WNEW | Where Rock Lives

Rock 101: Allen Klein, the Biggest 'Shark' of Them All

Not everyone is a rock expert, so here is your weekly primer on the events and happenings that shaped Rock and Roll from J.A. Bartlett of the Hits Just Keep On Comin'...

You may have seen the obituary over the July 4th weekend: Allen Klein died of complications from Alzheimer's Disease at age 77. He was eulogized with headlines such as "Beatles 'shark' Allen Klein passes away" and "Tough-guy Beatles manager dies." Klein was not a beloved figure, and he knew it. But if you were an artist who wanted a shark to get the money you believed you were entitled to, Klein was the man to call.

Klein managed Bobby Darin and Connie Francis, but made his first major splash in 1963, when he helped Sam Cooke get financial control over his own master recordings and start his own record label. In 1967, he bought the failing Cameo-Parkway record label, which came with the rights to lucrative recordings by the Animals, Herman's Hermits, and Chubby Checker, among others. By then, however, he was already entangled with the first of his two most famous clients: the Rolling Stones.

Rock 101: What Happened to Brian and Jim?

Not everyone is a rock expert, so here is your weekly Thursday primer on the events and happenings that shaped Rock and Roll from J.A. Bartlett of the Hits Just Keep On Comin'...

On July 3rd, 1969, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones was found dead in the swimming pool of the house in which he lived. Two years later, to the day, Jim Morrison of the Doors died in Paris, France. In between, rock fans dealt with the deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin as well. Although all four stars were said to have perished due to some combination of drink and drugs, Jones and Morrison's deaths have a dimension that the deaths of Hendrix and Joplin don't have -- the widespread belief that they were not merely accidents, or even, in Morrison's case, a death to begin with.

An alternate theory about what happened to Brian Jones has been developed over the last few years. In 1999, Anna Wohlin, Jones' girlfriend at the time of his death, claimed that Brian was murdered by a builder working on his house. Wohlin claimed that Jones was withholding payment from the builder for some repairs on the property. She said that Jones and the builder were fooling around in the pool while the builder's crew worked in the house. Later, she said found the builder in the kitchen, shaking and dripping wet, and Jones motionless at the bottom of the pool. (The story was dramatized in the 2005 film Stoned.) Years later, the builder is supposed to have confessed to the murder while on his deathbed, but the confession was never made public. In 2006, there was a call for the exhumation of Jones' body based on a medical report that showed he had far less alcohol and drugs in his bloodstream than additionally thought, but it never happened. The famous verdict by the local coroner --"death by misadventure" -- remains accurate.

Rock 101: The Beatles vs. the Beach Boys

Not everyone is a rock expert, so here is your weekly Thursday primer on the events and happenings that shaped Rock and Roll from J.A. Bartlett of the Hits Just Keep On Comin'...

During the middle of the 1960s, the "competition" between the Beatles and the Beach Boys was largely a creation of fan magazines. American publishers knew they could put Paul-vs.-Brian on the cover and watch the copies fly, even if the story inside turned out to be warmed-over speculation or utter nonsense. (In the UK, the magazines tended to pit the Beatles against the Rolling Stones.) But there was a grain of truth to the rivalry -- Brian Wilson heard Rubber Soul and was inspired to write Pet Sounds, then tried to outdo Sgt. Pepper with Smile; Paul McCartney was widely quoted as admiring Wilson's song God Only Knows.

During the mid-1960s, the Beatles and the Beach Boys frequently faced off on the American singles chart. Between 1963 and the end of 1966, the Beatles had 20 top-10 hits and the Beach Boys had 13. That means that they were frequently in the top 10 at the same time. This week in 1964, for instance, the Beatles' Love Me Do and the Beach Boys' I Get Around were there together. This week in 1965, the Beach Boys had the better of it, with Help Me Rhonda topping Ticket to Ride. The last time it happened in the 1960s was a September week in 1966 when Yellow Submarine sat at #4 and Wouldn't It Be Nice was #9.

