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On this day, April 22, 1937, Jack Nitzsche was born.
Jack Nitzsche
Background information
Birth name; Bernard Alfred Nitzsche
Born: April 22, 1937; Chicago, Illinois, United States
Died: August 25, 2000 (aged 63); Hollywood, Los Angeles, California
Bernard Alfred Nitzsche (/ˈniːtʃi/ NEECH-ee;[3] April 22, 1937 – August 25, 2000), known professionally as Jack Nitzsche, was an American musician, arranger, songwriter, composer, and record producer. He first came to prominence in the early 1960s as the right-hand-man of producer Phil Spector and went on to work with the Rolling Stones and Neil Young, among others. He also worked extensively in film scores, notably for films such as Performance, The Exorcist and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. In 1983, he won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for co-writing "Up Where We Belong" with Buffy Sainte-Marie.
{snip}
Life and career
Born in Chicago, Illinois, United States, and raised on a farm in Newaygo, Michigan, Nitzsche, the son of German immigrants, moved to Los Angeles in 1955 with ambitions of becoming a jazz saxophonist. He was hired by Sonny Bono, who was at the time an A&R executive at Specialty Records, as a music copyist. While there, Nitzsche wrote a novelty hit titled "Bongo Bongo Bongo". Nitzsche wrote with Bono the song "Needles and Pins" for Jackie DeShannon, later recorded by the Searchers. His instrumental composition "The Lonely Surfer" entered the Cash Box top 100 on August 3, 1963, and reached No. 37.
He became arranger and conductor for producer Phil Spector, and orchestrated the Wall of Sound for the song "River Deep, Mountain High" by Ike and Tina Turner. Nitzsche worked with Earl Palmer, Leon Russell, Roy Caton, Glen Campbell, Carol Kaye and Hal Blaine in The Wrecking Crew, the backing band for many pop acts such as the Beach Boys and the Monkees. Nitzsche arranged the title song of Doris Day's film Move Over, Darling, which was a successful single on the pop charts of the time.
While organizing the music for the T.A.M.I. Show television special in 1964, he met the Rolling Stones and went on to play keyboards on their albums The Rolling Stones, Now! (The Rolling Stones No. 2 in the UK), Out of Our Heads, Aftermath and Between the Buttons as well as on their hit singles "Paint It, Black" and "Let's Spend the Night Together"; he also wrote the choral arrangements for "You Can't Always Get What You Want". In 1968 he introduced the band to slide guitarist Ry Cooder, a seminal influence on the band's 1969–1973 style.
On several Rolling Stones records, he was credited as player of the "Nitzsche-phone". In an obituary on Gadfly Online, former Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham explained the credit:
He collaborated with Neil Young, beginning with producing "Expecting to Fly" by Buffalo Springfield. plus the song "On the Way Home". In 1968, Nitzsche and Cooder co-produced Young's eponymous solo debut with David Briggs. As he was moving from baroque to hard rock, Young hired Nitzsche for The Stray Gators, the session musicians behind Young on Harvest (1972) and Time Fades Away (1973).
Nitzsche played electric piano with Crazy Horse throughout 1970. Despite frequent clashes with Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina, Nitzsche remained with the band after Young left in 1970. Nitzsche produced the band's 1971 self-titled debut album and sang lead vocal on "Crow Jane Lady". He left Crazy Horse after the album's commercial failure.
While remaining prolific throughout the 1970s, he began to suffer from depression and problems connected to substance abuse. His relationship with Young began to deteriorate during the 1973 support tour for Harvest that yielded Time Fades Away. During rehearsals, drummer Kenneth Buttrey demanded a salary of $100,000 to compensate for lost session work, leading Nitzsche (with support from bassist Tim Drummond) to prevail upon the singer to extend this salary to the other band members. Although Young reluctantly agreed, Nitzsche thought Young never got over it. He frequently spewed obscenities into his vocal mike (leading Young's sound engineers to disconnect it) and often quarreled with David Crosby, who joined the tour's final dates to assist with vocal harmonies. After he publicly castigated Young in a 1974 interview, the two men became estranged for several years and collaborated only sporadically. Later that year, he was dropped from the Reprise roster after recording a song criticizing executive Mo Ostin. This period culminated in his arrest for allegedly breaking into the home of and then raping ex-girlfriend Carrie Snodgress, formerly Young's companion, with a gun barrel on June 29, 1979. Snodgress was treated at the hospital for a bone fracture, cuts and bruises and had 18 stitches. The charge of rape by instrumentation (which carries a five-year sentence) was dismissed.
