[This digest is the copyright of the Move "Useless Information" Mailing List. Re-publication or re-distribution of "Useless Information" content, in any form whatsoever, is expressly prohibited without prior written consent.] USELESS INFORMATION The Move Mailing List Digest Issue #421 December 12, 2002 In this issue: * Important message from Rob re: new Move compilation * The Move's "Monkees" song * Song Of The Week (week of 12/9): "Under Fire" * Year End Lists * Don Arden: "The Al Capone Of Pop" ============================================================== To POST TO THE LIST: Send an e-mail to: move-list@eskimo.com Move List Info & Archives: http://www.eskimo.com/~noanswer/movelist.html TO UNSUBSCRIBE: Send an e-mail to move-digest-request@eskimo.com with the word "unsubscribe" (no quotes) in the subject line ============================================================== Subject: Important message from Rob re: new Move compilation Date: Thu, 12 Dec 2002 18:22:24 -0800 From: Lynn Hoskins Rob needs to hear from you on this right away. Feel free to post your response to the list. If you're shy, you can e-mail me at lhoskins@earthlink.net with your suggestions and I'll compile off-list responses for Rob. Here's Rob's message for the list, sent from the studio: Just when you thought there were more than enough Move compilations... Next year will (hopefully) see some exciting releases involving The Move. In the meantime, a UK double CD Best Of has been scheduled for release for March / April time. Rather than see the same mistakes made again that were on 2000's "The Very Best Of The Move" (sic) (Union Square Records) we've hijacked the release and would like to turn it over to the fans. I know everyone wants a definitive box set, the Fillmore live album, the original albums with bonus material, BBC Sessions etc, etc - and these things are all under consideration and being worked on - but this CD is definitely coming out so the next best thing is to allow everyone on The Move List to have their say. What tracks would YOU like to see on there and what would you expect to see in the booklet? The double CD will be priced at £10.99 and will have 55 minutes of music per CD. As a guide, think of this CD as an introduction to your dream idea of a forthcoming Move remaster series. Normal service will be resumed in May 2003... Rob ********** Subject: The Move's "Monkees" song Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 02:29:58 -0800 From: Lynn Hoskins Quoting Bev from his 'Best of the Move' sleeve notes: >"Wave The Flag" was the flip and was a conscious attempt to do a >Monkees >record. I mean that we wanted to sound like the Monkees; we >were very >conscious of the stigma of not playing your own >instruments in the studio >(that went on in England too) so we >allowed the use of session men only >when no one in the group could >play the necessary instrument. Is anyone reminded of the Monkees while listening to "Wave The Flag And Stop The Train"? ********** Subject: Re: The Move's "Monkees" song Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 07:21:59 -0800 From: John DeSilva Lynn Hoskins wrote: > Is anyone reminded of the Monkees while listening to "Wave The Flag > And Stop The Train"? I'll admit to it - I can hear a bit of "Last Train To Clarksville", and Roy's guitar, using the middle pickup setting (or rhythm-middle pickup setting) on his Strat, does sound like Mike Nesmith (who I believe played a Gretsch Country Gentleman on most of the Monkees' sides). That's pretty much where the similarities end - I can't really imagine the Monkees doing a song about committing suicide by jumping off a train - even if it were the Last Train To Clarksville! JD San Jose, CA ********** Subject: Re: The Move's "Monkees" song Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 07:44:10 -0800 From: Joe Ramsey John DeSilva wrote: > That's pretty much where the similarities end - I can't really > imagine the Monkees doing a song about committing suicide by jumping > off a train - even if it were the Last Train To Clarksville! I don't know, John. Didn't The Monkees all commit suicide at the very beginning of their magnificently weird movie, "Head," to the tune of Carole King's psychedelically majestic "The Porpoise Song?" Good bye... goodbye... goodbye. Like them or not, Monkees music influenced everyone in the mid sixties (Zappa was in "Head" too!) ********** Subject: Song Of The Week: "Under Fire" Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 13:17:35 -0800 From: Lynn Hoskins A lot of fans have a love/hate relationship with "Starting Up." When commenting on "Under Fire" feel free