1963 - The Bird's The Word / I'm Losing My Grip (Liberty 55553)
1963 - The Shaky Bird (Part 1) / The Shaky Bird (Part 2) (Liberty 55585)
1963 - Cherry / Little Sally Walker (Liberty 55610)
1964 - Wee Jee Walk / Fairy Tales (Liberty 55671)
1964 - I Tried / One Monkey (Reprise 0293)
1964 - All That Glitters / You Move Me Baby (Am I Moving You) (A. R. E. 100)
1964 - You Move Me Baby / All That Glitters (Vee Jay 634)
1964 - I Love You Always / Years Of Tears (Vee Jay 649)
1965 - The Willy / Just Got To Be More (Vee Jay 677)
1966 - A Rose Growing In The Ruins / Tend To Business (Columbia 43581)
1966 - Yadi - Yadi - Dum - Dum / Yadi - Yadi Revisited (Columbia 43772)
1967- Little Sally Walker (Columbia)
1967 - You're Gonna Pay / I Don't Want A New Baby (Quan 1379)
1969 - Pop Your Corn (Part 1) / Pop Your Corn (Part 2) (RCA 74-0301)
1973 - Papa - Oom - Mow - Mow / I Don't Want A New Baby (Wand 11253)
Liberty 55553
Lps :
1963 - Doin' the Bird(Liberty LST-3282)
Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow
/ Love Pill / Long Tall Sally / Unchain My Heart / You Are My Sunshine /
Happy Jack / Mama-Oom-Mow-Mow / Kickapoo Joy Juice / Slippin' And
Slidin' / Old Time Love / Have Mercy Mercy Baby / Standing In The Love
Line
The Ebbtides (3)
1959 - Lonesome / Love Doctor (Jan Lar 101)
The Four After Fives
1961 - Hello Schoolteacher! / I Gotta have somebody (All Time 9076)
The Sharps (1)
Singles:
1956 - Six Months, Three Weeks / Cha - Cho Hop (inst.) (Tag 2200/Chess 1690)
1957 - Come On / Sweet Sweetheart (Jamie 1040/Vik 0264)
1957 - Our Love Is Here To Stay / Lock My Heart (Lamp 2007)
1957 - What Will I Gain / Shugglin' (Aladdin 4301)
1958 - All My Love / Look What You've Done To Me (Combo 146/Dot 15806)
1958 - Look At Me / Have Love, Will Travel (Jamie 1108)
1958 - Here's A Heart / Gig - A - Lene (Jamie 1114)
Unreleased :
1958 - Honey Babe (aka Tapun, Tapun) (Combo)
1958 - Hold Me (Combo)
1958 - I’m Such A Lovin’ Man (Combo)
Thurston Harris & The Sharps (1)
1957 - Little Bitty Pretty One / I Hope You Won't Hold It Against Me (Aladdin 3398)
Thurston Harris bb The Sharps (1)
1958 - Do What You Did / I'm Asking Forgiveness (T.Harris) (Aladdin 3399)
Sammy Turner & The Twisters (2)
1959 - Sweet Annie Laurie / Thunderbolt (Big Top 3007)
The Crenshaws
Singles :
1962 - Moonlight In Vermont / He's Got The Whole World In His Hand's (W.B. 5254)
Eps :
1965 - Off Shore / Let The Good Times Roll / Wishing Star / Manana (W.B. 5505)
Dante & His Friends (3)
1961 - Are You Just My Friend / Something Happens (Imperial 5798)
1962 - Miss America / Now I've Got You (Imperial 5827)
1962 - Magic Ring / Am I The One (Imperial 5867)
Biography :
Most
people in the early 2000s are surprised to find out about the
Rivingtons -- that's primarily because people mostly discover their
existence when they hear one of the group's three hits,
"Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow," "Mama-Oom-Mow-Mow (The Bird)," and "The Bird's the
Word," which are much, much better known in their composite re-recording
by the Trashmen (as "Surfin' Bird"). And when they hear the Rivingtons'
version, they're inevitably surprised by the fine singing and superb
R&B phrasing, miles away from the Trashmen's punk stylings. Their
version of the song was just as nonsensical, but it had amazing class
and panache, and it's more than that -- it's part of a story of superb
singing, bird dances and surfin' birds, great dances and even better
times, before the world of the 1960s got all dark and serious and too
dangerous for good clean fun. The Rivingtons were a West Coast vocal
group whose lineup featured Al Frazier, Carl White, John "Sonny" Harris,
and Turner "Rocky" Wilson Jr. That lineup went through myriad
reshapings to get there, along with renamings -- they weren't even the
Rivingtons to start with.
It all started with Al Frazier, in high school in Los Angeles at the
end of the 1940s, who sang baritone and formed his own group, the
Mello-Moods, whose ranks included future Platters member Paul Robi. They
had aspirations to record, but never got that lucky -- Frazier went
into the army and served in Korea, which didn't interrupt his desire for
a music career. When he got out he formed a new outfit, a mixed
male/female quartet called Emanons (which was "No Names" backwards).
They were good enough to wrangle a TV appearance locally in 1952, but
that was as far as they ascended. Then, in 1953, Frazier crossed paths
with lead singer Thurston Harris, bass singer Matthew Nelson, baritone
Leon Hughes, and tenor Willie Ray Rockwell, at an amateur night run by
the legendary deejay Hunter Hancock -- they had a group but no moves,
and Frazier had some moves to suggest, and suddenly they were a quintet,
then went back to being a quartet when Hughes left the lineup. The
four-man outfit, called the Lamplighters, were signed to Federal
Records, part of Syd Nathan's King Records, and began making their name
all over the West Coast during the run -- up to the middle of the 1950s.