In 1979, Nitzsche produced Graham Parker's album Squeezing Out Sparks. Nitzsche produced three Willy DeVille albums beginning in the late 1970s: Cabretta (1977), Return to Magenta (1978) and Coup de Grâce (1981). Nitzsche said DeVille was the best singer he had ever worked with.
{snip}
Background information
Birth name; Bernard Alfred Nitzsche
Born: April 22, 1937; Chicago, Illinois, United States
Died: August 25, 2000 (aged 63); Hollywood, Los Angeles, California
Bernard Alfred Nitzsche (/ˈniːtʃi/ NEECH-ee;[3] April 22, 1937 – August 25, 2000), known professionally as Jack Nitzsche, was an American musician, arranger, songwriter, composer, and record producer. He first came to prominence in the early 1960s as the right-hand-man of producer Phil Spector and went on to work with the Rolling Stones and Neil Young, among others. He also worked extensively in film scores, notably for films such as Performance, The Exorcist and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. In 1983, he won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for co-writing "Up Where We Belong" with Buffy Sainte-Marie.
{snip}
Life and career
Born in Chicago, Illinois, United States, and raised on a farm in Newaygo, Michigan, Nitzsche, the son of German immigrants, moved to Los Angeles in 1955 with ambitions of becoming a jazz saxophonist. He was hired by Sonny Bono, who was at the time an A&R executive at Specialty Records, as a music copyist. While there, Nitzsche wrote a novelty hit titled "Bongo Bongo Bongo". Nitzsche wrote with Bono the song "Needles and Pins" for Jackie DeShannon, later recorded by the Searchers. His instrumental composition "The Lonely Surfer" entered the Cash Box top 100 on August 3, 1963, and reached No. 37.
He became arranger and conductor for producer Phil Spector, and orchestrated the Wall of Sound for the song "River Deep, Mountain High" by Ike and Tina Turner. Nitzsche worked with Earl Palmer, Leon Russell, Roy Caton, Glen Campbell, Carol Kaye and Hal Blaine in The Wrecking Crew, the backing band for many pop acts such as the Beach Boys and the Monkees. Nitzsche arranged the title song of Doris Day's film Move Over, Darling, which was a successful single on the pop charts of the time.
While organizing the music for the T.A.M.I. Show television special in 1964, he met the Rolling Stones and went on to play keyboards on their albums The Rolling Stones, Now! (The Rolling Stones No. 2 in the UK), Out of Our Heads, Aftermath and Between the Buttons as well as on their hit singles "Paint It, Black" and "Let's Spend the Night Together"; he also wrote the choral arrangements for "You Can't Always Get What You Want". In 1968 he introduced the band to slide guitarist Ry Cooder, a seminal influence on the band's 1969–1973 style.
On several Rolling Stones records, he was credited as player of the "Nitzsche-phone". In an obituary on Gadfly Online, former Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham explained the credit:
I made that up for the credits on those Stones albums—it was just a regular piano (or maybe an organ) mic'd differently. It was all part of this package that was created around the Stones. People believed it existed. The idea was meant to be: "My god, they've had to invent new instruments to capture this new sound they hear in their brains." And they were inventing fresh sounds with old toys—therefore, it deserved to be highlighted—it was the read-up of creation, of imagination—getting credit for a job well done.[10]
He collaborated with Neil Young, beginning with producing "Expecting to Fly" by Buffalo Springfield. plus the song "On the Way Home". In 1968, Nitzsche and Cooder co-produced Young's eponymous solo debut with David Briggs. As he was moving from baroque to hard rock, Young hired Nitzsche for The Stray Gators, the session musicians behind Young on Harvest (1972) and Time Fades Away (1973).
Nitzsche played electric piano with Crazy Horse throughout 1970. Despite frequent clashes with Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina, Nitzsche remained with the band after Young left in 1970. Nitzsche produced the band's 1971 self-titled debut album and sang lead vocal on "Crow Jane Lady". He left Crazy Horse after the album's commercial failure.
