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Topic: Spade Cooley - schlock, or drivel? |
Leon Grizzard
From:
Austin, Texas, USA
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Posted 9 Jun 2004 11:18 am |
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| I bought a Spade Cooley double CD, Swinging the Devil’s Dream. I have another Spade Cooley CD, so I kind of knew what of expect, but fifty two tunes worth was overwhelming. Every third or fourth song there will be a great steel guitar ride by Noel Boggs or Joaquin Murphey, or a Jimmy Wyble guitar lead, and you really have to admire the drive of the rhythm section, and the tight playing, but otherwise: sickeningly cutesy arrangements, and songs with lyrics so trite and contrived they make Achey Breaky Heart, and anything coming off Music Row these days seem positively profound. I know that a lot of Swing Era stuff had those elements, but Cooley had it in Spades. (Yuk, yuk) I know that many would say Spade Cooley’s connection to Country music is so thin as to disqualify the comparison, but whenever people start badmouthing current Country songs or performers, and lamenting how far downhill things have gone, they are certainly right, but there has always been music to wince by. |
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Jim Cohen
From:
Philadelphia, PA
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Posted 9 Jun 2004 12:26 pm
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Leon, I like you already.  |
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Roger Rettig
From:
Naples, FL
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Posted 9 Jun 2004 12:54 pm
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What a refreshing 'post'!
RR |
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c c johnson
From:
killeen,tx usa * R.I.P.
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Posted 9 Jun 2004 1:07 pm
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| Leon I was a sub in 3 or 4 of Spades bands and what you say is correct to a certain point. Spade insisted that the lyrics were pronounced plainly and on the beat. Everything was geared to dancing except for the break theme. Spade was a musician man and I believe that if he could have gotten away with it he would not have had a vocalist including Tex. To Spade a vocalist was a necessary evil. BTW, Spade never climed any affiliation to country music. He considered it "corn" and not danceble. Band members listened to goodman, james, flanagan and others. The silly little lyrics on some songs were used for morale purposes for the aircraft workers in southern cal. The clean on the beat lyrics were origiated or made popular by Guy Lombardo. Get his records. Every word of the vocals is clear and precise and on the beat. Keep your thumb pick hot! CC |
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Leon Grizzard
From:
Austin, Texas, USA
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Posted 9 Jun 2004 1:57 pm
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| c c: It was really great to read your post, because I have wondered if the live shows were as tightly orchestrated as the records, or whether the players got to stretch out a little - Spade had some killer players, and it would have been great to hear them if they had some room. I almost thought of adding to my comments that he seem anti-country, or very disparaging of it on the tunes with country themes. Also, most the cuts on the CD are post-war, and I wonder if his persistance in the cutesy style was not a major reason he was not getting any hit records. |
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Bobby Lee
From:
Cloverdale, California, USA
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Posted 9 Jun 2004 3:16 pm
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| Quote: |
| The clean on the beat lyrics were origiated or made popular by Guy Lombardo. Get his records. Every word of the vocals is clear and precise and on the beat. |
There's a word for that kind of music: square! 
You know, the orchestration of a western swing band, the tonality and all, is pretty cool, but if the players never get to stretch out, all you're left with is notes on paper. That's not the spirit of swing, which evolved from jazz.
Bob Wills left plenty of space for rides behind the vocal and solos. It was big band jazz with a western flair. I'll admit that I never got into Spade Cooley very much. Maybe that's why.
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 Bobby Lee - email: quasar@b0b.com - gigs - CDs, Open Hearts
Sierra Session 12 (E9), Williams 400X (Emaj9, D6), Sierra Olympic 12 (C6add9),
Sierra Laptop 8 (E6add9), Fender Stringmaster (E13, A6),
Roland Handsonic, Line 6 Variax |
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chas smith R.I.P.
From:
Encino, CA, USA
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Posted 9 Jun 2004 3:56 pm
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| With some notable exceptions, the Spade Cooley bands and the Western Caravan, with Tex Williams had some of the worst music for the most amazing players. |
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Pete Burak
From:
Portland, OR USA
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Posted 9 Jun 2004 4:27 pm
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I kinda felt chumped after buying two Spade CD's looking for some Joqian.
They bordered on unlistenable for me.
I felt bad about that for some reason.
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Bill Hatcher
From:
Atlanta Ga. USA
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Posted 9 Jun 2004 5:16 pm
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L7.
On the beat.
Cutesy lyrics.
Danceable, etc.
