“The Loco-Motion” is a 1962 pop song written by American songwriters Gerry Goffin and Carole King. The song is a popular and enduring example of the dance-song genre: much of the lyrics are devoted to a description of the dance itself, usually done as a type of line dance. However, the song came before the dance.

King and Goffin wrote “The Loco-Motion” in hopes to have it recorded by Dee Dee Sharp who had a smash hit with “Mashed Potato Time”. Sharp passed on the song leaving the opportunity open for Eva Boyd who had recorded the demo. Her version was released and her name was changed to Little Eva.

“The Loco-Motion” was the first release by the new Dimension Records company, whose releases were mostly penned and produced by Goffin and King. There are two common versions of the song in circulation; one includes handclaps during the verses, the other has no handclaps. King performed the backup vocals in the recording.

The widely believed story of how the song “The Loco-Motion” came to be is that Carole King was playing music at home and Eva Boyd was doing some chores and started dancing to it; the dance The Loco-Motion was born. However, this is not true. Boyd was actually Carole King’s babysitter, having been introduced to King and husband Gerry Goffin by The Cookies, a local girl group who would also record for the songwriters and they realized she had a good singing voice, so they had her record “The Loco-Motion”. Carole King stated this during an interview on National Public Radio (NPR) shortly after Little Eva died.

As the song came before the dance, there was no dance when the song was originally written. When the song became a smash hit, Eva Boyd ended up having to create a dance to go along with the song. Carole King stated this in her “One to One” concert video. In live performances of the song, Little Eva can be seen doing her version of the dance.

Another bit of the conventional lore is that she had received only $50 for “The Loco-Motion”. However, although she never owned the rights to her recordings, it seems $50 was actually her weekly salary during the years she was making records (an increase of $15 from what Goffin and King had been paying her as nanny). In 1971, she moved to South Carolina and lived in obscurity on menial jobs and welfare, until being rediscovered in 1987. She died of cervical cancer in 2003.

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The song originates in a domestic event that took place while Graham Nash was living with Joni Mitchell (and her two cats) in her house on Laurel Canyon (Los Angeles), after they had gone out for breakfast and had bought an inexpensive vase on Ventura Boulevard. Nash wrote the song in an hour, on Mitchell’s piano.

In October 2013, Nash elaborated:

“Well, it’s an ordinary moment. What happened is that Joni [Mitchell] and I – I don’t know whether you know anything about Los Angeles, but on Ventura Boulevard in the Valley, there’s a very famous deli called Art’s Deli. And we’d been to breakfast there.

We’re going to get into Joan’s car, and we pass an antique store. And we’re looking in the window, and she saw a very beautiful vase that she wanted to buy… I persuaded her to buy this vase. It wasn’t very expensive, and we took it home.

It was a very grey, kind of sleety, drizzly L.A. morning. And we got to the house in Laurel Canyon, and I said – got through the front door and I said, you know what? I’ll light a fire. Why don’t you put some flowers in that vase that you just bought?

Well, she was in the garden getting flowers. That meant she was not at her piano, but I was… And an hour later ‘Our House’ was born, out of an incredibly ordinary moment that many, many people have experienced”.

In the same interview, Nash was asked about the harmonies in the song:

“It’s me and David [Crosby] and Stephen [Stills] doing our best. That’s all we ever do. You know, we’re lucky enough to be able to do, you know, anything that we want to do, musically. And, you know, these two guys are incredible musicians.

Crosby is one of the most unique musicians I know, and Stephen Stills has got this blues-based, South American kind of feeling to his music. And I’m this, you know, Henry VIII guy from England… You know, it’s not supposed to work, but it does, somehow”

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Paul Williams wrote this with Roger Nichols. Instrumental backing was by L.A. session musicians from the famous Wrecking Crew.

Sometimes song lyrics are written on the fly, and that was the case with a line in this song. Says Williams:

“On ‘Rainy Days And Mondays’ Chuck Kay, who was head of publishing at A&M, said, ‘That’s a perfect song for The 5th Dimension, let’s play it for them.’ They passed on it. I said, ‘Well, there are a couple of lines that aren’t done yet.’ He said, ‘You’ll finish it in the car.’

So in the car going over there, I came up with a fill line, which was ‘What I’ve got they used to call the blues.’ I didn’t have that line done yet, so I wrote it as just a quick fill line, because I wanted to mention the blues, but it was such a hackneyed expression, ‘I’ve got the blues.’ So I just wrote, ‘What I’ve got they used to call the blues.’ And it actually became my favorite line in the song. I think it’s the best line in the song.

