Buddy Holly was still alive when this, the second collaboration of Midwestern rockin' bros T. J. and Jim Shedlowsky and cleffer/producers Bob Crewe and Frank Slay, was released to crickets and tumbleweeds. Both records are epic exaggerations of the '50s rock 'n' roll sound: hyper-charged, powerful and impressive pieces of music that deserved public favor.
Neither record performed well outside of the siblings' Michigan home-base. Their debut, issued on another Columbia subsidiary, Epic Records, is one of the best rock 'n' roll singles of the 1950s. It's a tough one to track down, but today's single is harder still. For a while, Discogs banned its sale due to bad intel. They considered all issues of it to be bootlegs. Such tomfoolery does happen; given the fragile styrene of my copy, which no pirate would care to recreate, it's an obvious original.
This follow-up 45 isn't quite in the league of their Epic disc, "Big Deal"/"While I'm Away;" those were featured on the January 17, 2024 post which can still be found on the other site: the fascist facebook I don't use or look at; I made an exception to get the date of that entry. Approach with caution; you can hear both sides there. (They've also appeared on my podcast; search for the artist name to find them.)
Aside from mis-spelling Bob Crewe's surname in various ways ("Crowe" on the Epic 45; "Creve" on this one), Columbia let he and Frank Slay do their thing on a series of wild, arch productions that have the flavor of a John Waters movie. Everything is elevated, expanded and made louder than normal. Had teens been aware of these singles, they might have flipped over them. Columbia's self-promotion, outside its MOR pop, jazz and country artists, was negligible. Like other major labels, they tolerated vernacular music but wasted no time or effort over its well-being.
On both sides, the brothers have backup by an uncredited Four Lovers (soon to be hitmakers The Four Seasons). The Shedlowsky boys penned "That's All She Wrote," a tough teen rocker reminiscent of Leiber and Stoller's songs of the era but so steeped in rock 'n' roll to transcend its obvious influences.
A 12-bar blues with a stop-start format, it's a soda-shop version of the "Dear John" scenario: our heroes receive a kiss-off letter and are flummoxed by its upending of their once-happy existence. With a strong rock 'n' roll flavor, hard-edged harmonies by the brothers and zany-exuberant support by the Jersey boys, it exaggerates its own style and creates a potent, vivid effect that far exceeds other attempts to commodify this still-new youth music.
This is a heightened studio creation, but it rings true to the ethos of rock 'n' roll and exudes the excitement, joy and heartbreak that makes this music so compelling and colorful to these ears--and, I hope, to yours!
"Sound here, too," says Cash Box, in one of its more enigmatic assessments.
"Four Aces (of Love)" blends teen harmony pop with a drive that foreshadows 1990s indie rock. Dig the weird chords in the song's opening; they're presented with an aggression seldom heard in their day. The song, penned by the producers, is as much a showcase for The Four Seasons as The Skee Brothers; they replicate the general sound of Buddy Holly and The Crickets, who used a local harmony group for their vocal backups.
There the resemblance stops. The grind and force of this side, for all its careful arrangement, goes beyond the rock 'n' roll norms. Crewe and Slay's brilliance was in how they pushed the boundaries to their limits without distortion or chaos. They retained all the earthiness of first-generation rock 'n' roll and filtered it through their own vision of its ideal. A case can be made for these two producers being rock 'n' roll auteurs, up there with Sam Phillips, Leiber & Stoller and England's Joe Meek. All left their unique stamp on youth music.
I'm not a fan of their work with The Four Seasons, but it was their major legacy and it was influential. Their girl-group material of the 1960s is excellent; again, it takes the standards of its genre and pumps up the saturation, hue and vibrance to superhuman levels--without detriment.
The Skee Brothers parted ways with Crewe and Slay after the failure of this single. Their final release, on Roulette Records, did better than the others and is their easiest-to-find single. Without the visionary malarkey of Crewe and Slay, they sounded like any other rock-adjacent duo of the day.
The brothers continued to perform music off the record and in their own stomping grounds. They remained popular with Michiganders and kept at it into this century. They may still be with us; they're not performing anymore, and I hope they're okay.
Tomorrow: intense white doo-wop from The Imaginations via an obscure 1962 single on the Bo-Marc label. Part of a box of dusty 45s from a teenager's collection that sat on a garage shelf for decades. I pulled a few surprises out of its sleeveless masses.
It's a shame Columbia didn't know what they had here and didn't push these guys to teens. They could have cleaned up. Two outstanding rock 'n' roll decks!
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