No wonder he was so popular with the thousands of folks who came to see his band.
If the great players in his band ran the band, things would be hip, you couldn't find the beat to dance to it and they wouldn't care anything about a singer messing things up with lyrics and nobody would show up to see them in any appreciable numbers to get a good paying gig.
Seems to me there is a story out there about Spades band blowing away Bob Wills band one night out in Calif. Anybody hear that one? |
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Janice Brooks
From:
Pleasant Gap Pa
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Posted 9 Jun 2004 6:04 pm
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I think everyone should hear SC and make a judgement.
My first purchase was the Bloodshot transcripts and those songs to have a rythem for a marry go round ride.
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Janice "Busgal" Brooks
ICQ 44729047
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Jim Cohen
From:
Philadelphia, PA
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Posted 9 Jun 2004 6:50 pm
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He may have been square, but he was a killer of a bandleader... 
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c c johnson
From:
killeen,tx usa * R.I.P.
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Posted 9 Jun 2004 7:17 pm
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| Spads bands were reading bands with ad lib chorus' plainly marked. Thats how Joaquin, Wyble, and others really got to shine. |
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Jussi Huhtakangas
From:
Helsinki, Finland
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Posted 9 Jun 2004 9:18 pm
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| If you wanna hear how the band REALLY sounded like, get the Country Routes cd's of Spade and Tex Williams. Those include the live radio transcriptions without the big orchestration and corny songs. Almost every song features a lengthy Joaquin solo. When you hear those, you'll understand why Murph is raved about. Simply no one at the time could play like that ( and if you ask me, not since either ) And that band was HOT, the TW cd was recorded in the Palace ballroom, you can hear the audience applauding and screamin when the guys take solos. The commercial releases by Spade and Tex included a lot of smalchzy material, but there's plenty of swinging stuff too. Usually you just have to dig beyond the "greatest hits". |
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Rick Schmidt
From:
Prescott AZ, USA
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Posted 9 Jun 2004 11:57 pm
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| Droll Jim....very droll.....LMAO.... |
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David Mason
From:
Cambridge, MD, USA
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Posted 10 Jun 2004 12:03 am
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| I think it's easy to forget how much drivel was out there in the "good ol' days", and how well time has worked to filter down the better music. When I was at that certain age, the radio wasn't playing Cream, Joplin and Hendrix, they were playing the Grass Roots, Three Dog Night and Tommy James and the Shondells. It somehow alarms me to see period movies with soul music or acid rock as the soundtrack, because that's not what most people were hearing back then. |
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Smiley Roberts
From:
Hendersonville,Tn. 37075
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Posted 10 Jun 2004 4:29 am
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| Quote: |
| It's really like listening to the Lawrence Welk of western swing. |
PRECISELY,but I'll take "S.C." over "L.W.", any day of the week!!
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~ ~
©¿© It don't mean a thang,
mm if it ain't got that twang.
www.ntsga.com
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Jerry Hayes
From:
Virginia Beach, Va.
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Posted 10 Jun 2004 5:42 am
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I've got the Columbia historic edition CD of Tex Williams Western Caravan and IMHO it's a pretty dang good album. I listened to it all the way to St. Louis and back and wasn't bored at all. Lots of great stuff. One uptempo cut had a hot guitar solo (I thought) until all of a sudden a couple of slides came in and I realized it was a steel guitar. It sounded like Jimmy Bryant or someone of that caliber. Looking at the credits it was Joaquin Murphy. What an excellent player. I got to watch Spade's old TV show in Los Angeles on channel 5 when I was a kid and it was great. Joaquin would share lead duties with a 17 year old kid on lead guitar name Jimmy Nutrell or something like that. I've always wondered what happened to him. Oh by the way, I love Lawrence Welk and watch his show on PBS every Saturday night. I thought he had a killer band. Have a good 'un...JH
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Livin' in the Past and the Future with a 12 string Mooney Universal tuning.
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c c johnson
From:
killeen,tx usa * R.I.P.
