Billy Lee Riley à Go Go

From “Flying Saucers Rock ’n’ Roll” to the Whiskey

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Tell It Like It Was

12 min readJan 27, 2019

Photo courtesy of cocoparisienne for Pixabay

IN THE COURSE of a very long career, Billy Lee Riley tried his hand at rockabilly, country, novelty records, blues, anything the traffic would bear, under a slew of different names, as a singer, as a guitarist, as a harmonica player, for any label that would have him and several labels of his own invention. After a tough break at Sun Records in the 1950s, he never managed to make the national charts. These days he’s little known except to record collectors. Yet he left behind one terrific album, In Action!!!!, released in October 1966 on GNP Crescendo and still available on YouTube and Amazon today.

In Action!!!! is go-go music — not the hip-hop go-go music of Washington DC in the 1970s, but a highly specific subgenre of rock & roll that came from the Sunset Strip in LA in the mid-’60s. In fact, it’s so specific that I only know of three practitioners who played it at a national level.

Trini Lopez

TRINI LOPEZ APPEARS to have originated the formula back in the late ’50s or very early ’60s. By 1962 he was touring the world with Dave Shriver on bass and Mickey Jones on drums. He landed at a pub in Beverly Hills called Ye Little Club and then jumped from there to PJ’s on Sunset Strip, where he packed the joint. At some point, Shriver dropped out and Lopez played with just a drummer; eventually Dick Brant joined on bass, and that was the lineup that recorded Trini Lopez at PJ’s, his breakout album, in 1963.

What the album does is convey a palpable excitement. The audience is high in the mix, clapping and singing along, shouting encouragement.

“The thing I did different,” Lopez says, “was to put my own spin on those songs, and that I give myself credit for. I not only made those songs listenable, but I made them danceable too. Making songs danceable helped me a lot.” [Shasho]

In another interview he says, “Folk music was really in; I liked the melodies, I liked the lyrics. But again, I didn’t do ’em the way they were being written. I did ’em my way. I changed them around for my own satisfaction, my feeling of the songs, and my beat. . . . The only thing I didn’t change was the lyrics. But I changed the music completely. Everybody calls it the Trini Beat. They were dancing to my songs all over the world at discotheques.” [Unterberger1]

Lopez also created the template for the live “à go-go” recordings. “We recorded like two nights, three nights, and took the best of everything. There weren’t that many microphones. One for me, for my voice; one for my guitar, for my amp. A couple for the drums, and one for the bass. And just one or two for the audience. I was sitting behind a piano on a stool, and the people were all around me. . . . they didn’t even mike the people that much. But you can still hear ’em pretty good.” [Unterberger1]

When told that Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane cited Lopez’s combination of electric instruments and folk songs as an inspiration for deciding to play folk-rock, Trini responds, “The reason he probably said that is because I did start that out. I was doing it in ’61, ’62, until I recorded. Nobody was doing it in 1962. So I was right there at the beginning of that. That’s a nice compliment.” [Unterberger2]

Here’s “La Bamba” from Trini Lopez at PJ’s.

Johnny Rivers

IN THE AUDIENCE at PJ’s was a young Italian-American named John Henry Ramistella, from New York City via Baton Rouge. He was already playing Gazzarri’s nightclub (the one on La Cienega, not the later incarnation on the Strip) under his stage name of Johnny Rivers, as a duo with jazz drummer Eddie Rubin. According to Lopez, “He used to come see me at PJ’s all the time . . . he did ‘La Bamba’ and all those songs. I used to get calls from people: ‘Trini, we got Johnny Rivers trying to do you and we think he is a poor man’s Trini Lopez.’” Lopez, being a gentleman, then softens the blow. “But he’s very talented.” [Unterberger2]

Rivers, unsurprisingly, has a different take. “[W]hen I opened Whisky à Go Go — and prior to that the original Gazzarri’s . . . [n]o one was playing rock ’n’ roll in LA. There was nothing happening. So basically I brought South Louisiana blues and rock ’n’ roll, Chuck Berry rock ’n’ roll, to the Sunset Strip and got the whole thing started. We started a generation called ‘The Go-Go Generation.’” [Kelemen]

Rivers quickly built a big following at Gazzarri’s. “People were lined up down the stairs, we had a doorman, everything. There was another club prior to that which had been the hot spot called PJ’s. Trini Lopez had recorded a live album there. We started cutting into their crowd and business. Elmer Valentine, an owner of PJ’s, came in one night with a group of guys from Chicago. On break, they came up to me and said, ‘Listen, there’s a place up on Sunset called The Party, and it’s not doing well. We have a chance to take it over. If you’re interested, we’ll pay you a lot more than you’re making. We want to call it Whiskey à Go Go.’ I asked what kind of name was that? Well, Valentine had just got back from a vacation in Europe. He said there was a little club, the most popular in Paris, and all they did was play records while people danced. It was a discotheque of the same name. ‘My concept is, if you’ll sign for a year, we’ll let you play three sets a night, 45 minutes each, to keep the dance thing going. And I’d like to have gals — go-go girls — playing records in between.’” [Forbes]