Rock 101: Dark Side of the Rainbow

Not everyone is a rock expert, so here is your weekly Thursday primer on the events and happenings that shaped Rock and Roll from J.A. Bartlett of the Hits Just Keep On Comin'...

During the summer of 1997, major media outlets began reporting on a story that had been circulating among Pink Floyd fans and assorted stoners for years before -- the strange connections between Dark Side of the Moon and the 1939 film classic The Wizard of Oz. Nobody's quite sure who first discovered "the dark side of the rainbow," but over the years, an exhaustive list of connections has developed. Some of the most famous include the growing intensity of Clare Torry's vocal improvisation on The Great Gig in the Sky as Dorothy searches in terror for her family during the tornado that sweeps her to Oz; the switch from sepia-toned black and white to color at the instant Money begins; the line "who knows which is which and who is who" is sung as the camera cuts from Glinda the Good Witch to the Wicked Witch of the West; as Eclipse fades away, replaced by a heartbeat, Dorothy puts her hand on the Tin Woodman's chest.

All the testimony from the people who actually made the album points to a giant coincidence, albeit an astounding one. Rick Wright swore the band didn't do it intentionally. Roger Waters found it amusing. Nick Mason said it would have been too difficult to make the album in sync with the film. Producer Alan Parsons noted that the video technology needed to have done it didn't even exist in 1972. In a fabulous essay, Todd Gardner observes that if Pink Floyd had set out to do such a thing, they probably wouldn't have done it in such a random, haphazard way. He also points out that while the main theme of DSOTM is madness, The Wizard of Oz is a sentimental and ultimately uplifting film. Music critic J.D. Considine wrote that other films, such as Forrest Gump and 2001: A Space Odyssey, sync up even better with DSOTM. 

Rock 101: The Fusion Sound

Not everyone is a rock expert, so here is your weekly Thursday primer on the events and happenings that shaped Rock and Roll from J.A. Bartlett of the Hits Just Keep On Comin'...

Although much of the most popular progressive rock of the 1970s was based on -- or unabashedly stolen from -- classical music, it was relatively rare for prog-rock fans to jump genres and actually get into classical. Many prog-rock fans expanded their horizons instead by exploring jazz-rock fusion, which often found its way onto the late-night or weekend playlists at album-oriented rock radio stations.

Fusion grew out of Miles Davis’ electric experiments of the late '60s, which culminated in the albums In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew. Davis used instruments more commonly found in rock bands, including electric guitar and bass, and incorporated rock rhythms into jazz settings. Some fans and critics said they had trouble recognizing Davis' electric music as jazz at all. Nevertheless, his groundbreaking work inspired a number of successful bands. Weather Report was profoundly influenced by In a Silent Way, and they probably sold more records than any other fusion group during the 1970s, including the certified platinum Heavy Weather, released in 1977. The first track on the album, "Birdland," even got some airplay as a single. Weather Report featured a couple of prominent alumni of Davis’ late-'60s band, sax man Wayne Shorter and keyboard player Joe Zawinul. Influential bassist Jaco Pastorius joined in time for Heavy Weather and remained into the 80s. Here's "Birdland," performed live in 1978:

Rock 101: Band Names

Not everyone is a rock expert, so here is your weekly Thursday primer on the events and happenings that shaped Rock and Roll from J.A. Bartlett of the Hits Just Keep On Comin'...

We noticed that Roland Gift of Fine Young Cannibals is celebrating a birthday this week. But rather than give you a few hundred words on Gift's career, we decided to explore the origins of a few band names instead. Fine Young Cannibals, for example, got its name from a 1960 movie starring Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood called All the Fine Young Cannibals.

But what of some other notable bands? Green Day is supposed to be a reference to marijuana. The band moe. originally called itself Five Guys Named Moe, after an old R&B song. Iron and Wine came from a medicine bottle Sam Beam spotted in a Georgia general store. Blink-182 was originally just Blink until the band was threatened with a lawsuit by another band called Blink, so they added "182." Fall Out Boy was allegedly suggested by an audience member at one of the band's earliest shows, and is a reference to a Simpsons episode.