to "review" the rest of the album. I actually wanted to go with "On Top Of The World" but trying to figure out the lyrics gave me a headache. ;) Song Of The Week: December 9, 2002 "Under Fire" from the Roy Wood album "Starting Up" Possible discussion topics: Vocals Lyrics (I could use some help!) Instrumentation Songwriting Arrangement/Production Personal interpretation Strong/weak points *********************** "Under Fire" (R. Wood) Ooh, I'll never get out (Until we all fall down down down...) Somebody's watching me from over in the corner I see them everytime I go downtown I don't know what they want from me, I wish they'd go away We'll fill our glass until we both fall down down down The buildings _____ overflow into the alleyways Don't give me any room to hide at all This mental barricade has pinned me up against the wall The ladder moves away and I fall down down down CHORUS: I'm under fire and I'll never get out Just like a refugee I know they're after me I'm under fire and I'll never get out They know me instantly Find an escape for me Right now My _____ no indication It won't be easy _____ But every now and then I often wish they'd go away I'll never sleep until they all fall down down down CHORUS (repeat) _____ some information This iron curtain that _____ us all Their faces merge into the glass inside their limousine And they can see me going down down down CHORUS (repeat) CHORUS (repeat) ********** Subject: Re: Song Of The Week: "Under Fire" Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 07:16:15 -0800 From: "Tyler C.Sherman" When "Starting Up" was being readied for release in the mid-80's, I was fortunate to be in communication via "snail mail" (cyber-space was yet to be discovered) with three gentlemen who are probably well known to some of our UK list members: Steve May, Neil Hardie and George Mackenzie. I'm indebted to them for keeping me abreast of developments regarding this album and especially to Steve, who sent me copies of the two singles off the album, "Raining In The City" and this week's SOTW, "Under Fire", as well as the whole album when it was released. At the time, it was not even available as an import here in the states so I am grateful. I have not heard from Steve or Neil in a very long time...does anyone on the list know what ever became of them? George, of course, has found his way to this list. When I first heard "Under Fire", I thought it was the best thing Roy had done in years. A good piece of writing, perhaps executed with a bit too much effort to make a "modern sounding" record. Roy complained in a interview I have* that the record company added too much compression in mastering the album which, in his words, "took all the warmth out of it". I would have to agree with him. There is a somewhat sterile, flat sound to it. I would love to hear it the way Roy originally intended it to be heard. Perhaps a future reissue will do just that...and include session out-takes, if any. Incidentally, Steve told me that the original title of the "Starting Up" album was "Imminent Attack". Can anyone confirm this? Rob? Wizzards, Tyler *Perhaps I will transcribe this interview, from a UK periodical called "Keep On Rockin'" published about 10 years ago, for the benefit of list members, if I ever get time to do it. ********** Subject: Re: Song Of The Week: "Under Fire" Date: Thu, 12 Dec 2002 15:36:33 -0800 From: John Collins Hi everyone, I really like Under Fire, it is another good solid song, which Roy can churn out until the cows come home. (no pun). I breathed a sigh of relief when I first heard it, as the Woody magic was still there. I love the video too, it is very entertaining. I love the album, my favourite by a long way though is Raining in The City. Anyone who has been waiting at a bus stop in Birmingham or any City on a rainy night will appreciate this song. I would love to see this out on CD, as my vinyl version is somewhat worn! :-( ********** Subject: Year End Lists Date: Thu, 12 Dec 2002 17:17:12 -0800 From: Lynn Hoskins I've had a number of requests to do Year End Lists on the Move List. Typically, Year End Lists are what get posted to general music lists... Best new band Best 5 albums Best 5 songs Best reissue Best show ...you get the idea. Seeing as there were new no Move-related songs or albums to be released in 2002, our lists would be quite short. ;) What I can do is refine the "best" questions so that some are specific to 2002, and some are more general. We can have a few "best" questions at the bottom where people can list some of their non-Move favorites of 2002. If you have any suggestions, would you please drop me an e-mail? We'll get this going on Monday the 16th. ********** Subject: Don Arden: "The Al Capone Of Pop" Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 02:12:11 -0800 From: Lynn Hoskins Val Burgess was kind enough to type this up for both the ELO and Move lists. The following article appeared in the December 8 edition of The Sunday Express. Don Arden was interviewed by Robin Eggar. The Move are mentioned by name only briefly, but it's a highly entertaining piece, and REALLY makes you wonder what happened behind closed doors when Arden managed The Move (and later Roy solo, Wizzard, and ELO)... hmmmmm...... ;) ---- Don Arden. 