Rivers started his residency at the Whiskey on its opening night, January 15, 1964. Quickly the go-go girls stopped being DJs and started dancing instead. Rivers added Joe Osborn (formerly with Ricky Nelson, later of the Wrecking Crew) on bass. The celebrities flocked — Natalie Wood, Cary Grant, Johnny Carson, Jayne Mansfield, the Beatles. Lou Adler, co-owner of the Whiskey, decided it was time for Rivers to record, and that he would try to capture the lightning of Rivers’ live shows in a vinyl bottle.

Rivers admits the end product was not entirely authentic. “We would take it in and enhance it because back in those days we only had three tracks. We would bring up the Wally Heider remote truck, and we only had two mikes for the band, and one mike that kind of hung over the bandstand to pick up the audience reaction. Well, it didn’t get the audience reaction hardly at all, so we would take a bunch of people in the studio and have them enhance it with handclapping and singing along and all that stuff. It was originally on there, but you could barely hear it.

“That’s where we cut ‘Memphis.’ We took it in the studio and I redid the guitar solo and stuff on it, and that was it. But the basic track was cut live at the Whiskey.” [Goddard]

Here’s a great cut from that first Rivers album, the Roy Hamilton hit “You Can Have Her.”

By the end of ’64, Valentine had turned the Whiskey into a franchise and sent Johnny on the road to open the new clubs. Drummer Eddie Rubin stayed behind, maybe because he didn’t want to travel (Rubin’s story) or maybe because he was not the most punctual of sidemen (Rivers’ story). Rivers replaced him with none other than Mickey Jones, Lopez’s drummer.

With Rivers on the road, there was a Johnny Rivers-sized hole in the Whiskey that Elmer Valentine needed to fill.

Billy Lee Riley

BILL RILEY’S EARLY HISTORY is not that different from Elvis’s. He was born dirt-poor in Pocahontas, Arkansas, in 1933, was a sharecropper as a child and worked and sang alongside his African-American neighbors. He moved to Memphis in 1955 and by 1956 was recording at Sam Phillips’ Sun Records. He had a minor hit with “Flying Saucers Rock & Roll” in early 1957 and followed it up with a cover of Billy “The Kid” Emerson’s “Red Hot” (as in, “your gal ain’t doodley-squat”). Riley and his band, the Little Green Men, had become the house band at Sun by this point, often accompanied by a young piano player from Louisiana named Jerry Lee Lewis.

Phillip’s initial reaction to Lewis had been, according to Riley, “Man, you don’t want no piano player in a Rock-A-Billy band. It don’t work in a Rock-A-Billy band. Man you need guitars, drums, and a bass, but not a piano.” Nonetheless Phillips grudgingly let Lewis record a few sides. [All Riley quotes are from rockabilly.net]

Riley remembers being on the road at the time and calling Alan Freed, who told him that “Red Hot” was starting to break. Freed then offered Riley a slot on a national tour. “But by the time I closed out and got back home, Sam had contacted Alan Freed’s manager and cut a deal with him that got me off the tour and Jerry Lee Lewis put in my place. To rub salt in the wound, a couple of days after I returned to Memphis . . . I noticed that there were three pieces of mail that looked like Western Union Telegrams. . . . Each letter was an order for ten thousand copies of my record ‘Red Hot’ . . . As soon as Sam saw the orders he got on the phone and called each of the distributors and told them that he was not shipping number 277, the number of my record, he was pushing number 281, Jerry Lee Lewis’ ‘Great Balls of Fire.’”

Despite all that, Riley continued to record intermittently with Sun through 1960, then started his own record labels, Rita, Nita, and Mojo. Finally, in 1962 he headed out to Los Angeles to work as a studio musician. His first job was as lead guitarist on “The Lonely Bull” by the Tijuana Brass. After hundreds of sessions, mostly as a harmonica player, for major artists from Dean Martin (“Houston”) to the Beach Boys (the “Help Me Ronda” LP version), he got a shot at a steady gig.