U2, originally called "the Hype," is said to have chosen its name because they liked its ambiguity (the U2 spy airplane, "you too," or "you two," I suppose), although a friend of the band also claimed it was the least objectionable of the six names he proposed to them. Nirvana was supposedly chosen because Kurt Cobain wanted something beautiful instead of a typical punk-rock name. Nirvana member Dave Grohl's band Foo Fighters took its name from a term used in World War II to describe a type of UFO seen by fighter pilots. But the band UFO, originally named Hocus Pocus, renamed itself after the London club where they were discovered.

Some bands named themselves after people. Tesla took its name from scientist Nicola Tesla, who experimented with electricity and radio communication in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Franz Ferdinand was the Austrian prince whose assassination in 1914 sparked the outbreak of World War I. The Dandy Warhols are named after influential artist and scenemaker Andy Warhol. Jethro Tull took its name from the inventor of a farm implement used for planting seeds. Uriah Heep was a character in the Charles Dickens' novel David Copperfield, and Lynryd Skynyrd was an oblique reference to a long-hair-hating teacher at the high school attended by several band members. Pink Floyd named itself after two obscure blues musicians, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council.

Some names come from songs. Death Cab for Cutie is the title of a song recorded by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, a British band of the 1960s that was in orbit around both Monty Python and the Beatles. Canned Heat took its name from a blues song about drinking Sterno. Radiohead comes from a song by the Talking Heads. The Rolling Stones took their name from the Muddy Waters song Rollin' Stone.

The story of the Stones' name is only a bit less famous than that of how Led Zeppelin got its name -- which is probably the most famous name story of all. The name came from a scornful remark either Keith Moon or John Entwistle of the Who is said to have made about the likely success of Jimmy Page's new band: "it'll go over like a lead zeppelin." (The "a" in "lead" was supposedly dropped to keep "ignorant Americans" from mispronouncing it.)

And as befits the most influential band in rock history, the Beatles also have one of the best name stories, although it's not as interesting as John Lennon claimed in the book In His Own Write. There, he said "Beatles" with an A was suggested to them by a man who appeared riding on a flaming pie. At the suggestion of Stu Sutcliffe, they initially called themselves "the Beetles" in tribute to Buddy Holly's band the Crickets. They changed it to "the Beatals" for a while, but went through several variations (Silver Beats, Silver Beetles, and Silver Beatles) before settling on "the Beatles" in August 1960. It's one of the great puns in the history of the English language, although few people see it that way.

If you have a favorite band-name story, please share it in the comments.

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Rock 101: Many, Many Dylans

Rock music has a robust history, so every Wednesday, J.A. Bartlett of the Hits Just Keep On Comin' talks about the biggest and most intriguing moments from years past...

Bob Dylan, who is turning 68 years old this week, has performed under several aliases during his long career. And his birthday is as good an excuse as we need to dig into some of those names.

Elston Gunn: One of Dylan's first bands, in the late 1950s, was called Elston Gunn and the Rock Boppers. Dylan also used the name during a couple of North Dakota gigs as a piano player behind Bobby Vee. (He occasionally spelled it Gunnn -- three N's -- but we'll forgive him because he was young.)

Blind Boy Grunt: Possibly his most famous assumed name, Blind Boy Grunt was the name Dylan chose on a session for the folk-music magazine Broadside, for an anthology album released in 1963. He couldn't use his real name because he was under contract to Columbia Records at the time.

Bob Landy: On a 1964 sampler of New York folk tunes called The Blues Project, "Landy" played piano on the song Downtown Blues.

Tedham Porterhouse: Harp player on Ramblin' Jack Elliott's 1964 self-titled album.

Robert Milkwood Thomas: Piano player and backing vocalist on Steve Goodman's 1972 album Somebody Else's Troubles.

