THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD
1,746) Dickens — “Sho’ Need Love”
This “tripped out magic” (Expo67, https://purepop1uk.blogspot.com/2011/02/dickens-dont-talk-about-my-music.html?m=1), “trippy ethereal” (happening45, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh_KpNCN7Hk) almost A-side “reaches haunting heights of psych Pop glory”. (Robin Wills, https://purepop1uk.blogspot.com/2011/02/dickens-dont-talk-about-my-music.html) And it was all a joke! While the B-side “features inane bashing on a basic, two-chord riff, with minimalist drumming, dive-bombing bass, a pointlessly swirling Hammond organ[, as to the A-side,] ‘We wanted to do one pretty song, just to make people wonder what in the world was wrong'[.”] (Phil Milstein, https://www.spectropop.com/Dickens/index.htm)
Us/Them Group tells us about the single:
The 1971 single only exists as a demo, printed as a white label promo pressing for Scepter Records. Dickens were, essentially, a mockery of the era’s hard rock shenanigans, comprised of NRBQ’s [New Rhythm and Blues Quartet] road crew and some band members all playing instruments they didn’t know how to play. This recording happened essentially by accident when studio time became available after Gomer Pyle actor and balladeer Jim Nabors cancelled a session. The group quickly cut a few songs, which an enthusiastic A&R man had pressed up, before the label president nixed it and fired the VP for allowing such nonsense. It’s believed that only about 50 copies survived. It’s a shame, since this Flipper-before-Flipper dirge-metal freakout was way ahead of its time.
A “music industry insider” explains the rise and fall of “Sho’ Need Love”:
We had three hours in the studio . . . . The Dickens came prepared with two virtually identical songs from their concerts: “Don’t Talk About My Music” and “Pollution Revolution.” . . . Despite Donn[ Adams’] clunky drumming and [Dom] Placco’s stunningly bad guitar playing, the group chose to move on rather than redo anything, so there was time for a third song. The studio has a weird sounding rinky-tink piano, and Keith and Joey composed a song for it in about five minutes. They had a lot of fun putting tons of echo on the piano and manipulating the tape speed to get bizarre effects. The whole song was done in layers with everything, including Placco’s hauntingly inept guitar break and Joey’s multitracked vocals, thought of on the spot. Coming up with a title took longer than composing the song, but they wound up taking the key word from each verse, (“Show” “Need” “Love”), and calling it “Sho’ Need Love.” Scepter was owned and run by a woman named Florence Greenberg, the lady who signed the Shirelles, Chuck Jackson, Dionne Warwick, and gave Bacharach/David their first real shot at making records. She ruled with an iron hand, making her overweight, blind son, Stanley . . . their figurehead director of A&R. Since Scepter had first refusal rights on anything Michael recorded for himself or his friends in the Scepter studio, our three Dickens songs . . . were played for Stan Green who passed on everything until the last song . . . “Sho’ Need Love”! Stan was convinced that this was a hit sound and he had us sign contracts . . . . After the DJ copies were pressed, the record was played at Scepter’s weekly singles meeting for Florence and the rest of the staff. . . . Florence hit the ceiling when she heard the Dickens single, refusing to let it come out on her label and ordering all copies destroyed! . . . Every copy of the Dickens 45 you’ve ever seen . . . came from the original two boxes (50 records total) of promo 45s that were snatched from the trash . . . . Commercial copies were never pressed and don’t exist.
Phil Milstein writes of the Dickens;
NRBQ’s response was to give the kids exactly what they wanted, and then some: they would send their road crew out to play instruments they’d never played before, through amplifiers set as loud as they could go. After all, what could be more galling to a crowd of stoned hippies out for an afternoon of mud-rattling megarock than to be confronted with a band “that didn’t know how to play, didn’t know how to play at all,” as Dom Placco, road manager for NRBQ, characterized that band’s hair-shaking hellspawn, The Dickens. Intimates and observers remain divided as to whether The Dickens’ prevailing force was as a straight-up heavyrock parody or as a loving evocation of musical recklessness. . . . [S]ometime in 1969 Donn[‘s] and Dom[‘] . . . idea was to put on the heavyrock bobos who, following Woodstock . . . had taken rule of the rock roost. . . . [For t]he Beatles’ “Rain”. . . . the band would just sing the chorus — “Rain, I don’t mind” — over and over, polishing it off with an epic feedback jam, highlighted by Donn and Dom rolling around on the stage smacking and rubbing their guitar necks together. . . . [R]oad manager Placco — who eventual Dickens producer Marty Pekar says “had never done anything more with a guitar than carry one” — strapped on a Gretsch solid-body . . . . [M]ost of their appearances were mainly limited to short, spontaneous sets following NRBQ performances, sometimes as punishment meted out to an unresponsive audience. . . . Headquartered at the time in upstate New York’s bucolic Hudson Valley, NRBQ spent the summers of 1970 and ’71 playing regular Sunday afternoon outdoor gigs at Folly Farm . . . . It was . . . at one of their Folly Farm appearances, that The Dickens were, in essence, discovered. NRBQ was signed at the time to Columbia Records, where they had a fan in staff copywriter Earl Carter. . . . Carter was blown away by The Dickens . . . . and was deputized as manager. . . . Carter returned to New York determined to help The Dickens become the Next Big Thing. . . . He assigned his friend and Columbia colleague Pekar to take the band into the studio. . . . Pekar . . . turned to Michael Wright, a friend who was a staff engineer for Scepter. After an amazing run of hits in the 1960s, by the early ’70s Scepter was flailing around . . . . [and] were anxious to move into rock, and so Wright allowed Pekar to record The Dickens for the label on spec. . . . Placco visited Scepter’s offices some months later on a mission to discover the record’s fate. He recalls conferring there with an A&R exec . . . . [“]He said, “You’re The Dickens?” He was nearly trembling. . . . We asked what happened to the guys who OK’d it for release, and he said they were no longer with them. The vice president had been fired, and the guy made it sound like it was because of us.[“] . . . In a perversely Dickensian way, this was a moment of überrock triumph. “We thought it was great!,” Placco concludes. Since the whole thing had been a lark to begin with, the band was hardly crestfallen over the non-release of their record. “We never believed it in the first place,” Donn says. “We were surprised that somebody actually pressed the thing.” Oddly, the pressing on “Sho’ Need Love” sounds significantly sped up, producing unnatural tones and cadences, an occurrence that everyone involved is at a loss to explain, and not everyone agrees is even the case. Again, for a band that was designed to be wrong from its very inception, such ultimate wrongness seems perfectly fitting.
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