Snapshots #449: Gangster Songs

If you woke up this morning with a horse's head in the bed next to you... here's why.

15. Where Bond gets his suits.

James Taylor - Machine Gun Kelly

14. Yellowhammer, Yellowhammer, Yellowhammer.

Alabama is the Yellowhammer State, X3.

Alabama 3 - Woke Up This Morning

Theme tune to The Sopranos.

13. Burn receipts to prevent nasty entanglements.

"Burn receipts" was an anagram.

Prince Buster - Al Capone

12. They'll blast you to bits.

The Smithereens - Gotti

11. Audio Nerds take him in.

Audio Nerds take him in.

Dion - King Of The New York Streets

10. Not a Robin, a Kitten, a Fox or a Scimitar.

All models of Reliant motors. Including the Reliant Rialto...

Rialto - Untouchable

9. Alias "beyond the ordinary".

The Special AKA - Gangsters

8. Used for finding your way around a dark tent, prior to the year zero.

BC Camplight - I Want To Be In The Mafia

7. Hoover, Nail, Justice... it overwhelms them to be on the inside.

Three Jimmys and overwHELMS.

Jimmy Helms - Gonna Make You An Offer You Can't Refuse

6. Bloody liquid gives you twinges.

Plasma + Tics.

The Plasmatics - Concrete Shoes

5. Visualize Toothless and Puff.

Imagine Dragons - Top Of The World

Top of the world, ma!

4. How the mix-up happened.

Mix-up 'How the' to get...

The Who - The Punk And The Godfather 

3. He was summer burned and winter blown.

Lyrics from Jimmy Webb's song about...

PF Sloan - Sins Of The Family

2. Have you lost a coat, Tina?

"A coat, Tina" was an anagram.

Catatonia - I Am The Mob

1. Tablecloths at parties.

Paper Lace - The Night Chicago Died

I'll be making you another offer you can't refuse next Saturday morning...

Celebrity Jukebox #124: PF Sloan

You may argue that I’m stretching the definition of “celebrity” today. Still, if you’re famous enough to have a song written about you, you’re a celebrity in my book. You might not be invited on Celebrity Big Brother or Celebrity Wife-Swap or Celebrity Dung Inspectors… whatever’s the latest big celebrity thing to clog up the TV schedules like a rancid fatberg in the sewerage tunnels... but then I've rarely heard of any of the "celebrities" they drag out for these shows anyway... and the ones I have heard of, I generally find objectionable.

Better yet, today's "celebrity" hasn’t had a song written about him by any old Tom, Dick or Harry Styles. He had a song written about him by arguably the greatest songwriter in the history of truly great songwriters. But we’ll get to that…

P.F. Sloan - Raised On Records

Phil “Flip” Sloan was born in New York in 1945. When he was 13, his family moved to Hollywood and his dad bought him a guitar. Legend has it that he met Elvis in the music shop, and wangled his first ever guitar lesson from the King of Rock 'n' Roll. 

A year later, he wrote and released his first single…

Flip Sloan - All I Want Is Loving

Flip Sloan - Little Girl In The Cabin

Sloan soon got a job writing songs for Screen Gems, one of many record companies in the 60s employing teenagers to write songs for their own age group. That's where he met a soon-to-be frequent collaborator, Steve Barri, and together they penned their first minor hit...

Round Robin - Kick That Little Foot, Sally Ann

This led to further success, writing hits for The Turtles, The Searchers and Herman’s Hermits, although Sloan's most known for a tune that became a big Vietnam protest anthem…

Barry Maguire – Eve Of Destruction

Even Bob Dylan liked that one.

PF Sloan also wrote the theme tune to the US version of the Patrick McGoohan show, Danger Man, retitled Secret Agent on American TV. Originally recorded by Johnny Rivers, many years later that song cropped up on the first LP I ever bought... 

 

Bruce Willis – Secret Agent Man

Sloan also joined The Wrecking Crew as a session guitarist. While playing with that legendary ensemble, he came up with a particularly fine opening hook…

The Mamas & The Papas – California Dreamin'

(Here's Sloan himself, talking about how that came about.)

P.F. Sloan - Sins Of A Family

Regardless of his success as a songwriter and musician, what Phil Sloan really wanted was to be a star in his own right. But that was not to be, and in the early 70s he abandoned the music industry altogether and spent many years as a recluse, fighting depression and mental illness. Although he enjoyed a brief comeback in the 21st Century, he sadly died of cancer in 2015. 

PF Sloan - Sailover

Now rewind… to the mid-60s, and a lazy day when Sloan agreed to meet a budding junior songwriter and offer him some words of encouragement. When Sloan heard the songs that young man had to play, they brought him to tears. He thought every one of them could be a major hit...

 

The 5th Dimension – Up, Up And Away

Richard Harris – MacArthur Park

Glen Campbell – By The Time I Get To Phoenix

Jimmy Webb never forgot the support he'd received from PF Sloan early in his career. A few years later, he wrote a timeless tribute to his lost hero that goes something like this...

Last time I saw P.F. Sloan

He was summer burned and winter blown

He turned the corner all alone

But he continued singing

Yeah now, listen to him singing

Jimmy Webb – P.F. Sloan

Bruce Springsteen's manager, Jon Landau, called PF Sloan "a masterpiece [that] could not be improved upon". Even Billy Bragg has something to say about it. The song was also recorded by The Association, Unicorn and Jennifer Warnes, among others, but the definitive version wouldn’t arrive for another 40 years. 

It doesn’t get any better than this…

Cover Me Monday #4: P.F. Sloan

This weekend's Saturday Snapshots featured the Jimmy Webb song P.F. Sloan, a tribute to the man who wrote Barry McGuire's Eve of Destruction, as well as many other songs for artists as varied as the Mamas & Papas, Herman's Hermits, The Turtles and Johnny Rivers.

Like many successful songwriters of his era, Sloan wanted to be a solo star in his own right. However, the success of Eve of Destruction, health problems, and a conflict with his record company forced Sloan out of the music scene in the early 70s for many years, leading Jimmy Webb to pen his heartfelt tribute about "seeking P.F. Sloan", another unsung hero of the cut-throat world of pop.

Most of you will know that I hold Jimmy Webb in very high regard, and not just because he composed the greatest song ever written. I've seen Webb live and he's an excellent performer, warm and witty raconteur and genuinely decent bloke. But I also know he'd be the first to admit that his songs often sound better when performed by others. Curiously though - despite how damned catchy that chorus is - P.F. Sloan was never recorded by Glen Campbell or any of Webb's other more famous collaborators.

Dig deep and you can find versions by The Association, Unicorn (me neither) and Jennifer Warnes, but up until a few years ago Webb's own recording went unchallenged. (Webb also re-recorded the song a few years back as a duet with Jackson Browne, but I still prefer the original.)

This, though... this trumps them all. Ironically, Rumer is another artist who claims to have suffered greatly at the hands of the music industry; the pressure of her debut album led her to being diagnosed both bipolar and PTSD. She has the voice of an an angel though, and is considered by many to be the closest thing we've got these days to Karen Carpenter...



While researching this post, I discovered a couple more nice videos.

Firstly, here's Jimmy and Rumer duetting the song in 2013... with Jimmy explaining more about the genesis of the tune.

Secondly, one year later, here's Rumer performing the song live with P.F. Sloan himself. Sadly, Sloan would die of cancer within 18 months of this recording, but I like to think his immortality is guaranteed, thanks not least to Barry McGuire, Jimmy Webb and Rumer.