Lucky Wilbury/Boo Wilbury: As part of the supergroup the Traveling Wilburys (with George Harrison, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, and Roy Orbison), Dylan had two different pseudonyms. On the 1988 album Volume One, he was Lucky; on 1990's Volume Three, Boo.

Elmer Johnson: In 1989, Dylan sat in with the Band during a show in Edwardsville, Illinois, as they played his song In the Pines.

Jack Fate/Sergei Petrov: Fate is the name of the character Dylan played in the 2003 movie Masked and Anonymous; Petrov was the name he took as co-writer of the film.

Jack Frost: Dylan's producer credit on his last three studio albums, Love and Theft, Modern Times, and Together Through Life.

Roosevelt Gook: Included on some lists, this wasn't a Dylan pseudonym, although he suggested it for Al Kooper at sessions for the Tom Rush album Take a Little Walk With Me in 1965. Kooper didn't use it, either, but it's too goofy to leave out of this discussion.

If we've missed any of Dylan's other names, we trust you'll let us know in the comments.

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Rock 101: The Other Woodstocks

Not everyone is a rock expert, so here is your weekly Thursday primer on the events and happenings that shaped Rock and Roll from J.A. Bartlett of the Hits Just Keep On Comin'...

The 1969 Woodstock festival looms large in the imagination of every rock fan, and the desire to recreate that world-altering weekend may not go away until the last baby boomer enters a nursing home. The news that a lineup is being set for a Woodstock 40th anniversary show this August got us thinking about past Woodstock anniversary shows.

The famous Joni Mitchell song includes the line "We've got to get ourselves back to the garden." It took 10 years for some of the original performers to make the trip, and then it was to Madison Square Garden instead of Max Yasgur's farm. Woodstock '79 featured Richie Havens, Canned Heat, and Country Joe and the Fish, among others. There's precious little information available about the show, which doesn't seem to have left much of an impression on anybody. (A videocassette of highlights was released in 1991, but good luck finding it.) In 1989, an anniversary gathering was held on the original site. It seems to have been almost entirely improvised (but that's according to Wikipedia, so who the hell knows). About 30,000 people eventually turned up over the course of three midweek days corresponding to the original festival dates. Original Woodstock icon Wavy Gravy was there; musical performers included Melanie, Savoy Brown, and David Peel. The event also featured a total eclipse of the the moon one evening. Cosmic, man.

By 1994, boomer nostalgia was well-established as a reliable cash cow, and younger rock fans raised on tales of Woodstock Nation wanted to make their own garden. Thus Woodstock '94 was born. The bill was a mix of original Woodstock vets (including Crosby Stills and Nash, the Band, Joe Cocker, and Santana) and icons of the moment such as Nine Inch Nails and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Also on the bill: Bob Dylan, who had turned down an invitation to play the original in 1969, plus Peter Gabriel, Aerosmith, Metallica, and a host of others. The rumor mill promised other appearances that never happened: the Rolling Stones, Pearl Jam, the surviving members of Nirvana, and even Bill Clinton with his saxophone. Like the original, Woodstock '94 spawned a film and a soundtrack album, and the crowd of 400,000 was drenched in rain at one point. But all you really need to know about the cool quotient of Woodstock '94 is that the master of ceremonies was actor/comedian Tom Arnold.

At Woodstock '99, held at a former Air Force base near Utica, New York, 200 miles or so from the original site, the weather was rotten and the sanitation insufficient. Legend had it that such conditions helped foster the communal spirit of the 1969 original. In 1999, it just made people mean. Extortionate prices for scarce concessions didn't help; neither did the proliferation of corporate sponsors, which made some in the crowd of 200,000 feel oppressed by The Man. Ultimately, the event turned into a sour end-of-the-millennium satire on the peace-and-love vibe of the original. There were reports of rapes in the mosh pit on Friday night. Violence broke out in the audience on Saturday night during Limp Bizkit's performance, egged on by the band from the stage. Vendor stands and ATMs were looted. Fires were set on Sunday while the Red Hot Chili Peppers performed, and members of the crowd threw rocks at firefighters and cops. Amidst the mounting chaos, MTV, which had been broadcasting extensively from the event, pulled its crew off the site, blaming "waves of hatred." Hundreds of New York state troopers finally moved in and cleared the crowd a few hours before the festival was scheduled to end. 