I met Johnny Mercer once at A&M Records, and he sat down and I introduced myself, ‘Paul Williams,’ and he shook my hand. And he walked back into the studio where he was mixing, then he stuck his head back out into the hall and he went, ‘Paul Williams, ‘what I’ve got they used to call the blues,’ that Paul Williams?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir.’

It was funny. It was one of the great moments of my life, to meet Johnny Mercer, who I think was the lyricist’s lyricist.”

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Roy Orbison was writing with his songwriting partner Bill Dees at his house when he told Dees to get started writing by playing anything that came to mind. Orbison’s wife Claudette came in and said she was going to go into town to buy something. Orbison asked if she needed any money, and Dees cracked, “Pretty woman never needs any money.” Inspired, Orbison started singing, “Pretty woman walking down the street.”

Bill Dees recalls:

“He sang it while I was banging my hand down on the table and by the time she returned we had the song. I love the song. From the moment that the rhythm started, I could hear the heels clicking on the pavement, click, click, the pretty woman walking down the street, in a yellow skirt and red shoes.

We wrote Oh Pretty Woman on a Friday, the next Friday we recorded it, and the next Friday it was out. It was the fastest thing I ever saw. Actually, the yeah, yeah, yeah in Oh Pretty Woman probably came from The Beatles.”

In the same book Bill Dees recounts how the distinctive growling cry of “Mercy” came about: “I can’t do that growl like Roy, but the “Mercy” is mine. I used to say that all the time when I saw a pretty woman or had some good food. Still do.”

Orbison and his wife Claudette had recently reconciled after some tough times, but as this song was climbing the charts, Roy found out she had been cheating on him and filed for divorce. In 1966, they remarried, but two months later Claudette was killed when the motorcycle she was riding was hit by a truck. Orbison faced tragedy again when his two oldest sons died in a fire at his home in 1968. He was on tour at the time.

Orbison posthumously won the 1991 Grammy Award for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance for his live recording of “Pretty Woman” on his HBO television special Roy Orbison and Friends, A Black and White Night. In 1999, the song was honored with a Grammy Hall of Fame Award and was named one of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked it #224 on their list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time.” On May 14, 2008, The Library of Congress selected the song for preservation in the National Recording Registry.

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In 2011, Rolling Stone magazine ranked Dylan’s version of the song at #232 in their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

In the album notes of his 1985 compilation, Biograph, Dylan claimed that he wrote the lyrics of this song in Kansas City on Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1965, while on tour. However, after listening to the recording session tapes of Dylan at work on this song in the Nashville studio, historian Sean Wilentz has written that Dylan improvised the lyrics in the studio, by singing “disconnected lines and semi-gibberish”.

Dylan was initially unsure what the person described in the song does that is just like a woman, rejecting “shakes”, “wakes”, and “makes mistakes”. The improvisational spirit extends to the band attempting, in their fourth take, a “weird, double-time version”, somewhere between Jamaican ska and Bo Diddley.

Clinton Heylin has analysed successive drafts of the song from the so-called Blonde On Blonde papers, papers that Heylin believes were either left behind by Dylan or stolen from his Nashville hotel room. The first draft has a complete first verse, a single couplet from the second verse, and another couplet from the third verse. There is no trace of the chorus of the song. In successive drafts, Dylan added sporadic lines to these verses, without ever writing out the chorus.

This leads Heylin to speculate that Dylan was writing the words while Al Kooper played the tune over and over on the piano in the hotel room, and the chorus was a “last-minute formulation in the studio”. Kooper has explained that he would play piano for Dylan in his hotel room, to aid the song-writing process, and then would teach the tunes to the studio musicians at the recording sessions.

The song features a lilting melody, backed by delicately picked nylon-string guitar and piano instrumentation, resulting in arguably the most commercial track on the album.

The musicians backing Dylan on the track include Charlie McCoy, Joseph A. Souter Jr., and Wayne Moss on guitar, Henry Strzelecki on bass, Hargus “Pig” Robbins on piano, Al Kooper on organ and Kenny Buttrey on drums. Although Dylan’s regular guitar sideman, Robbie Robertson, was present at the recording session, he did not play on the song.

