On the final Peel show to soundtrack Castaway Theatre Company’s production of Equus, he finally managed to track down the cover of a Little Richard song which he had spent so long working through his singles collection trying to find. Of course I had to keep that back as the final track for this production.
The first mention of the search on this blog dates back to a Peel show broadcast almost exactly one year earlier than this 27/3/93 show. In the course of that time, I, like many listeners back then I’m sure, had built up in their minds what the record was going to be and what it would be like. For myself, I suspected either some kind of Delta Blues freak out version or an immaculately performed Stax-style soul version, that Peel would have got hold of during his years living and working in the United States, and cut by someone who history had forgotten. I also suspected that Peel would have been one of only a handful of people to own the single.
Well, I was partially correct. The artist in question, Mickey Lee Lane, was never a household name and Peel wondered whether he had recorded any other records - just the ten or so, John. But in every other respect, my assumptions were confounded. Lane was no grizzled blues man or ghetto soul man, he was a rock ‘n’ roller who wrote, recorded, toured and engineered obsessively from the mid 1950s onwards in numerous groups and often in tandem with family members either as a songwriter or a performer. Despite looking like British sports commentator, Alan Parry, Lane packed any release he put out under his name with as much berserk rock ‘n’ roll energy as he could. Examples include Shaggy Dog (1964), (They’re All in) The Senior Class (1964), The Zoo (1964) and Hey-Sah-Lo-Ney (1965), which sees Lane giving James Brown a run for his money.
All assumptions about Lane seemed to be wrong. Peel played his version of Tutti Frutti, and described it as having a “Fort Worth, Texas sound”. Maybe Lane was aiming for that, but considering he came from New York, I doubt it was something he automatically gravitated towards. I thought Peel had got the record during his years in the States, but it was released in 1967, by which time Peel was back in the UK and establishing himself as a darling of the UK underground scene through both The Perfumed Garden and his early appearances on Radio 1. Also, while it’s true that Lane’s version of Tutti Frutti languished in relative obscurity, it could have been a different story but for record company politics. The record was put out by Mala Records, but despite strong reviews it was under-promoted by them in favour of focussing on Neon Rainbow, the follow-up record by The Box Tops to their international smash hit, The Letter. Lane suspected that the record was sat on at the request of Kama Sutra, the label he was working with at the time, who didn’t want him to leave them in order to go out and promote Tutti Frutti.
If you’ve listened to any of the Lane recordings linked to above - and I hope that you will, because they’re fantastic - you’ll be able to hear his signature touches all over his recording of Tutti Frutti. There’s prominent tambourine and Danelectro guitar. Most interesting of all is the fact that Lane’s recording isn’t strictly speaking a straight cover of Little Richard’s original. He rewrites the lyrics, replacing the girls named Sue and Daisy with Cyn (I don’t know where she’s been), Marie (She looks so good to me), Jane (She dances in the rain) and Joan (I’d like to take her home). He shows due respect to Little Richard by not singing Awopboploobopalopbamboom, instead he scats it into something which fits his own creation. As the record progresses, we get the sense that Lane is trying to see how many different musical styles he can take this rock ‘n’ roll touchstone into within the space of the 140 seconds that the tape machines are running. The first 50 seconds match up rock ‘n’ roll with soul music. Then from 0:52 to 1:20, the song lurches into popsike-acid rock with piano and keyboard runs reminiscent of The Doors. The final minute takes on a positively gospel-like fervour with call and response vocals playing out in front of a musical background which gets progressively faster and more deliriously intense.
It’s a staggeringly good recording and while we may like to think of Peel in late 1967 immersing himself in Donovan albums or promising unlimited studio sessions to Tyrannosaurus Rex, he hadn’t lost his love of a good rockin’ tune, no matter how much terrible poetry he was happy to read out, and it’s not hard to see why he loved it then and why he was prepared to go to such lengths to try and track it down.
As for Mickey Lee Lane, he would go on to release one more single after Tutti Frutti, before devoting his time to writing, performing and production work. On the strength of what I’ve heard so far, I’d be tempted to go to Discogs and pick-up a copy of a 1995 compilation of his recordings called Rockin’ On… Lane died in 2011, but more information about his life and career can be found in this Tony Wilkinson article from 2005.
Video courtesy of RoverTCB
All lyrics are copyright of Mickey Lee Lane.
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