In the decade since Woodstock '99, concert organizers have learned how to operate massive outdoor festivals, and it seems like there's one almost every weekend somewhere. So Woodstock '09, currently set for a single day on August 15, should be easy to pull off. Shouldn't it?

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Rock 101: The First Teen Idol

Not everyone is a rock expert, so here is your weekly Thursday primer on the events and happenings that shaped Rock and Roll from J.A. Bartlett of the Hits Just Keep On Comin'...

"Rock 'n' roll smells phony and false. It is sung, played, and written for the most part by cretinous goons. . . the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear."

So said Frank Sinatra to a Congressional committee in 1957. While Sinatra gained a reputation as one of rock's foremost opponents, it didn't last. And in fact, by 1957 he already had more in common with the early rockers than he might have been willing to admit.

Sinatra burst on the music scene in 1939 as a 23-year-old big-band singer. On December 30, 1942, he made his first live appearance as a solo artist at the Paramount Theater in New York City. The show attracted a horde of teenage girls who wore poodle skirts and white socks, which they rolled down their ankles. They were nicknamed "bobby-soxers," and Sinatra was their hero. When he hit the Paramount stage, he was completely unprepared for their reaction. He said later, "The sound that greeted me was absolutely deafening. It was a tremendous roar. Five thousand kids, stamping, yelling, screaming, applauding. I was scared stiff. I couldn’t move a muscle." The roar shocked the musicians backing Sinatra as well, including bandleader Benny Goodman, a musician familiar with enthusiastic crowds. Even he had never seen anything like it.

At show after show throughout 1943, Sinatra was greeted by the same reaction. A return engagement at the Paramount in October 1944, after Sinatra had scored a string of hits and appeared in a couple of movies, drew a crowd of nearly 35,000 female fans, and it took the police to disperse them. Cultural observers were baffled. No singer had inspired this kind of reaction before. Was it a form of madness, or immorality? Were the bobbysoxers a class of juvenile delinquents on the rise?

Not really. The screaming and swooning of the bobby-soxers was, in fact, the sound of a generation being born. The concept of the teenager as a demographic group, no longer children but not fully adult, didn't exist yet. It wouldn't be fully formed until the 1950s, when marketers realized that teenagers had untold disposable dollars to spend. The bobby-soxers were the first manifestation of this new generation. Their reaction to Sinatra would be repeated in the reaction of young female fans to their musical idols from Elvis to the Beatles to the Backstreet Boys to the next American Idol and beyond. And every time you find yourself in a pre-concert crush, you're experiencing something that began with Sinatra more than 60 years ago.

Sinatra eventually made his peace with rock music. Only three years after his "cretinous goons" remark, he founded Reprise Records. That label would eventually be home to Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young, the Kinks, Fleetwood Mac, and others, although not until after Sinatra had sold the label to Warner Brothers. The last two albums he made before his death, Duets (1993) and Duets II (1994), featured him singing with a wide array of performers he might previously have shunned, including Bono, Chrissie Hynde, Jimmy Buffett, and Neil Diamond. And when he died (11 years ago this month), he was still numbered among the top four musical icons of all time, alongside Elvis, the Beatles, and Bing Crosby, even though rock, the music he once claimed to hate, had long since conquered popular music.

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Rock 101: "Smile"

Not everyone is a rock expert, so here is your weekly Thursday primer on the events and happenings that shaped Rock and Roll from J.A. Bartlett of the Hits Just Keep On Comin'...

