V.S.O.P. #88 WEST COAST ROCK AND ROLL, VOLUME 1
w/Billy Devroe and his Devilairs, Tony Allen & The Wonders, The Saxons, Plas Johnson, Lucy Campo, The Sparklers, The Twisters, Clint Stacey and the Ernie Freeman Band, The Flannels, The Jac-O-Lacs Recorded, between 1955 and 1967, at various studios in Hollywood. All sessions produced by Robert Scherman.
This collection is more than just a welcome opportunity to enjoy once again some seldom herd but nonetheless engaging and well produced West Coast rock and roll, recorded mostly in the late ‘50s for release on the Tampa label. It is also a tribute to one small facet of the remarkable career of Robert Scherman, a truly unsung hero in the annals of the recording industry. The name may not be familiar to you, but bear with these notes a little further and you will be amazed at the impact this gentleman has had on some quality popular music that has touched all our lives.
Bob was born in Indianapolis, Indiana on June 14, 1917. A seeming child prodigy, he was performing classical piano recitals at age nine. Pop tunes proved to be his first love, however, and by the early ‘40s Scherman found himself in Hollywood, with a couple of B-movie film scores and a brief tenure as an ASCAP representative to his credit. He decided quite logically that his own record label would be the best possible outlet for his creative drive, and in 1943 Scherman was busily prowling L.A. nightspots in search of an artist to do justice to an original composition which he thought had great potential, a song called “All For You”. He found a pianist-singer named Nat “King” Cole leading a struggling trio that had previously recorded for Decca without commercial success, and persuaded Cole that he had the tune that could break him out. Indeed, it did. “All For You” received so much attention in its initial release on Scherman’s Atlas label (various sources also list Excelsior and Premiere, the latter also a Scherman-owned enterprise), that the newly formed Capitol Records took heed, bought the master and signed Cole to an exclusive contract. Today, Scherman’s key role in Cole’s assent to international stardom remains one of his most sadly overlooked contributions.
Undaunted after losing Cole, Bob found another struggling vocalist with whom he recorded two sides, “Melancholy Madeline” and “Maureen”, that were deliberate attempts at recapturing the King Cole Trio sound (they even featured Trio guitarist Oscar Moore). The single enjoyed a regional success in New York, and Scherman had the singer return to the studio to record 12 more sides for Atlas. These recordings and some nightclub work eventually brought the vocalist to the attention of Mercury Records, where Frankie Laine went on to commence in earnest an extremely successful recording career.
Scheman’s achievements, however, were not going totally unrecognized. The Cole recording of “All For You” brought Bob to the attention of Syd Nathan, a Cincinnati-based record mogul who hired him to produce sessions for his King label. While with King, Scherman was constantly traveling, and working with such seminal R&B artists s James Brown, Bull Moose Jackson and Wynonie Harris. Perhaps his grandest accomplishment while with King was the sessions which produced Harris’s acclaimed recording of “Good Rocking Tonight”, which rocketed to the number one slot on Billboard’s race charts in 1948 and served as a harbinger of the coming revolution in pop. Bob eventually wearied of the grinding travel which his position with King entailed, and by the early ‘50s had returned to Los Angeles and started two new labels, Tampa and Skylark, that were primarily devoted to recording great jazz artists.
Scherman cut records featuring such heavyweights as Art Pepper, Louis Bellson and Barney Kessel. Sensing the changes in the air, bob even used jazz musicians as his segue way to rock and roll. “I suppose my first rock record” he recalled in a recent interview, “was a song on Skylark” called “Big Boy” with the Lighthouse All Starts.” Bassist Howard Rumsey’s Lighthouse All Stars featured a veritable who’s who of West Coast jazz talent that participated in jam sessions at a club called the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach. “Big Boy” was a driving instrumental that proved very popular with the college crowd. By the late ‘50s, when rock and roll had clearly emerged as the dominant force in popular music, Scherman had molded his Tampa label into a haven for a variety of talented newcomers, which brings us to this present collection.
Bob wore a bewildering variety of hats at his labels, and was frequently the writer, producer, and distributor behind any given Tampa project. Unfortunately, a lack of promotional muscle and Scherman’s unwillingness to participate in payola (“Sooner or later you’d have to come across with money for play time,” he recalls ruefully) prevented most of his music from being heard at its initial release. Nevertheless there is much here that merits a second look, and all of this material is being released on compact disc for the first time.
The vocal groups that recorded for Tampa were frequently either assembled in the studio or captured at an early point in their evolution toward a more notable incarnation. “A lot of those groups, like The Sparklers and The Flannels,” recalls Scherman, “were put together because I had some material that needed that certain kind of treatment. “It is readily apparent that the latter’s rendition of “Hey Rube” from July of 1956, for example, was an attempt to replicate the success that The Robins, who later became The Coasters, were having on Spark and Atco labels with novelty material from the pens of Lieber & Stoller. Speaking of The Coasters, it may interest connoisseurs to know that another group in this collection, The Jac-O-Lacs, also recorded as “The Chimes for Flair and at one time included Cornell Gunter in their line-up. Gunter, of course, went on toe become a Coaster’s mainstay.