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Posted 10 Jun 2004 5:43 am
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| BTW I am not an expert on Spade. Over a two yr period I subbed in his bands 20 =25 times. Here is a little story you may get a kick out of. I was subbing in Jess Willards band,(subbing again as I was too young to join the union 14) and Spade needed a steell sub for one night and Jess sent me to him. I was setting next to the guitar player which to this day I believe his name was Johnny. People say no that was Jimmy (Wyble) but I still say it was Johnny. I didn't know that Spades bands were reading bands so when they put those chicken tracks in front of me, Johnny saw my face turn ghostly white. He said have you heard the record. I did. Johnny sais just play it like Joaquin. I sais No way can I play it like Joaquin. He said well just get as close as you can. I said what if MR COOLEY doesn't like wkat I'm playing. He said he'll come back her atell you to take your guitarand amp and leave the stage. Which Really made me nervous. Apparently he was not too disappointed as he never asked me to leave the stage. one other thing, when the steel part was coming up, Johnny would say "Get ready kid" NOW KID. |
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Blake Hawkins
From:
Florida
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Posted 10 Jun 2004 5:45 am
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I worked in the control room of a TV station which carried Lawrence Welk. In the days before satellites and high fidelity audio over telephone lines, Welk was distributed on 2" "Quad" videotape. His sound quality was absolutely first rate. When his show was on you could tell the difference in sound on most any TV.
We all used to laugh at the music, but he buried his competition.
There were good musicians on that show, especially Buddy Merill. |
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John Pelz
From:
Kettering, Ohio, USA
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Posted 10 Jun 2004 6:39 am
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quote:
Seems to me there is a story out there about Spades band blowing away Bob Wills band one night out in Calif. Anybody hear that one?
According to the "Spadella" CD liner-notes:
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| At Venice Pier, success had tilted the Phillips-Cooley relationship into unfriendly territory. Phillips hired Bob Wills to replace Cooley at the ballroom. Cocky and defiant, Cooley insisted on a one-weekend "Battle of the Band" with Wills before leaving. After two nights of alternating sets, the audience gave the nod to Cooley, whereupon Spade crowned himself the "King of Western Swing." The title stuck, as did the phrase, "western swing," now the standard nom de plume for that particular genre of music. |
| Quote: |
| I got the impression from the book that the band was quite something live, but I have to agree with this thread. The couple CDs I bought in search of Joaquin solos let me down. It's really like listening to the Lawrence Welk of western swing. |
There may be a variety of reasons for this, at least as far as the difference between the quality of live/studio performances goes. Mostly wartime shellac rationing & the Petrillo Ban (AFM strike) would've prevented recordings being made during WWII, which seems to have been when Spade's band was at the height of its success and popularity, and perhaps the zenith of its hottest live performances, too. (More "seasoned" contributors to this thread, feel free to correct me on this one if I'm wrong!) Changing popular tastes may have also influenced Spade's selection of material. According to the "Spadella" liner-notes, by the end of the 1940s, the 20-year heyday of the cowboy movie was mostly over, along with the public's fascination with both singing cowboys and highly arranged western swing bands. Cooley reacted to all of this by using more horns in the band, and by "retooling his 18-piece band into a slick, Freddy Martin-like entity." ie- making the band's music more "accessible." Evidently all throughout his career, Spade was playing catch-up with folks like Bob Wills' band, Roy Rogers & Lawrence Welk. Constant stress in Spade's personal life wouldn't have helped either, and may have distracted him, as Jim humorously alludes to above.
Anyhow, I'm listening to "Spadella" as I write this, and almost every tune has a hot break/ride by Joaquin on it. Not to mention some really hot regular guitar-playing. I wonder if the string-section (I'm not talking about a fiddle or two-- an entire string-section!) and the harp isn't what may be turning a lot of people off, which is understandable. To me, what I've heard by Spade's band is more of a popular/singing cowboy style than the Western swing typified by Bob Wills' band. As the "Spadella" liner-notes put it -- "A bunch of fiddles, a harp, and a pair of accordions. Who'd have imagined they could coexist within the same band without major fist fights?" (And a steel guitar, to boot!) Whatever, like Smiley said above, I'll take Spade Cooley over Lawrence Welk any day of the week... |
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Jason Odd
From:
Stawell, Victoria, Australia
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Posted 10 Jun 2004 6:57 am
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Most of the popular dance bands folded in the 1947-49 period, and I'm talking the pop and jazz outfits, it was tough to run a big band and in certain areas Urban blues and the newer wave of R&B (Wyonne Harris, etc) were taking off, only the most popular big bands really made.
The Glenn Miller film was a bit of a hit in 1954, but that was truly nostalgia for an already bygone era.
The Dorsey Brothers managed to squeeze some life out of the genre, but they had the overly smooth TV show, Welk took elements of the big band sound and smoothed it out to the most commercial dead-brain, dewy eyed, sentimental schmaltz ever.
Spade was the western swing answer to that.