'THE AL CAPONE OF POP.' "I was the king", growls the Al Capone of pop. "Where I walked, troublemakers walked on the other side of the streets because they might get hurt. I don't care what anybody says about me. I was king." They don't make pop managers like Don Arden - short, squat, pugnacious as a bulldog with the temper of a pitbull - any more. Back in the sixties Arden, while managing top British pop talent, was the terrier of tin pan alley. Musicians, roadies, executives, everyone in the wild west end was frightened of him. According to legend he hung rivals out of fourth floor windows; kept a loaded revolver in his desk drawer; tore doors off hinges; abused and threatened to kill employees and Radio 4 journalist Roger Cook; knocked out an Italian police chief and ground a cigar into someone's head. Not all of these stories are true, enough are. Don Arden will be 77 in January. Sitting in his Park Lane apartment, bald, with a white bushy beard, he resembles Uncle Albert in 'Only Fools And Horses.' But that's just the way he looks. Although he can be extremely funny there is a sharp, scary edge. Most of his adjectives have four letters. Arden is never, and has never been, wrong. If he was he cannot admit it. Ever; He knows how to carry a grudge. If you ever cross him, especially over money and win, you have an enemy for life. He is arrogant and obstinate, so is his daughter. If you ever wondered when watching the reality TV show, The Osbournes, why Sharon Osbourne is so tough and capable of dealing with her dysfunctional husband and unruly brood, it may be because she's Don's daughter. Until last August, they hadn't spoken for 20 years. The feud began over money (it always does with Don) and escalated into threats. There were tails of gruesome threats and deeds by Arden, who denies them absolutely...but not that Sharon tried to run him over with her car. These days Don won't discuss it. "I am glad that it's all over," he says. "I don't want to think about what went wrong. Peculiar things happen in life. Love for your children and business are entirely different things. The two got muddled up here." Don Arden always had grand ambitions even back when he was plain Harry Levy, a working-class Jewish boy in Manchester. "Myself and my mother, we had this thing that I was going to be the world's greatest singer. When I was six I joined the choir in the Synagogue; by the time I was 14 I was ready to go on stage." Sharp-witted and an excellent mimic, he once conned a theatre into giving him the dressing room for the popular light opera star, Richard Tauber; Tauber was 52, Don just 15. He became Don Arden at 19 and worked the music halls as a successful compere/singer/comedian until his hair-triggered temper got him banned. He punched a stage manager he overheard asking a girl, "What do you want that Jew boy's autograph for?" He went out on stage pursued by the irate stage manager, whom he promptly knocked into the orchestra pit. "After that the only way I could get work was to promote myself. There was a big call for Jewish artists who could perform in Hebrew but there were only three of us in Europe. After two years I was getting £300 per night and I decided I could make big money. So I forgot about my singing - though I sing in the bath occasionally. I don't care what anybody says or how much they hate me, I always knew I could make stars." The music industry has always been an industry of fantasy. Wannabes are willing to change their names, their personalities, their sexuality, in pursuit of stardom. Reputations are built on a quicksand of half-truth's, rumour, innuendo and lies. Arden always knew that. He could be vicious and ruled by intimidation, but often it was chutzpah. "True," he grins, "but they all fall for it, I always let them believe what they want to believe." One of his first clients was American wild rock'n'roller Gene Vincent. It was a stormy relationship - legend has it that Vincent pulled a knife on his manager - which ended in court. In 