While remaining prolific throughout the 1970s, he began to suffer from depression and problems connected to substance abuse. His relationship with Young began to deteriorate during the 1973 support tour for Harvest that yielded Time Fades Away. During rehearsals, drummer Kenneth Buttrey demanded a salary of $100,000 to compensate for lost session work, leading Nitzsche (with support from bassist Tim Drummond) to prevail upon the singer to extend this salary to the other band members. Although Young reluctantly agreed, Nitzsche thought Young never got over it. He frequently spewed obscenities into his vocal mike (leading Young's sound engineers to disconnect it) and often quarreled with David Crosby, who joined the tour's final dates to assist with vocal harmonies. After he publicly castigated Young in a 1974 interview, the two men became estranged for several years and collaborated only sporadically. Later that year, he was dropped from the Reprise roster after recording a song criticizing executive Mo Ostin. This period culminated in his arrest for allegedly breaking into the home of and then raping ex-girlfriend Carrie Snodgress, formerly Young's companion, with a gun barrel on June 29, 1979. Snodgress was treated at the hospital for a bone fracture, cuts and bruises and had 18 stitches. The charge of rape by instrumentation (which carries a five-year sentence) was dismissed.
In 1979, Nitzsche produced Graham Parker's album Squeezing Out Sparks. Nitzsche produced three Willy DeVille albums beginning in the late 1970s: Cabretta (1977), Return to Magenta (1978) and Coup de Grâce (1981). Nitzsche said DeVille was the best singer he had ever worked with.
{snip}
The Shoop Shoop Song (It's in His Kiss)
"It's in His Kiss" is a song written and composed by Rudy Clark. It was first released as a single in 1963 by Merry Clayton that did not chart. The song was made a hit a year later when recorded by Betty Everett, who hit No. 1 on the Cashbox magazine R&B charts with it in 1964. Recorded by dozens of artists and groups around the world in the decades since, the song became an international hit once again when remade by Cher in 1990.
{snip}
Merry Clayton version
The song was rejected by the Shirelles, the premier girl group of the early 1960s, and was first recorded in Los Angeles by Merry Clayton as her first credited single. Clayton had previously provided an uncredited female vocal to the hit "You're the Reason I'm Living" recorded by Bobby Darin as his debut on Capitol Records, and Darin had subsequently arranged for Clayton herself to be signed to Capitol. The composer of "It's in His Kiss", Rudy Clark, was a staff writer for TM Music, which Darin headed. Clayton's recording of the song was produced by Jack Nitzsche and featured Hal Blaine on drums and the Blossoms as chorus. It was released as a single on June 10, 1963, without success.
Clayton performed the song again in the 1987 film Maid to Order in which she, as the character Audrey James, sang the song in the film's climactic scene accompanied by the fictional band Loaded Blanks, played by Jack Russell, Lorne Black, Audie Desbrow, Mark Kendall and Michael Lardie of rock band Great White.
{snip}
"It's in His Kiss" is a song written and composed by Rudy Clark. It was first released as a single in 1963 by Merry Clayton that did not chart. The song was made a hit a year later when recorded by Betty Everett, who hit No. 1 on the Cashbox magazine R&B charts with it in 1964. Recorded by dozens of artists and groups around the world in the decades since, the song became an international hit once again when remade by Cher in 1990.
{snip}
Merry Clayton version
The song was rejected by the Shirelles, the premier girl group of the early 1960s, and was first recorded in Los Angeles by Merry Clayton as her first credited single. Clayton had previously provided an uncredited female vocal to the hit "You're the Reason I'm Living" recorded by Bobby Darin as his debut on Capitol Records, and Darin had subsequently arranged for Clayton herself to be signed to Capitol. The composer of "It's in His Kiss", Rudy Clark, was a staff writer for TM Music, which Darin headed. Clayton's recording of the song was produced by Jack Nitzsche and featured Hal Blaine on drums and the Blossoms as chorus. It was released as a single on June 10, 1963, without success.
Clayton performed the song again in the 1987 film Maid to Order in which she, as the character Audrey James, sang the song in the film's climactic scene accompanied by the fictional band Loaded Blanks, played by Jack Russell, Lorne Black, Audie Desbrow, Mark Kendall and Michael Lardie of rock band Great White.
{snip}
Videos to follow.