To me, Cooley had some great bands, but you get to hear a lot more raw stuff by Bob Wills due to all those transcription discs he cut, and there's some hot stuff on those.
Cooley did not seem to dig the blues at all, to my ears the cat had no affinity for it at all.
Another totally commercial West Coast outfit was Ole Rasmussen's band, they cut excellent short swinging melodic numbers that were an extremely commercial take on the Wills sound.
Despite a fairly hamfisted piano player, the band generally managed to avoid the overly sentimental vibe of Welk and Cooley by still employing fiddlers as opposed to four violinists and a horn section.
Tex Williams and the Western Caravan have some truly awesome live transcription recordings, hot stuff indeed.
Jerry H., the guitar player with Cooley in the late 1950s into the 1960s was an ex-country picker named Jimmy Luttrel who moved on to jazz. |
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Donny Hinson
From:
Glen Burnie, Md. U.S.A.
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Posted 10 Jun 2004 7:58 am
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I think Spade was great...in his time and in his day. You have to remember that Disco was once regarded as the freshest and greatest thing to ever happen to the music world. It was called the ultimate dance music! Now, it's considered trite, banal, and pretty much abhorred by everyone. Musical tastes change with the times, but the one thing that's constant is the difference between the likes of musicians, and the likes of the average listener.
John Q. Public is (and always has been) perfectly happy with schmaltz, schlock, and shock. |
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Wayne Carver
From:
Martinez, Georgia, USA
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Posted 10 Jun 2004 8:47 am
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I guess i like corny music including: Spade Cooley, Buck Owens,Maddox Bros & Rose and Little Jimmy Dickens. I like the serious stuff too but always liked the novelty numbers too.
Where would Slim Whitman and Boxcar Willie fit in? |
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Bill Hatcher
From:
Atlanta Ga. USA
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Posted 10 Jun 2004 9:47 am
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In regards to Welk.
I played with the LW orchestra on several occasions. There were some musicians in that band that were just virtuoso calibre. Henry Cuestra on clarinet just scared the dickens out of me when he launched on Sing,Sing,Sing. Myron Floren on accordion. Jo Anne Castle on piano. That vibes player that would dance and jump over the vibes, incredible. The Dixieland group was great as well as the rhythm section. When they put the book down in front of me and starting calling chart numbers out and counting off tempos I knew I was in the middle of something very good and very challenging!! I was covering Buddy Merrill AND Neal Lavangs' chair.
I don't really see how you can dis any group of musicians (Cooley or Welk) 30 or 40 years after the fact that they were the top rated musical acts regionally and nationally. Great is great no matter how the musical tastes change.
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Herb Steiner
From:
Briarcliff TX 78669, pop. 2,064
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Posted 10 Jun 2004 10:46 am
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I like pretty much everything Spade Cooley recorded, both live and in the studio. I have all of it.
I like beautiful melodies played by good musicians with precision. It doesn't all have to be raw roots music for me. Spade's bands fit all the qualifications.
Spade changed his style beginning in 1946 with the mutiny of Tex Williams, Smokey Rogers, and Deuce Spriggens. They left, along with Cactus Soldi, to form the Western Caravan. Joaquin had left earlier to play with the Plainsmen, and Pedro was in the army. When Pedro got out, he joined the Caravan, and Joaquin joined in (I think) early 1947.
BTW, the pre-1946 band really didn't have a full "string section." It was Spade, Tiny Hunt, and Cactus generally. But they were trained violinists as well as jazz musicians (at least Cactus was), and since Spade and Pedro (also a violinist) probably wanted it "legit," that's how they played it.
When the Tex contingent split, Spade started making the change to the horn band, and that probably came to it's zenith in the early 1950's. That's when I remember Spade's TV show, which sounded like Harry James Orchestra played by musicians in cowboy suits.
Which was okay for me, I like big band as well.
Lawrence Welk, I dig him too, but not for the same reasons I like Ellington and Basie. Square? Sure, but he was playing for his audiences, which were square... not the hipsters the "real" jazzers were playing for. The musicians in his group were amazing. I was at a session with Neil Levang years ago, and he was playing fiddle tunes on the guitar while eating a sandwich and sight reading his part. And Paul Humphreys was one of the amazing drummers in jazz. They took the gig because it was steady and paid well. Who wouldn't, huh?
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Herb's Steel Guitar Pages
Texas Steel Guitar Association
[This message was edited by Herb Steiner on 10 June 2004 at 11:51 AM.] |
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