1963 he was determined to take full advantage of the British pop explosion. He promoted gigs for the Rolling Stones, introduced the Animals to producer Micky Most and signed the Nashville Teens (whose Tobacco Road is a forgotten classic.) He managed the Small Faces and Amen Corner to a stream of pop hits. His bands worked all the time because back then the money was in the live shows, not record sales In the sixties managers were true Svengali figures. As contracts were regularly traded between them, loyalties were passing and poaching commonplace. The fringes of the business were full of unsavoury characters trying to make a fast quid. Arden would have none of that. His acts were "discouraged" from leaving, though he insists that "if I threatened an artist I couldn't expect them to perform for me." Other managers were a different matter. When Arden heard that Robert Stigwood had been up to the Small Faces's flat late at night, he went berserk and decided to send a clear message to Tin Pan Alley. He told former wrestler Peter Grant - who later went on to achieve infamy as Led Zeppelin's manager - to hire some heavies to rehearse "a film scene that would teach him a lesson and make him a laughing stock." The gang stormed into Stigwood's office, locking the door behind them. Arden then pretended to go berserk. He smashed a glass ashtray down on his desk, cracking both, then told him, "I dont like people interfering with my artists, so you are going over the top." Stigwood realised it was no joke when he was dragged onto the balcony and held four floors over the street, while Grant and company exhorted their boss to drop him. When, years later, the police questioned Stigwood about the incident, he simply told them, "Mr. Arden remained a perfect gentleman." Act or not, Arden's temper did get out of control. He was at a meeting where Clifford Davis, manager of Fleetwood Mac, was sitting in reception smoking a fat cigar. According to Don, Davis said, blowing a ring "I know where your family live, just a warnin." Says Arden, "I went over to him, grabbed the cigar and ground a hole in his forehead, I told him, "Don't ever offer that threat, some guys would kill you for that." Arden was an expert at the sixties sport of chart hyping. The compilers of the New Musical Express singles chart regularly had their weekly pay of £15 doubled. In exchange, an Arden record would be bumped up a couple of places in the Top 10. Young mothers were recruited to buy his records for £5 a week "I wasn't doing anything wrong," he insists, "It wasn't illegal, everyone was trying to do it." His methods might have been dubious but he was successful. There was never any shortage of young men willing to seal a pact with the self-styled Al Capone of Pop. "Artists want results and they don't give a s*** how they get them," he says. "They think it is your duty to get them a hit - which it is - and most of them don't care how you do it." After he sold the Small Faces contract for £12,000, he picked up Amen Corner who reeled off four hits. Then came the most successful and longest-lasting relationship of his career-managing The Electric Light Orchestra (ELO), a band that mixed rock with classical music and was fronted by singer/guitarist Jeff Lynne. It became one of the biggest bands in the seventies, selling over 100 million albums with 15 consecutive Top 20 hits. Lynne's songs and production skills made him a rich man and there has never been a financial dispute between him and Arden. Success attracted some unwelcome attention. "In the early seventies the Mafia told me in no uncertain manner that they represented me in America." he says, "I wasn't going to be in show business all of my life to hand over my creations. I wasn't born that way." Arden and a bunch of Mob representatives met in a locked room in New York's Academy of Music where they made "nice threats." Don stood up and said, "There is one thing I have to tell you, you are out of business, you don't exist, you are dead, you are finished. "You can't tell me who I work with, I work on my own, the rest of my family are in my business. I know all about you. You only have British artists. American artists know you are in the Mob and they don't want to know, and neither do I. I have to tell you something. I rule the streets of London, don't chance it fellas." The next day he got a call from the man who ran the operation, inviting him to lunch. "Don," he said, "It's wonderful to come across somebody like you. You're f***ing mad. I love it. I don't want your artists, I want to be your friend." In the music business having people believe you are 'connected' is