Johnny Rivers, Sing Us a Song

A consideration of the one of the sixties' finest tunesmith interpreters

Welcome music lovers!

Part of the fun of writing Listening Sessions is the chance to go deep on artists who often don’t receive in-depth critical appraisal. I suspect Johnny Rivers is one of those artists. He was big in the sixties but little known today. He made his name interpreting the bedrock of the rock repertoire at the Whisky a Go Go and then switched to a more stylized and often deeply beautiful sound. It’s the latter that is the primary focus of this essay which I hope you will enjoy. As always, I would love to hear your thoughts about I’ve written—what I did get right, what did I get wrong and am I off the mark in calling ‘Poor Side of Town’ “a perfect record”? I also would love to know what you think about the music of Johnny Rivers. Let’s chat!

Coming up next will be an essay on what, in my opinion, is Miles Davis’ finest moment in concert that was caught on record, the Philharmonic Hall show of February 12, 1964.

See you in ten days’ time and may good listening be with you all!

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The rise of Johnny Rivers was real. In 1964, he had three top 20 singles (two of them in the top 10) and two top 40 albums. His specialty was covers of the repertoire of the early days of rock and roll—his first two big hits were of Chuck Berry’s ‘Memphis’ and ‘Maybelline.’ He also was the act who opened the Hollywood location of the Whiskey a Go Go, putting it on the map and soon to be an important hub of the sixties counterculture.

That movement was arguably inevitable as a result of the explosion of Beatlemania just as the doors of the a Go Go first opened. The arrival of the Beatles on American shore almost universally imperiled the future of America’s pop artists from the Bobby’s of Vee, Vinton and Rydell to the Everly Brothers, Roy Orbison and Rick Nelson to Brenda Lee, the Ronettes and the Shirelles to Fats Domino, Little Richard and Lloyd Price, and many, many more.

In this regard, Rivers would seem to have been destined to join them on the outside looking in. He didn't, of course. The groups of the early British Invasion all championed the music he was covering, treating it as a stepping stone to more personalized and original music as Rivers eventually would too. That he was making his music in the exciting milieu of the discotheque solidified his standing. But all this notwithstanding, that he rose when he did was in opposition to the direction that the arc of history was bending.

It’s probably not well known that Rivers was part of the bill at the Monterey International Pop Festival in June 1967, playing in between Beverly Martyn, and Eric Burdon and the Animals during the Festival’s opening night. Yet, Rivers is one of only four Festival artists—Martyn, the Paupers and a one-time-only group called the Group With No Name led by Curtis Faryar are the others—who have not had anything from their sets commercially released in any form. Rivers is glimpsed briefly in D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary of the Festival departing a plane and an illicit recording from his set playing the song that started it all, ‘Memphis,’ is easily available on YouTube.

By then, he had switched gears, leaving a Go Go behind for the studio working with the musicians who would one day be christened the Wrecking Crew. That Rivers was at Monterey may have had to do with the fact that Lou Adler, his producer, was also, with John Phillips, the Festival’s primary organizer. I’d like to think instead that Rivers was there as a sign of the broad vision guiding who was chosen to appear at Monterey. There was the Who, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Moby Grape, Jefferson Airplane, the Byrds and the Grateful Dead but there was also Laura Nyro, the Association, Simon & Garfunkel, Hugh Masekela, Lou Rawls and yes, Johnny Rivers.

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He performed 10 songs at Monterey. In addition to ‘Memphis,’ he sang two more of the hit covers that established his name: the venerable folk sing ‘Midnight Special’ and Harold Dorman’s ‘Mountain of Love.’ Not surprisingly, these kind of recordings—most recorded live or made to appear to be recorded live at the a Go Go—were made for dancing. The rhythms lope easily. The band is simple, there’s just Rivers on guitar with Joe Osborn on bass and Eddie Rubin (and later on, Mickey Jones) on drums. He was a genial singer. Never too far was a Southern drawl (while Rivers was born in New York, he was raised in Baton Rogue, Louisiana) which imparted a folksiness to his music.

In effect, it homogenized whatever song he was singing. That doesn’t suggest there was a dryness or monotony to his music. Indeed, as the selections become more creative: Willie Dixon’s (by way of Mose Allison) ‘Seventh Son,’ which he turned into a smash and Oscar Brown Jr.’s ‘The Snake,’ which led Rivers’ fourth and final primarily live album, …And I Know You Wanna Dance, and more contemporary, especially his cherry picking of the best of Motown—check out his version of Stevie Wonder’s ‘Uptight (Everything’s Alright)’—Rivers was suggesting a meeting place for the various strands of popular music. In other words, Johnny Rivers was a synthesizer.

