked by his sexist artwork for "Tonight you're mine", really disgusting

[brian_mansfield]

It's not like Carmen tried to keep his inspiration a secret. And the concerto probably was in the public domain already, so he wouldn't have needed to give Rachmaninov a songwriting credit.

[heartscore]

@brian_mansfield According to Wikipedia the inheritors of Rachmaninov forced him to give twelve percent of the royalties. I am not sure about U.S Law, but in Europe copyright is protected for 70 years after death, so the copyright for Rachmaninov ended in 2013.

[heartscore]

Maybe influenced by the discussion about Rachmaninov I want to tell a story about a classical work (falls under "controversial"):

The austrian (later american) concert pianist Paul Wittgenstein had just made his highly acclaimed debut in 1913, when he was conscribed to join the army. During the following World War 1 he was shoot in the elbow and lost his right arm, which was amputated. But when he came home he not gave up. He started to practice extensively with his left hand. At last he continued his career by ordering piano concerts just for the left hand from several composers. One of them was the "Piano concerto for the left hand" by Maurice Ravel. Because the piano-part was not as challenging as Wittgenstein had expected he changed the score to show off his technical abilities. The composer Ravel became upset after the premiere, because he was not informed about the modifications of his work, and both exchanged angry letters. In one of them Wittgenstein stated, that an interpreter would not be the slave of the composer.

Maurice Ravels reply was very short:

"Interpreters are slaves"

Here is a recording of Paul Wittgenstein playing the Ravel Concerto. Beware of the audio-quality, because it's a very old live-recording

https://play.spotify.com/track/4291syEURVp3l1iuTLDyIv

[brian_mansfield]

What a great story, @heartscore! I've been fascinated by that piece, after hearing only the barest bones of Wittgenstein's story, since I was a teenaged aspiring keyboardist. I had no idea he had altered Ravel's concerto when performing the composition. Thanks for sharing!

[brian_mansfield]

Of course, there's always the story of Sam Smith's "Stay With Me" and Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down."
spotify:track:5Db9VIdDsN5yu3Eu7CT0i4:small spotify:track:7gSQv1OHpkIoAdUiRLdmI6:small

"Stay With Me" sounded enough like the Petty hit that Petty and his "I Won't Back Down" co-writer, Jeff Lynne, wound up splitting a 25% share of the songwriting royalties – even though Smith swears he wasn't aware of their song when he wrote his.

From all accounts, the settlement was quick and amicable — maybe because the similarities are pretty obvious when you put the songs side by side and because "Stay With Me" was making so much money Smith and his co-writers could afford to be generous. Petty and Lynne are now credited as co-writers (but they weren't included in the song's Grammy nominations).

[heartscore]

@brian_mansfield Copyright infringement can happen accidentally, so I would believe in Sam Smith statement. As a musician you absorb so many melodies, motifs and chord progressions, that the origin of the own ideas are sometimes hard to remember.

[heartscore]

In 1986 the american Trash-Metal band Slayer released their infamous album "Reign in blood", which still sets standards for extreme Metal. The release of the album was delayed. Columbia records, the distributor of the band's label Def Jam, refused to publish it because of the offensive topics in combination with the brutal artwork. The main reason for the controversy was the first track "Angel of death" which tells the experiments of Nazi physician Joseph Mengele at the german concentration camp Auschwitz. The lyrics take a ruthless look on the inhuman experiments of Mengele. Afterwards Holocaust survivors felt offended and the band was confronted and accused for sympathising with Nazi ideology. The band always denied to be racists and said the lyrics were documentary.

Besides the controversy the song was highly acclaimed by critics and became a favourite in their live-set. Maybe the most famous part is the double-bass break of drummer Dave Lombardo.

https://play.spotify.com/track/5AdoS3gS47x40nBNlNmPQ8

[user-removed]

@heartscore

Great album and story to highlight by Slayer. The reason being, Slayer the band picked up the best from fast paced elements of Hardcore Punk Rock from the previous decade. Also at the time of the recording and release of this release, the music developed here incorporated the new genre developing within hardcore punk music scenes that was floating around, which the bands in the hardcore punk music scenes were starting to experiment with called Crossover, using Thrash and Metal influences into hardcore punk song structures. I would say this release plus a few other Metal releases during the same decade is probable one of the biggest influences of the past and even Metalcore bands of today now.