The "competition" between the Beatles and the Beach Boys during the mid-1960s was mostly a creation of fan magazines. Competition never drove the artists as much as fans believed it did, but that doesn't mean each group didn't pay attention to what the other was doing. After Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys heard Rubber Soul in 1965, he started working on a concept album of his own. Pet Sounds, released in 1966, was a masterpiece of production, incorporating track upon track of unusual instruments and sounds a year before the Beatles scaled similar heights with Sgt. Pepper. Although Pet Sounds contained a couple of big hit singles, Wouldn't It Be Nice and Sloop John B, it was the Beach Boys' least-successful album to date in the States. In Britain, however, it was much more popular, and in the year-end music polls for 1966, the Beach Boys topped the Beatles in some categories. (Paul McCartney would later say that God Only Knows, a track from Pet Sounds, was his all-time favorite song.)

Later in 1966, Wilson returned to the studio determined to outdo Pet Sounds. For several months, he collaborated with songwriter Van Dyke Parks on an even-more elaborate album to be called Smile. Wilson said he intended it as "a teenage symphony to God." A taste of the album, the single Good Vibrations, went to #1 at the end of 1966, reportedly requiring over 80 miles of recording tape to make. Based on promises by Wilson, Capitol Records had scheduled release of Smile for January 1967, but it didn't happen. And over the next several months, Wilson started to crack up. His use of drugs didn't help matters any, although there's some dispute over how much Wilson was using at the time. The other Beach Boys bickered over the project, and Parks quit entirely in March. In May, the band's publicist announced that the whole thing was being shelved. Not only that, but they backed out of a headlining spot at the Monterey Pop Festival that June.

Had the Beach Boys appeared at Monterey, they might have gained some of the rock credibility Wilson had been seeking with Pet Sounds and Smile. As it turned out, they spent June and July making Smiley Smile, which was released in September 1967. It contained several alternate version of tracks intended for Smile, along with the first album appearance of Good Vibrations. But by the time it came out, the Beatles had released Sgt. Pepper. After that, nobody talked about "competition" between the Beatles and the Beach Boys anymore.

After Brian bowed out of the Beach Boys, some of the Smile material remained behind. A reworked version of Surf's Up, which would have been the centerpiece of Smile, appeared as the title song of a 1971 album. Tracks from the Smile sessions were released on the 1993 Good Vibrations box set, and in 2004, Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks would complete the album, releasing it as Brian Wilson Presents Smile. Nearly 40 years after its conception, it brought Wilson his first solo Grammy award,

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Rock 101: Oh No They Didn't

Not everyone is a rock expert, so here is your weekly Thursday primer on the events and happenings that shaped Rock and Roll from J.A. Bartlett of the Hits Just Keep On Comin'...

Every once in a while, out on the wild frontier of the Internet, you'll find mention of a cover version of Dobie Gray's 1973 hit Drift Away (also covered in 2002 by Uncle Kracker) which is supposedly performed by the Rolling Stones and the Beatles together. Although the prospect of such a collaboration is tantalizing in the extreme, it never happened.

There is indeed a Stones recording of Drift Away. They cut it in November 1973 during sessions for the album It’s Only Rock and Roll. In the end, it didn't appear on the album, most likely due to time restrictions -- the vinyl format limited the amount of music that could reasonably appear on a record. It's certainly not because the performance wasn’t good enough. You can hear it here.

I have been unable to find or figure out how Drift Away got credited as a joint Stones/Beatles project. Nevertheless, the myth that it is such a collaboration persists. But had the Beatles joined the Stones in Germany to cover Drift Away in 1973, years after the Beatles had broken up, the event would have made headlines around the world. And besides, there had already been Beatles/Stones collaborations: John and Paul sang on the Stones’ We Love You, and Mick sang on the Beatles’ Baby You’re a Rich Man.

Drift Away surfaced on the 1991 bootleg compilation Greatest Rarities, Volume 1, and is widely available on the Internet these days. Another track found on the Greatest Rarities compilation, Too Many Cooks, is said to feature John on guitar. His participation has never been confirmed, although Mick says it’s possible he was present for the informal jam session that resulted in the song. But as far as Drift Away is concerned, there’s nary a Beatle involved.