‘Secret Agent Man,’ written by P.F. Sloan and Steve Barri and first recorded by Rivers for the TV show Secret Agent (originally called Danger Man when it aired in Britain), was the closest thing to an original that Rivers put onto the charts during his a Go Go era. Powered by a guitar riff played by Rivers that comments on Monty Norman’s iconic theme for James Bond, ‘Secret Agent Man’ shows that his hit-making instincts weren’t simply confined to songs that had already been proven to reach others. The performance has an edge not simply sharpened by the stone-cold tone of Rivers’ six string. There’s the rush of the start of the chorus and the way his phrasing curls on the words “persuasive lips.” It was produced, as well as all of Rivers’ early records, by Adler. The engineer was Bones Howe.

They were important in the shift in how records were made in California, especially through the meticulous sound and painstaking harmonies of the Mamas and the Papas which painted a portrait of the sunshine state as a Shangri-La, a metropolis of possibilities in technicolour. Think of the dazzling euphoria of the opening seconds of ‘I Saw Her Again’ or the emphatic declarations of ‘Straight Shooter.’ As satisfying and long-lasting as the music Adler and Howe made with them was, they never made anything quite as sweet as the song they soon made with Rivers that took him in a whole new direction.

Rivers reckoned that it took him about half a year to work up ‘Poor Side of Town.’ It owed far more to classic pop music than it did to all of the genres that had up until then been his melting pot. It told a story of upward striving; the hardscrabble protagonist and the woman from the same side of the tracks who ditched him for a rich guy who then callously tossed her aside. What emerges from this turn of events is not a tale of revenge or a celebration of just desserts being served but something deeper.

There’s a recognition that both the man and the woman are motivated to try to move on up. Rivers sings, “I can’t blame you for tryin’ / I’m tryin’ to make it too” and the man offers to take the woman back so that “together, we can make it, baby / from the poor side of town.”

The unabashed romanticism of the lyrics are matched by how they are complemented in music. There’s an elegant recurring guitar hook that Rivers plays. He is accompanied by the cream of the California crop: Larry Knechtel on piano, Osborn and Hal Blaine on drums. The arranger Marty Paich, best known for this fruitful association with Mel Tormé, provides a graceful chart for strings and woodwinds, including a few moments for Bud Shank’s flute to pierce through, lending a true romantic sweep to the song.

The crowning touch is the presence of Darlene Love and the Blossoms. From the opening “do-do-doo-wah / shoo-be-doo-be” they sing with Rivers to their backgrounds throughout, they add even more polish. And then there is their spotlight in the interlude: “so tell me how much you love me / come near to me, and say you need me now,” both man and woman turning to each other. I’ll admit that, by this part, I’m swooning to what I’m hearing.

‘Poor Side of Town’ had the sunshine of pop without the syrup. The slickness of pop singing without the smarminess. It’s a perfect record and was Johnny Rivers’ biggest hit. It provided the direction that his music would take in the late sixties.

Changes, released at the start of 1967 and on which ‘Poor Side of Town’ leads off the second side, is a ravishing album. How ravishing? Enough to make something like ‘Softly, As I Leave You,’ about as treacly a pop song as there is, deeply and unexpectedly moving—again, the Blossoms shoot the performance into the stratosphere. Gone were the rock songs, replaced with a fairly expert program of refined pop. The only pieces with any rock pedigree were ‘California Dreamin’’ and ‘Do You Wanna Dance?’ On Changes, Rivers shades the former—the big break for the Mamas and the Papas—as baroque and slightly gothic and the latter—like the Mamas and the Papas—into a very appealing ballad.

His unadorned voice keeps the lights dimmed low for close readings of ‘Days of Wine and Roses’ and ‘The Shadow of Your Smile.’ There’s a similar hushed quality to the beginning of his take on ‘A Taste of Honey’ which resolves into a headlong rush for Bobby Scott and Ric Marlow indelible refrain of “I’ll return, yes, I will return / I’ll come back for the honey / and you.”

Rivers also throws himself into a carefree version of ‘Cast Your Fate to the Wind’ with Carol Werber’s lyrics added to Vince Guaraldi’s earworm-quality melody. There is pleasure to hearing it, not only in that all the building blocks that make it a great song are here, including the lilting opening line, but also in how Rivers’ embrace of highly stylized pop was not artistic compromise or selling out or what have you but instead, was the flourishing of everything he had to offer as an artist. To hear him is to be soothed, to be reassured.