They
were doing well, young men loving their work and getting lots of it,
and then, while on the East Coast, Thurston Harris suddenly got homesick
for Indianapolis and decided to leave the act. The group was on hiatus
and might have stayed that way if Willie Ray Rockwell hadn't pointed
Frazier to a pair of singers, tenor John "Sonny" Harris and lead Carl
White, with Nelson returning to establish the lineup that would carry
them for the next few years. The only problem was that the record
company felt it was ill-advised to release a new Lamplighters single
with a new lead singer, so instead of picking up where the latter group
had left off, they were renamed the Tenderfoots and forced to rebuild
their reputation and audience. They got four records out on Federal
without any significant sales or airplay, and their bookings were
similarly slim. They tried to bring Thurston Harris back into the lineup
but that didn't last. And they spent time appearing on other artists'
records -- including a credit as "the Jacks" behind Paul Anka on
"Blau-Wile-Deveest-Fontaine," and were signed to the Jamie label as the
Sharps by producer Lester Sill (of future Phil Spector fame) in 1956.
They
bounced around some more, to Aladdin Records, where they even ended up
singing behind Thurston Harris, on records including "Little Bitty
Pretty One." Their next stop was Tag Records and then to Combo Records,
with "Look What You've Done to Me," which was later picked up by Dot
Records for national distribution. Then it was back to Jamie, where they
cut more sides of their own and sang behind Duane Eddy, among others
(they were the Rebels in that incarnation). Finally, at the very end of
the 1950s, Matthew Nelson left the fold and was replaced on bass by
Turner "Rocky" Wilson Jr., and that lineup sang behind artists including
bandleader/actor/trumpeter Ray Anthony (of Mamie Van Doren fame). There
was also a stint as the Four After Fives and another as the Crenshaws,
working with producer Kim Fowley on "Hello School Teacher," and backing
Roy Milton, and cutting sides for Warner Bros.. Their break came one day
when they were fooling around in the studio and Rocky Wilson suddenly
came up with the "papa-oom-mow-mow" vocal line, done basso, and everyone
loved it. The resulting LP was startlingly compelling record that
Fowley steered, along with the group, to a pair of producers, Jack Levy
and Adam Ross. They came up with a $1200 advance for the song and
against an eventual contract with group, and the name the Rivingtons
(derived from the two having once lived on Rivington Street on New
York's Lower East Side). They offered the recording to Capitol, who
turned it down as a little too far-out (that from a label that recorded
Yma Sumac and released the single "Tsukiaki").
Instead, it went to Capitol's younger rival, Liberty Records, who
bought it but then sat on it for six months trying to figure out how to
sell a song called "Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow." The group and their managers had
no doubt how to sell it -- play it, sing it, get it heard. Which is
exactly what they did, at a performing showcase for deejays in Los
Angeles. The deejays loved what they heard, and asked for a record to
promote, and the managers duly provided them with "Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow." It
spread across the Los Angeles airwaves, and out from there to
California, and suddenly there was no decision to be made about
marketing the song -- it sold itself, and all Liberty had to do was ship
them, the song did the rest. One of the reasons for its appeal was that
yes, it was a nonsense song, but the members sang it with such spirit
and élan, that it wasn't a "guilty pleasure" or an embarrassing novelty
record -- it was silly, but it was also viscerally exciting like the
very best R&B dance records, and sung that way. Like an amazing
number of other "novelty" singles -- "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer",
"Short Shorts," and "Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow's distant successor, "Na Na Hey
Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye)," it was cut initially as a joke, an
after-thought, at the end of a session, and worked its way into the
vernacular infectiously. An album followed, entitled Doin' the Bird, in
late 1962, that the group wasn't too happy about, and a follow-up
single, "Mama-Oom-Mow-Mow," but not before "Kickapoo Joy Juice"
interrupted their momentum.
They
followed with up with "The Bird's the Word," which capitalized on the
first two records on that theme, and then "The Shaky Bird." They rode
the crest of a wave for a year, into the second half of 1963. By that
time, a Minneapolis-based surf band called the Trashmen co-opted the
boom started by the Rivingtons, combining their first and third Liberty
singles into a composite work entitled "Surfin' Bird," pushing the beat
into warp nine and rocketing them to the Top Ten and linking the
Rivingtons forever to the tail-end of the surf music craze and also, to
an extent, displacing the originals -- by the time the Ramones began
playing it a decade or so later, it was already a standard piece of punk
band repertory. The Rivingtons kept making good records but never found
a replacement for the "bird" craze around which to wrap their work.
"Cherry" was a straight R&B ballad, and "Weejee Walk," which closed
out their Liberty career, was an attempt at another dance piece. The
group bounced around some more, between Reprise Records and Adam Ross's
own label, and Columbia Records, before forming their own label, Quan,
in 1967. They were Carlos & the Rivingtons at one point, and in
1973, amid the oldies craze, they did an updated version of
"Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow." Carl White, who passed away at the end of the
decade, was succeeded by Andrew Butler, and as of the early 1990s, a
version of the Rivingtons was still performing. In 1991, EMI Records,
which had acquired the Liberty library, issued Liberty Years, a 23-song
compilation of the group's Liberty sides. It's glorious, a magnificent
collection of stunning vocals, and as priceless and essential a body of
music as the best work of Bo Diddley, Johnny Otis, or any other
foundation rockers you care to name.