“I knew the bass player in Johnny Rivers’ band,” Riley says, “and Rivers was fixing to go on the road and open some more [Whiskey à Go Go] clubs. The band didn’t want to go with him. Well, [bass player] Joe Osborn went with him, but the drummer [Eddie Rubin] wasn’t going. So Joe said: ‘Why don’t you go down there and audition for Elmer Valentine. I think you can get that job as soon as Johnny leaves. We’ll go down there and audition with you.’ So I said, ‘Fine, man.’ So I auditioned and got the job, and I had to hire a bass man, but the drummer stayed there, and he was pretty much educated on what to do there, so he taught me the ropes. So I started playing there, and heck — the guy really liked me, so I started following Johnny. Johnny would open a club in Atlanta and I’d go in after him, same with New York, San Francisco, New Orleans, everywhere there was a Whiskey à Go Go. He’d open the club, leave, and I’d go in after him. I stayed in that circuit for about a year and a half.”

Mercury Records, clearly hoping to capitalize on the success of the Rivers albums, rushed out Whiskey à Go Go Presents Billy Lee Riley in February of 1965. The sound quality of the album, at least in the form it’s currently available, is poor. The arrangements tend to recycle the “Suzie Q” riff, most shamelessly on the song “Dimples,” which is “Suzie Q” in all but lyrics. Rivers’ formula mixed Chuck Berry, country, blues, R&B, soft rock, and the kitchen sink. On Presents, Riley never strays far from southern blues. He claims that he drew more people into the club than Rivers did, but you can’t tell it from this recording.

By 1966 the Whiskey, along with Sunset Strip and the rest of LA, had changed. The Byrds, the Doors, Love, and Buffalo Springfield were the hot local bands. Riley was gigging around town to little effect when Gene Norman of GNP Crescendo Records showed up.

“He knew me,” Riley says, “he knew about me at Sun, and he knew what was going on over at the Whiskey . . . he came down one night and asked if I was interested in recording. He rented the studio and just set it up like a nightclub, put tables in there. He served drinks to the 25, 30 people he had in there for an audience, and we sat up there just like we did on stage and like a live album. That was the In Action!!! album . . .”

In Action!!!!

FROM THE SET LIST to the sound quality, from the vocals to the audience response, In Action!!!! is in a whole other league from Presents. Opening with Mose Allison’s “Parchment [sic] Farm,” Riley captures the sly grin in Allison’s version without losing his own resonant voice. But it’s with the second song, a radical revision of “Goodnight Irene,” that the album takes off. The song was a waltz when Lead Belly first recorded it and when the Weavers famously covered it, but Riley’s version charges out the gate like “La Bamba,” in raucous 4/4. Riley’s voice is Southern, joyous, unfettered, and perfect.

On Irene’s heels comes the Gordon Lightfoot tune “The Way I Feel,” energized and swinging without losing any of the sadness inherent in the lyrics. The vocal performance is so riveting that you may not notice at first that Riley is playing both rhythm and lead guitar on this “live” album. Next up is the second of three Lightfoot songs on the record, “Rich Man’s Spiritual,” again indebted to “La Bamba,” and enhanced by a Farfisa or Vox Combo organ (as are several of the other tracks). The side wraps up with a rocking version of the Hank Williams hit “Kaw-Liga.”

Side Two opens with the most extreme reworking on the album, in which “St. James Infirmary” collides head-on with the “Suzie Q” riff, and once again Riley makes the blasphemous sound inevitable and even sublime. Richie Unterberger, in an email, described Riley as “gutsier, bluesier, more authentic (if such a thing existed in the go-go genre) than Rivers or Lopez,” and it’s nowhere more apparent than in the timbre of Riley’s voice as he goes high for “When I die/You can bury me . . .”

Riley returns to the “Bamba” chords for Jay and the Americans’ “Come a Little Bit Closer.” Next is a driving version of Lightfoot’s “Early Morning Rain” that is as full of heart as it is of rhythm.

Riley then goes to his old friend Jack Clement for “Guess Things Happen That Way,” a big hit for Johnny Cash in 1958. He channels just enough of Cash’s stoicism to give the song an arid beauty that makes it another standout track. Finally, Riley winds up with an up-tempo “House of the Rising Sun” that owes as much to Jimmy Reed as to the Animals.

The mixture of pop, country, folk, blues, and standards is as eclectic as any Rivers did, the backing musicians (sadly uncredited on the LP jacket) are outstanding throughout, the energy is high and never lets up.

The album failed to chart or get any serious attention. Riley struggled on for a few years and then, in the early ’70s, he gave up and went back to Arkansas to paint houses as his father had done before him.

Coda

RILEY CAME OUT OF RETIREMENT in the ’90s and played wherever he could, preferably blues, but he wasn’t proud. “I’ll work with anybody,” he said in 1996. “I just want to get paid for my work.”

Riley died in 2009.

Why does success find some and not others? Riley was handsome, charismatic, unquestionably talented, as far as I can tell not troubled with drinking or drug problems. He lacked just one thing: luck.

In the words of Jack Clement, “I don’t like it, but I guess things happen that way.”