more effective than being connected. Arden shrewdly played on that. A roadie for one of his bands in the seventies resounds how Arden always left the top drawer of his desk open. In it was his shooter. "Absolute bull****," snaps Arden. "I was too well-known to risk that. On the odd occasions when the police did call to me to verify certain things, do you think I would be sat there with a gun in my desk?" Except when he threatened to kill an American lawyer over a contractual dispute with The Move. Artie Mogul, "A charming scallywag," had come over from the States with his Lawyer, Lee Phillips, to sort out the problem. "Don told me to bring in my air pistol," says his son David. "After all the niceties Lee Phillips says, "Well Don I guess we've got you f*****." Don says, "Well if I'm f*****, your dead!." I've never seen anybody move so fast - there are burn marks on the carpet. Artie just sat there and said "Don, I'm ashamed of you." When Queen wanted to get out of their first management contract, they turned to Arden for help. Their managers, Barry and Norman Sheffield, were buying Rolls-Royces but "Queen never had any decent clothes, no money and very little food," says Arden with genuine surprise that anyone could be so dumb as to treat a hit artist so badly. He went to see the Sheffields and in an hour convinced them to release Queen from their contract. The Arden legend has grown with each passing year. Some stories are simply not true. People Arden never knew claim he hung them out of the window. The Small Faces' Steve Marriot convinced Pink Floyd's David Gilmour that Don had blown his front door off with a shotgun, an event Arden denies. He also denies that he burned Blaises night club to the ground ("Why would I want to? We had Ike and Tina Turner booked to play the next night, the fire cost me £500.") He is not just a pantomime villain, for there is a dark, deeply vindictive side to the man. Mention Lyndsey de Paul (who sued him) and his replies are unprintable. Or Roger Cook, who made his name when confronting Arden on Radio 4's Checkpoint and was challenged to a fight. The Arden empire - Jet Records, management promotion - was a family business worth many millions at its peak. While David was devotedly loyal, it was his sister who was the apple of daddy's eye. But in the seventies something personal happened between Sharon and her father. They were already estranged when she decided she could resurrect Ozzy's career. He divorced his first wife to marry her. Don claims he gave Sharon the management contract as a wedding present but when she wanted to take Ozzy off Jet, he told her "Sharon, leave me alone, just get me a million dollars and p*** off." Which is when things got nasty. She later said "The best lesson I ever had was watching my father f*** his business up. He taught me everything not to do. He has never seen any of my three kids. As far as I am concerned, he never will." He described her as an "enemy to the empire I built." Throughout the eighties, although Sharon and Ozzy both battled drug and alcohol problems, she turned his career round. It didn't go so well for her father, who's heavy-handed tactics had run out of their time. In 1986, David was sentenced at the Old Bailey to two years in jail, one suspended, for blackmail and unlawfully imprisoning an accountant Arden believed had exhorted $100,000 of company funds. Don was later found not-guilty for thesame offences. As ELO had quit touring, Jet was slowly wound down. After David and his sister started to talk again, he determined she should reconcile with her father. "Ozzy and I can take full credit for them becoming pals again," says David. "We went through murder. Ozzy knew that Sharon wanted to talk to Don and I knew he did, but nobody was going to make the first move. By telling lies, I got them together at the Four Seasons in Los Angeles. Sharon turned up with Jacky (her teenage son) and within five minutes they were laughing and joking. It was like 20 years had never happened. She was saying, 'Do you remember when I tried to run you over? I've never seen you jump so high in my life.' Now it's like nothing ever happened." [END] (Thanks, Val!) ********** Subject: Re: Don Arden: "The Al Capone Of Pop" Date: Wed, 11 Dec 2002 02:15:32 -0800 From: Richard Messum I echo Lynn's thanks to Val. A fascinating article. End of Useless Information #421 ******************************* [This digest is the copyright of the Move "Useless Information" Mailing List. Re-publication or re-distribution of "Useless Information" content, in any form whatsoever, is expressly prohibited without prior written consent.]