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Rock 101: The Famous List of Drug-Oriented Songs

Not everyone is a rock expert, so here is your weekly Thursday primer on the events and happenings that shaped Rock and Roll from J.A. Bartlett of the Hits Just Keep On Comin'...

When you spend time prowling the rock history archives, you find that certain factoids appear again and again, often described with the same sentence, as if it had been cut-and-pasted from one site to another, which it probably has been. One of them is that in April 1971, the Illinois Crime Commission released a list of songs it found to be "drug-oriented." Sometimes the factoid mentions a few of the songs but never goes into more detail. Today, we're going into more detail.

The Commission was set up by the Illinois legislature during the 1960s to investigate organized crime in the state, but in late 1970, it held public hearings "on the narcotics and dangerous drugs problem." Whatever else might have come out of the hearings is buried in the state archives. All anybody remembers is the list of "drug-oriented rock records" released to the public in April 1971. According to an article in Rolling Stone, nine records appeared on the list:

Let's Go Get Stoned by Joe Cocker
A Whiter Shade of Pale by Procol Harum
Hi-De-Ho by Blood Sweat and Tears
With a Little Help From My Friends by Sergio Mendes and Brash 66 [sic]
White Rabbit by the Jefferson Airplane
Yellow Submarine by the Beatles
Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds by the Beatles
Puff the Magic Dragon by Peter, Paul and Mary

The one that jumps out first is With a Little Help From My Friends, not because anybody is surprised by its inclusion today, but because it's listed as having been recorded by Sergio Mendes and Brasil 66 (not Brash 66), and not a little band from England called the Beatles. With a Little Help From My Friends would be cited by Vice-President Spiro Agnew during a speech later in the year. "It's a catchy tune," he said, "but until it was pointed out to me, I never realized that the 'friends' were assorted drugs with such nicknames as 'Mary Jane,' 'Speed,' and 'Benny.'" However, you might wonder what Agnew was smoking, since the song contains none of the names he mentioned.

The commission observed that Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds "depicts the pleasure of LSD" and that "yellow submarine" was "street jargon for yellow, barbiturate capsules." White Rabbit celebrates "the kicks provided by LSD and other psychedelics." Hi De Ho is about "the joys of smoking marijuana," presumably because of the phrase "I'm gonna get me some of that old sweet roll," although the lyrics (written by noted counterculture figures Carole King and Gerry Goffin) are opaque enough for the song to be about eating really good pastry. And speaking of opacity, the commission found that Whiter Shade of Pale praised "mind-bending characteristics of the psychedelics," even though nobody can tell what the hell it's supposed to be about.

The commission report strained credulity the most by including Let's Go Get Stoned, noting that the "lyrics have a double meaning, referring to alcohol but also to drugs." Those damn kids, perverting a perfectly good term for being drunk that was standard adult parlance in the 1960s, used on television without causing a second thought. The most laughable of them all, of course, was Puff the Magic Dragon, which the commission proclaimed was about "smoking marijuana and hashish." Puff was based on a poem written in 1959 and had been released in 1963, several years before the other songs cited, although rumors about its "true" meaning began circulating in the late 60s. Peter Yarrow has spent nearly 40 years denying the rumors, saying that the song is about the loss of childhood innocence, which is plain from the words on the page. 

The Illinois Crime Commission's list was no joke in 1971. It landed in a season during which drug-oriented lyrics were already controversial. The Federal Communications Commission had posted a public notice in March reminding stations that they were responsible for knowing the meaning of the songs they played, especially songs that might mention drug use or abuse. This was reported as being a ban on drug-oriented lyrics, so shortly after the Illinois report was released, the FCC clarified itself. It reminded stations that its earlier pronouncement had merely reaffirmed that each station's license-holder was responsible for all speech heard on the station, including songs that possibly glorified drugs. While there was no blanket censorship, the reminder was enough to chill the climate, and many songs were indeed dropped from playlists, if only for a while. In the years since, the chill has occasionally returned, and it will probably do so now and then until the end of time, as long as there are adults inclined to worry about what the kids are listening to.

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