There's A Riot Goin' On

Recreating a couple of threads I'm proud of. --We've been running Unpolled Bangers From Unpolled Years at the People's Pop Polls (see footnote* for what those words mean). Tom let me have 1954 and I chose the Robins' "Riot In Cell Block #9," which gave me the opportunity to expand a thread I'd initially done for the Soundtracks poll: where the song came from, where the sound came from, what it led to, what various places the various riffs led to. I'll let the tweets tell the story, may add a word or two of explanation or embellishment. One thing: I don't actually name "Hoochie Coochie Man" in the first thread. I wasn't playing coy. Back in Soundtracks, Twitter'd flagged my tweet for "sensitive content" whenever I used the song title or embedded the song - their software must've thought it was porn - it is a sexy song! - so that's why I don't call it by its title here in the first thread; instead I break it off into its own thread. If Twitter had flagged it again, only the second thread would've been affected. Fortunately, this time they didn't flag it.

[The self-defeating, childish man who runs Twitter doesn't let us embed tweets in our Substacks. I could paste in screenshots, but decided it would be easier, and look better, if I simply printed the text of the tweets. Am pasting in the poll tweet.]

Starting with the heat itself (a tough one for my nominee).

Thread no. 1: Working and varying a riff

In the 1954 prison film Riot In Cell Block 11 (scored by Herschel Burke Gilbert), the musical prelude starts with high drama and then stops dead for two beats, then starts the drama again. /1

Meanwhile, a long time earlier, in a galaxy far, far away... no, at virtually *the exact same moment* actually, but in a *genre* far, far away, Muddy Waters and his band start a Willie Dixon song with a riff that goes two beats and then drops to silence for a half measure. /2

Not gonna embed it yet, though, 'cause Twitter thinks its title is pr0/\/. /3

When the Muddy song hits, Leiber & Stoller (a couple of middle-class Jewish boys) recognize its cinematic potential and create the underclass anthem "Riot In Cell Block No. 9" by the Robins, using a variant of the Muddy stop-time riff. /4

"Riot" is up today in the People's Pop Polls as a previously unpolled banger, hence this thread – but the thread's not near done; and I urge you all to join the polls: w/ another Leiber-Stoller song, Big Mama Thornton's "Hound Dog," in the Animal poll /5

[Note: Animals poll has just concluded. "Hound Dog" made the quarterfinals, where, however, not only did it fail to catch a rabbit, it lost to a rabbit, a white rabbit.]

The following year (1955), Elmer Bernstein lifts Riot's variant of the Muddy riff for the soundtrack to Man With The Golden Arm, which we polled back in Soundtracks (the Frankie Machine version), so we're back full-circle to ci-ne-mah. /6

Still threading, tho, 'cause there's more People's Pop content: same year as "Arm," Bo Diddley does "I'm A Man," which is *his* variant on the Muddy stop-time riff. "I'm A Man" gets covered yon and hither, and the riff is lifted by the Animals /7

[Note: The Animals double the second note of the riff, but for practical purposes it's the "I'm A Man" riff.]

The Animals riff was in turn sampled in Girls Aloud's "Biology," which not only made our Charity Crusher, it danced all the way to Pollhalla. /8

Meanwhile, Muddy Waters himself had appropriately copied "I'm A Man" on "Mannish Boy" with a riff that triangulates Riot In Cell Block No. 9, I'm A Man, and his original riff itself. We polled Muddy's remake of "Mannish Boy" in our 1977 poll. /end pt 1

Thread no. 2: Willie Dixon gets diplomatic

Riot Thread 2: Elmer Bernstein's score for Man With The Golden Arm, which lifted the Robins' variant on the Muddy riff, got an Oscar nomination. Wikip reports Willie Dixon saying, "We felt like this was a great achievement for one of these blues phrases to be used in a movie." /1

But Wikip leaves out the tone of voice from the original interview, in Robert Palmer's Deep Blues (p. 167): "'We felt like this was a great achievement for one of these blues phrases to be used in a movie,' says Dixon, diplomatically." /2

So here's the original "H00chi3 Coochi3 Man," written by Willie Dixon, performed by Muddy Waters, with the stop-time riff that by rights should be on Tweet 2 of the previous thread. Am hoping my l33t speak evades Twitter's buffoonery. /3

Dixon says the riffs were band-written, which means Little Walter on harmonica is as crucial as Muddy Waters on guitar (they're not doubling each other: Walter plays four notes while Muddy does five). /4

Don't want to imply that Gilbert originated the use of musical starts and stops in movie melodrama, or that Dixon, Waters, etc. did so in R&B. Palmer points to its long use in jazz, for instance. But it's Leiber & Stoller who connect the dots, use it to make songs cinematic. /end

And here's a playlist. There's A Riot Goin' On.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLshHxICULapmpCcm5-jjvr4h6XrvItrl8

*Here's Tom Ewing's basic primer on the People's Pop Polls. Here are my own thoughts on the polls. "Unpolled banger" is a fairly high-profile track we hadn’t previously polled, by an act that has never put a song into Pollhalla. (Dif. criteria for Pollhalla for different polls, but most often means making it to the quarterfinals; unpolled year means we're not taking tracks from one of the years we've given a dedicated poll to (we have year polls and theme polls; so by "dedicated poll" I mean one of the year polls).)

Meta content for Substack: "It is a sexy song!" The audience for Muddy Waters in the clubs of Chicago was primarily adult black women who found him sexy - in the British Isles, though, it was white teen males who wanted to play guitar like him, or sing his songs, or invent new lives based on what the music promised. —Yes, it was not that cut and dried. Surely the women in Chicago were inventing lives, the boys in Britain felt the sexiness even if they wanted it as their own, there were girls listening in London and males listening in Chicago - and whites too, at least several named "Chess." Of course, *I* haven't done the research as to who was in whose audience, or why; is just stuff I remember reading, and stuff I’m making guesses at.

This entry was originally posted at https://koganbot.dreamwidth.org/390620.html. Comments still welcome here, there, and anywhere.