The Saxons on this collection were also known as The Hollywood Saxons, in addition to recording as The Tuxedos on Forte and The Capris on Tender. Their line-up featured Stan Beverly on lead vocals, and also included Maurice Giles, Joe Lewis, Charles Taggart, and Nathaniel Wilson. Tony Allen of Tony Allen & The Wonders is the same Tony Allen who along with The Champs recorded “Night Owl” for Specialty. Their Tampa single featured here was also subsequently released on the Forward and Big Time labels. Bob Scherman recalls that the single release of “Little Sheba” by The Twisters caught the attention of Lew Chudd’s legendary New Orleans-based Imperial label (recording home of Fats Domino and Smiley Lewis, among many others), but Bob declined to part with the master and the song was never widely heard outside of Southern California.
The grand tradition of R&B instrumental “honking and shouting” which Scherman helped to foster at King with players like sax man Earl Bostic is well represented here by three selections, two of which, “Blue Jean Shuffle” and “Plasma”, were released as both sides of a Plas Johnson Tampa single. Johnson was a studio stalwart who’s playing was featured on countless rock records. Scherman recorded two entire albums of Johnson material for Tampa, and according to Cash Box magazine, his rendition of “Last Call” (featured on an upcoming release of Plas Johnson’s recordings for Tampa) broke into the R&B top ten in Los Angeles (charting at number nine, just below the doo-wop classic “Church Bells May Ring by The Willows.) Plas finally achieved a measure of the recognition he richly deserved when his sinuous, sensual playing helped make Henry Mancini’s “The Pink Panther Theme” a top forty success in 1964.
The performance on “This Old House” included here bears no relation to “This Ole House”, the Stuart Hamblen composition popularized by Rosemary Clooney in the mid’50s. It is instead a soulful outing from 1966 by the Ernie Freeman Blues Band (which was actually a studio pick-up group) featuring Clint Stacey on vocal. It was released on Gaslight records as “Lonesome Ole House”. Freeman was a multi-talented arranger who worked with the likes of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and was recognized with a Grammy in 1970 for his contribution to the arrangement of the Simon & Garfunkle classic “Bridge Over Trouble Water.” Bob recalls that Clint Stacey was “a good singer but a hard-headed guy with an attitude that kept him from getting anywhere.” This single was released on a later Scherman label, Jet.
Two of the most promising artists to grace the Tampa label and its affiliates were Billy Devroe and Lucy Campo. Devroe was a Canadian who kept his band working fairly regularly, albeit with little notoriety, from 1947 to 1967. At the time of his Tampa recordings it is apparent that he had joined the long parade of would-b Elvis Presleys. “Coquette” is a version of the old jazz standard with triplets thrown in behind a hiccupped vocal (the instrumentation also features the work of noted guitarist Howard Roberts). “Make It” is in the same vein, although the lyrics probably hurt the record, as it soon became clear that “make like a bunny and disappear” was not the most commercially compelling refrain ever committed to wax. Scheman strongly feels that Devroe did run into a powerful piece of material that should have been his breakthrough record while with Tampa, a song called “The Love of Bridey Murphy”, but once again a lack of promotion ability proved the record’s undoing. Devroe eventually left performing to become a successful talent agent.
Bob discovered Lucy Campo, a talented singer of Mexican heritage, when she was only 14, and believes that she was about 17 when she recorded “Lookin’ Out The Window”, with its interpolated Spanish lyric, for his Interlude label in 1963. “Lucy liked high class pop tunes,” recalls Bob, and she had a nice sound, a little like Teresa Brewer.” “I’ll Hang My Dreams On A Rainbow” was recorded in 1967 with a string section on loan from the L.A. Symphony (also present was another of Tampa’s old jazz friends, tenor man Harold Land) for release on yet another Scherman enterprise, S & H Records. The “S: stood for Bob’s surname, and the “H” was for Florida-based promotion man Ed Hodowud. Hodowud was the co-author of “What A Way To Say Goodbye”, another S & H release on which, to these ears, at least, Lucy’s vocal bears a strong resemblance to Brenda Lee. Scherman eventually secured Campo a recording deal with RCA-Victor, but major success eluded her and she left the music business in favor of domestic pursuits.
The passing years have been kind to this material. The records remain enjoyable, and there is enough material outside the confines of this collection to hopefully await your inspection on future volumes. The passage of time has been similarly kind to Robert Scherman’s proven ability to spot a hit maker. In 19809 bob and his wife Glenda were taken with a young female singer they heard in a San Diego church. Bob ushered her into a studio to record some of his compositions, thus helping to launch the career of Sandi Patti, a best-selling, Grammy Award-winning gospel vocalist. In 1993, exactly 50 years after Bob paid a struggling Nat Cole $200.00 to record “All For You”, the Grammy Award for Best Historical Album was bestowed on the Mosaic label’s monumental 18 compact disc set “The Complete Capitol Recordings of the Nat King Cole Trio”, which also included the handful of Cole sides that Bob recorded and released on his various labels, among them five tunes for which the writer’s credit belongs to one Bob Scherman.
Almost everyone who enjoys jazz, pop, R& and early rock and roll is familiar with an artist who was at one time somehow involved with Bob Scherman and his music, and made better by that association. An unsung hero, perhaps, but not an unappreciated one. His legacy is indeed remarkable, and these Tampa releases are a part of that legacy. Have a great time while you listen to them. The creative talents behind these recordings wouldn’t want it any other way.
JOSEPH F. LAREDO, 1994 .
Download: www.amazon.com/West-Coast-Rock-N-Roll/dp/B002I0A4HY/ref=sr_1_2
Other sources for this CD: City Hall Records
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