This exploration of female wiles and feminine vulnerability was widely rumored—”not least by her acquaintances among Andy Warhol’s Factory retinue”—to be about Edie Sedgwick. The reference to Baby’s penchant for “fog, amphetamine and pearls” suggests Sedgwick or some similar debutante, according to Heylin. “

Just Like a Woman” has also been rumored to have been written about Dylan’s relationship with fellow folk singer Joan Baez. In particular, it has been suggested that the lines “Please don’t let on that you knew me when/I was hungry and it was your world” may refer to the early days of their relationship, when Baez was more famous than Dylan.

Discussing whether the biographical basis of this song is important, literary critic Christopher Ricks has argued, “Everyone can understand the feelings and the relationship described in the song, so why does it matter if Dylan wrote it with one woman in mind?”

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“Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)” was written by Bob Dylan and first recorded during The Basement Tapes sessions in 1967.

The song was recorded in December 1967 and first released in January 1968 as the “Mighty Quinn” by Manfred Mann. There are a lot of folk legends about where the inspiration came from:

It is possible that Dylan came up with the idea for this after seeing the 1959 Nicholas Ray movie called The Savage Innocents. In that movie, Anthony Quinn played an Eskimo named Inuk.

The Grateful Dead occasionally played this at their shows. Here’s one story that circulated about the song: The Grateful Dead years ago had a wild LSD party in a New York City hotel during a tour visit. Allegedly, one of the party guests was Bob Dylan. One of the other guests at the hotel didn’t appreciate the noise and voiced several complaints.

It was actor Anthony Quinn who’d played an Eskimo in The Savage Innocents. That could have inspired a partying Dylan to write a strange and funny song like this.

One theory is that “The Mighty Quinn” is Sheriff Larry Quinlan, who raided the Castillia Foundation land in Millbrook, New York and arrested Dr. Timothy Leary and his group of hippies. Quinlan confiscated all the LSD and other drugs at the scene. In this scenario, the “pigeons” are informers.

Mike D’Abo of Manfred Mann:

“We met in a publisher’s house as Bob Dylan was making some new material available to other artists. We heard about 10 songs and I thought ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’ would be the one to do, but Manfred liked The Mighty Quinn, which was called ‘Quinn The Eskimo’ then.

It was sung in a rambling monotone but Manfred had recognized its potential. He sold me on the idea of doing this song, but I had to make up some of the words as I couldn’t make out everything he was saying. It was like learning a song phonetically in a foreign language. I have never had the first idea what the song is about except that it seems to be ‘Hey, gang, gather round, something exciting is going to happen ’cause the big man’s coming.’ As to who the big man is and why he is an Eskimo, I don’t know.”

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People who are unfamiliar with Zappa will dismiss this as silly and unimportant. And he probably wanted just that. Zappa was a true musical and social visionary. He was an avid anti-government, anti-bureaucratic, anti-poseur proponent who railed against the “plastic people” in society and politics.

The song is a manifesto against conformity and materialistic culture, with Frank Zappa finally asking, “Go home/and check yourself/you think we’re singing ’bout someone else?”.

He was an accomplished and extremely talented musician and creator/composer. He surrounded himself with truly elite musicians. His later serious jazz talent is worth seeking out if you’re so inclined.

(This article contains verbiage from Francois Couture)

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“Up on the Roof” is a song written by husband and wife Gerry Goffin and Carole King, when she was 20 years old, and most popularly recorded in 1962 by The Drifters. This is the demo recording by Carole with Gerry singing:

Appropriately enough, the song was born among the rat-race noise of a crowded city street. “Carole came up with the melody in the car – an a cappella melody,” Goffin told Ken Emerson. “I said, ‘How about a place to be alone?’ She says, ‘My secret place.’ So the song was originally called ‘My Secret Place.’ I said, ‘No, that’s no good. How about ‘Up on the Roof’? It was imaginary – maybe something that I copped out of West Side Story.” Gerry Goffin would cite “Up on the Roof” as his all-time favorite of the lyrics he’d written. Goffin kept King’s suggested focus of a haven, modifying it with his enthusiasm for the movie musical West Side Story which contained several striking scenes set on the rooftops of Upper West Side highrises.

Here’s a live version of Carole performing it in 1972:

Little Eva also released her version in 1962:

In April 2010, The Drifters’ “Up on the Roof” was named number 114 on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list. It is one of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.

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The Hollies are best known for their pioneering and distinctive three-part vocal harmony style. The Hollies became one of the leading British groups of the 1960s (231 weeks on the UK singles charts during the 1960s, the 9th highest of any artist of the decade) and into the mid 1970s.