Changes is not only notable as a statement of Rivers’ ultimate purpose but also as the second time that a song written by a soon-to-be-very-big tunesmith by the name of Jim Webb was recorded. Rivers’ version of ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ aches with poignancy. He became Webb’s conduit to quickly building a reputation as a major songwriting voice during the rise of an ambitious, sophisticated pop.

Through the 5th Dimension, whom Rivers signed to his Soul City label, a subsidiary of Imperial Records, his recording home, Webb had his first big hit with their version of ‘Up, Up and Away.’ Their first album, titled after it and released in May 1967, included four other Webb songs. Rivers’ Rewind, out a month later, had seven by him.

The album’s big hits were two Motown mainstays: ‘The Track of My Tears’ and ‘Baby, I Need Your Lovin’.’ Both were adept complements to recordings that were already on their way to becoming iconic, accentuating the secrets of their artful constructions.

For Smokey Robinson, Warren Moore and Marv Tarplin’s ‘The Tracks of My Tears,’ it’s in the contemplative moment in which the song’s protagonist confesses “I need you” which Rivers sings and the Blossoms underline. For (Brian) Holland - (Lamont Dozier) - (Eddie) Holland’s ‘Baby, I Need Your Lovin’’,’ it’s the gradual upping of the intensity before the final chorus which Rivers and the other musicians treat as a subtle sweep upwards. It’s not that Rivers’ covers dial down the soulfulness of both songs, it's that he once again acts as a synthesizer, bringing them untarnished into his sound.

The ultimate demonstration of that sound on Rewind is found on the one song on which Rivers does not sing. Webb’s ‘The Eleventh Song’ is all about how “what a groovy day” it is and how Knechtel, Osborn, Blaine, Paich and the Blossoms induce that bliss.

It’s also felt on ‘Tunesmith,’ a Webb composition about the solitariness of the songwriter. The chorus is centred around the call of “tunesmith, tunesmith, sing me a song / give me your laughter, give me your tears” cushioned by Paich’s cinematic writing for strings. It’s a sad song with a rich poignancy and a heartbreaking lead by Rivers.

The inclusion of so many songs from Webb’s pen on Rewind has it aiming higher than Changes. And, for the most part, it hits its target. Rivers is double tracked on ‘Carpet Man,’ giving him a toughness not usually associated with him and he finds the sweet spot on ‘Do What You Gotta Go,’ as did others like Al Wilson (another Rivers find), Clarence Carter and Roberta Flack (RIP). He also locates the beauty of the lesser-known ‘Sidewalk Song/27th Street.’

On Rivers’ follow-up, Realization, out in 1968, the reach began to exceed its grasp. The covers of Changes, Rewind and Realization tell the tale of his transformation: he is clean shaven on the former, sports the beginning of a goatee on the middle and then has a full goatee, sideburns and beads on the latter.

It’s not so much that the sound of Rivers’ music changed on Realization though there are brief interludes throughout and the odd far-out effect that both could be labeled as psychedelic. It’s that the music often became a bit too ponderous as on ‘Something Strange’ and covers of ‘Hey Joe’ (here, Rivers shifts the lyrics to say “hey Joe, where are you going with your eyes closed”) and ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ that don’t add anything to their more well-known versions. Better is the contrast of the bite of Dylan’s lyrics for ‘Positively 4th Street’ with Rivers’ earnest performance. Best is Brown Jr.’s ‘Brother Where Are You,’ a very affecting song of the Civil Rights struggle.

Rivers wrote or co-wrote three of Realization’s ten songs. ‘Going Back to Big Sur’ is the best of them and yet another example of how the sound of Rivers’ records was the key to their impact. Two songs on the album were written by James Hendricks of the Lamp of Childhood, another group in the Adler camp, and formerly of the Mugwumps, the antecedent of the Mamas and the Papas. ‘Summer Rain’ is the better known of the two and one of the truly astute chronicles of the Summer of 1967, more clear-eyed then Scott McKenzie’s ‘San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)’ but more romantic than Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

Centered on the ubiquitousness of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, ‘Summer Rain’ portrays the Summer of Love as but a moment, memorable yes, but not substantive enough to arrest a change in the weather or society at large. It is another expert pop record by Rivers fueled by the synergy between him and the musicians (on that point, Blaine’s sudden run on the toms after the line “when the snow drifts by my window / north wind blowin’ like thunder” is pre sui generis). It was the end of Johnny Rivers’ rise though he did have a few moments in the sun in the seventies.

He’s the kind of artist who was once big but it little known today beyond the hits. That’s, I suppose, understandable but I suspect those who wish to go deeper will be often thrilled by what they hear.