This is a great album that blends brutal Speed and Thrash into a solid assault of sonic music, and the lyrical content of the songs on this release is the intent, pure Nihilistic outcomes, one can tell from the first song that this is not an album that has any good outlook at all. And the strange thing Slayer would go on from this release that was just so fast and brutal to reinvent Thrash Metal again with the release of South of Heaven which had a totally different music direction, sound, and feel overall from Reign In Blood. The re-recorded track of Aggressive Perfector for this release was cleaned up in a new recording from the Haunting The Chapel E.P. reissue, a song Slayer recorded going back to the Metal Massacre compilation days. Slayer had been doing this song live in their set lists for some time already before Reign In Blood was released. 

[heartscore]

@user-removed I love about Slayer that they made music without any compromise. This album is often rated a sone of the best Metal albums for good reason. I think it was a clever decision to slow down for "South of heaven", because even Slayer could not top the intensity and speed of "Reign in blood"

[heartscore]

I am interested in everything about The Who, so a few days ago I discovered a controversial story about their iconic song "My generation": According to Joe McMichael, author of "The Who concert file", the song was banned by the BBC. The funny thing is, that the BBC banned the song not because of its aggressive attitude and sound. And also not because of the line "Why don't you all fade away", in which "fade" could be easily replaced with another F-word.

No, the BBC banned the song, because they thought it would be offensive against stutterers. In fact Roger Daltry stutters, but he imitates the effect of drugs, the amphetamine pills, which were consumed by the Mods.

spotify:track:6UdCTwbVAvNqbWyZKZiRWL

[crematedman]

@heartscore @brian_mansfield @user-removed @Soundofus This thread is exactly what the community is about - top level discussion ^_^

https://open.spotify.com/track/6ToM0uwxtPKo9CMpbPGYvM

My choice is a signature track by The Doors. Their name was inspired by open mindedness and the subjectiveness and limitations of perception observed by Aldous Huxley.

It's a definitive example of the drug culture of the time, and how this was suppressed by the mainstream media, given that she get "high" is cut from the radio version.

[heartscore]

@crematedman Thank you for all the likes and the compliments, I also love this thread-idea of @Soundofus and you remind me, that we could continue ... I did not know this story about "Break on through". From today's perspective it seems ridiculous, that the radio cut the word "high", just listen to modern Hiphop lyrics, they had to cut the whole song 🙂

[Steampunksum]

In the '70s "ZZ Top" had several top hits "Tubsteak Boogie" was one. So in Seattle that song and controversy nearly forced the venue to Vancouver BC. Officials would not allow laser lights in the performance due to possible side affects from exposure for more than 10 minutes. They were the first out with that new technology. Ticket holders were outraged but under pressure the Mayor gave us clearance. They performed well. The lasers were one simple green random ray.

[heartscore]

The Amen break is a 4-bar drum solo recorded for the song "Amen, brother" by 60s Soul-group "The Winstons". Originally published in 1969 it became extremely popular as a sampled drum-loop up from the 80s. According to Wikipedia it was sampled 2239 times from 1980 to present. But neither the performing drummer G.C.Coleman nor Richard L. Spencer, the copyright holder, ever received royalties for the recording. When G.C.Coleman died in 2006 he was homeless. British DJs Martyn Webster and Steve Theobald set up a Fund raising campaign for Spencer and raised 24000 GBP in 2015.

The breakthrough of the Amen break happened, when it was published in 1986 on the "Ultimate breaks and beats" sampler. On the sampler the drum-solo was artificially slowed down allowing DJs to use it on the spot for Hip Hop and other Dance styles. Later producers prefered to speed it up. However during the 90s the Amen break became the essential basis for almost all modern Dance-styles including Breakbeat, Hip Hop, Drum and Bass, Breakcore, Jungle and others. The english producer Luke Vilbert aka Amen Andrews used the Amen break on nearly every track. The four famous drum-bars were even used on albums of Oasis, Nine inch nails, Slipknot and Björk. You can also hear it on commercials and TV-shows like The Amazing race and Futurama.

The story of G.C.Colemaan, who died in poverty, is one of the most tragic in the popular music history. And if you think, that 24000 GBP is a lot for the copyright owner Spencer you forget, that the (ab)users of the recording made millions. Here is the original recording, the drum-solo starts at 1:25

spotify:track:32Rf95ZT8gxisQMK6xAhba

Here is a list of songs, which use the Amen break: http://wikibin.org/articles/list-of-tracks-that-sample-the-amen-break.html

And here is one of the playlists on Spotify about Amen break-songs:

spotify:user:syknyk:playlist:0Y2g70xW0YM3aQsMA9IGGU