The Hollies originated as a duo formed by Allan Clarke and Graham Nash, who were best friends from primary school and began performing together during the skiffle craze of the late 1950s. Eventually Clarke and Nash became a vocal and guitar duo modeled on American duo the Everly Brothers under the names “Ricky and Dane Young”. Under this name, they teamed up with a local band, the Fourtones until 1962 when Clarke and Nash quit and joined another Manchester band, the Deltas. The Deltas first called themselves “The Hollies” for a December 1962 gig at the Oasis Club in Manchester. It has been suggested that bassist Eric Haydock named the group in relation to a Christmas holly garland, though in a 2009 interview Graham Nash said that the group decided just prior to a performance to call themselves “The Hollies” because of their admiration for Buddy Holly.

Over the next three years The Hollies became known for doing cover versions while starting to write and perform a substantial amount of original material, written by the group’s songwriting team of Clarke, Nash, and lead guitarist Tony Hicks. Around this time they were introduced to a 16 year-old fellow Manchester kid named Graham Gouldman, who played in several local bands but became known more for his songwriting skills. He signed a management agreement with Harvey Lisberg in 1965, and while working by day in a men’s outfitters shop and playing by night with his semi-professional band, he wrote a string of hit songs, many of them million sellers. Between 1965 and 1967 alone he wrote “For Your Love”, “Heart Full of Soul” and “Evil Hearted You” for the Yardbirds, “Look Through Any Window” (with Charles Silverman) and “Bus Stop” for the Hollies, “Listen People”, “No Milk Today” and “East West” for Herman’s Hermits, “Pamela, Pamela” for Wayne Fontana, “Behind the Door” for St. Louis Union (covered by Cher), and “Tallyman” for Jeff Beck. He also went on to form the band 10cc, best known for their hit “I’m Not In Love.”

In a 1976 interview Graham Gouldman said the idea for the song “Bus Stop” had come while he was riding home from work on a bus. The opening lines were written by his father, playwright Hyme Gouldman who was a talented and creative writer who often helped his son with song ideas. Graham had the idea for bus stop setting, and his dad came up with the first line: “Bus stop, wet day, she’s there, I say, ‘please share my umbrella.'” From that starting point, he was able to finish the song. Graham Gouldman continued with the rest of the song in his bedroom, apart from the middle-eight, which he finished while riding to work on the bus the next day.

Thirty years later he elaborated on the song’s beginnings:

‘Bus Stop’, I had the title and I came home one day and he said ‘I’ve started something on that Bus Stop idea you had, and I’m going to play it for you. He’d written ‘Bus stop, wet day, she’s there, I say please share my umbrella’ and it’s like when you get a really great part of a lyric or, I also had this nice riff as well, and when you have such a great start to a song it’s kind of like the rest is easy. It’s like finding your way onto a road and when you get onto the right route, you just follow it.

Herman’s Hermits also recorded this song in 1966. They got first crack at many of Gouldman’s songs because their manager was married to his sister.

Peter Noone, the Herman’s Hermits frontman, explained:

“Bus Stop” went to The Hollies before us, because Graham Gouldman didn’t think it was the kind of song that we would like. Then when we heard it, it was like, Are you kidding me? We want that. Luckily John Paul Jones (pre Led Zeppelin) heard it when we were trying to figure it out and he said ‘Nah, I’ve got it,’ and he re-invented the song. That’s John Paul Jones who turned that into a hit record, nobody else. It is not a hit song. If you listen to the Hollies demo version of it, it’s just not good. He reorganized the song and made it what it is: serious art work.”

The Hollies were one of the last of the major British Invasion groups to have significant chart success in the United States. From 1966 until after they signed to Epic in 1967, the band had their most concentrated success in the US, including four Top 15 songs (“Bus Stop”, “Stop Stop Stop”, “On a Carousel”, and “Carrie Anne”). The move to Epic followed by Graham Nash’s departure ended this streak; after that, the Hollies had a few more huge hits: “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” (No.7, 1969), “Long Cool Woman” (No.2, 1972), and “The Air That I Breathe” (No.6, 1974).

In 2010, the Hollies were included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The band members inducted were Allan Clarke, Graham Nash, Tony Hicks, Eric Haydock, Bobby Elliott, Bernie Calvert, and Terry Sylvester. They were also inducted into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in the US in 2006.

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