This is a webpage about songwriting. The idea is to pass along some good writing tips & philosophy to folks who like pre psychedelic era rock'n'roll & its various kindred spirit styles (r&b, skiffle, rockabilly, doo-wop, teen sound, girl group, surf, instrumental, vocal surf & hot rod, beat music, beat group era r&b, Chicago soul, folk rock, garage, etc.). You'll find loads of quotes here, usually from famous people who have the right idea and a few good songs to show for it. The quotes are meant to pass along some secrets lost and/or deemed passe and unimportant basically since the psychedelic scene took over.

Rock'n'roll & teen oriented music, if properly done, inspires people to play and/or sing rock'n'roll & teen oriented music, and some folks even write a few original songs. There have been a few rock'n'roll explosions over years & these events have produced plenty of great songs by people and groups who never became popular or famous. That's the true nature of it. Once folks get the bug they sort of spread it around, usually by imitating their heroes. But these days it's hard to catch the bug in an era when nobody seems to have the bug. Hopefully the following quotes will help some people come up with some cool songs.

Some comments will be from me. You can tell them by the white type & lack of quotation marks. Hope they seem informed & are helpful. But enough of this waste of space...

Face it folks, most songwriters haven't a clue...

"The whole songwriting process is very, very mysterious. Most songwriters don't know how it works..."
-Nick Lowe

But acts like Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Buddy Holly, and the early Ramones made one good song after another, and consistently great albums. They were well grounded in their basic songwriting forms and this produced great results.

Hopefully, some of what follows will help folks come up with some solid sides. It's time to get inspired and write some good songs for a change!!!

"So I would just sit there and start to riff, and Jerry (Lieber) would start singing a line, and sometimes the line matched the notes I was playing, and sometimes the line didn't. Sometimes he'd want me to change the music to match the words, and sometimes I'd want him to change the words to match the music. Often we'd fight. Fighting was part of the creative process....But after pushing and pulling, we'd usually wind up with something that surprised and delighted us both: a good song."
-Mike Stoller

"I went into the songwriting aspect of it with gusto. I worked off youthful energy and my head was full of needs to get a bad childhood off my chest. I proceeded to do this by sittin' at my piano and poundin' out chords and rhythms. I was getting the knack of writing melodies. A melody goes in little rhythms, because nobody has the attention span to create a whole melody at once. This is why I got a couple of notes at a time. Once in a while, you get lucky and write, let's say, 10 notes at once. Part of that is luck. The key to writing a song is patience and 'stick-to-it-iveness.'"
-Brian Wilson

"If Mike (Stoller) had clung to his bebop bias, that might have been a problem. But the blues broke him down and the blues freed him up. For all his love of that high-minded technically complex jazz, Mike's heart was in the blues....Blues was the bottom line. The blues was our bond--from that day forward. The blues became the basis of a lifetime of work."
-Jerry Lieber

"Bebop is serious music, a beautiful music, and although I would never be a great bop pianist, that was the form that I considered the highest art. At the same time, I recognized that, for all its complexity, the foundation of bop--in fact, the foundation of all jazz--is the blues. At first, writing a three-minute blues seemed like a simple task. But I saw that blues composition had its subtleties, and, as Jerry (Lieber) and I started working together, those subtleties interested me more and more."
-Mike Stoller

"...R&B can hardly be considered a form of jazz. It is not based on improvisation, as is the latter. The impact is, and can only be, emotional. It would be ludicrous if the same type of pseudo-intellectual snobbery that one unfortunately finds contaminating the jazz scene were to be applied to anything as basic and vital as R&B. It must be apparent that R&R has a far greater affinity for R&B than the latter has for jazz, insofar as rock is a direct corruption of R&B, whereas jazz is Negro music on a different plane, intellectually higher, though emotionally less intense."
-Brian Jones, founder of the Rollin' Stones, in a letter to Jazz News.

Let's correct a common misconception at this point. Great rock'n'roll is often described as "simple," even by some of the folks who wrote it in the first place. Using the term "simple" typically comes across as a put-down. The implication is that other forms of music are "smarter," more complicated, and more adult (as if the purpose of music was to be some grand mature intellectual exercise rather than a means to having a good time). Perhaps instead of describing the music as "simple" we should refer to it as unpretentious.

Great rock'n'roll isn't "simple," it's "direct." Great teen sound music & rock'n'roll lacks excess. If it were really simple then there would be a lot of it around these days, but this isn't the case. Even diehard fans of great music find it hard to compositionally match the quality of those "simple" tunes.

"...And I'll listen, just before I record, to a few albums to see what people are doing, if they improved any or if anything has happened. And nothing's really happened. There's a lot of great guitarists and musicians around, but nothing's happening. I mean I don't like the Blood, Sweat and Tears shit--I think all that is bullshit. Rock & roll is doing like jazz, as far as I can see. And the bullshitters are going off into that excellentness, which I never believed in. I consider myself in the avant garde of rock & roll..."
-John Lennon from December 1970.

"...But "Tutti Frutti" or "Long Tall Sally" is pretty avant garde. I met an old avant-garde friend of Yoko's in the Village the other day who was talking about "one note," and "didn't Dylan sing one note?"--like he's just discovered that. That's about as far out as you can get. Intellectually I can play games enough to [devise] reasons why that music is very important and always will be. Like the blues as opposed to jazz--white middle-class good jazz as opposed to the blues. Blues is better."
-John Lennon

"It (blues) is a chair, not a design for a chair or a better chair or a bigger chair or a chair with leather or a design. It is the first chair, it's chairs for sitting on, not chairs for looking at or being appreciated. You sit on that music....And so "Please Please Me" and "From Me to You" and all those were our version of the chair. We were building our own chairs, that's all, and they were sort of local chairs. I don't know."
-John Lennon

"We'd say, 'We like it, man; it's bluesy.'"
-Paul McCartney

"Most of my songs, the sheet music is always incorrect if I ever get anybody to play me the notes on it. They always, never, there seem to be some notes, I don't understand it but, some notes like minor notes against major. I'm always singing minor notes against a major chord. I think it's bluesy but it turns out it isn't. It's a mistake, they keep telling me, so they never write it like that, they always write a major note."
-John Lennon

"Once, when George Martin was figuring out what a particular note was in 'A Hard Day's Night' (not for one of our arrangements; this was later, when he was writing out our songs to record them himself, orchestrally), I remember his saying to John: 'It's been a hard day's night and I've been working... Is that a 7th, or another note, or is it somewhere in-between?' John would say, 'It's between those two.' And George would have to put down 'blue note' or something."
-Paul McCartney

"John listened to it ('Yesterday'), and there's a particular bit where the cello moves into a bluesy note which he thought was terrific..."
-George Martin

"It ('From Me To You') was far bluesier when we wrote it..."
-John Lennon

"I was constantly making up music; playing mouth organs, accordions, piano, anything I could lay my hands on as a kid. I sang and imitated others. But the real Pied Piper was rock'n'roll. When I heard it I dropped everything else."
-John Lennon

"We wrote songs together. I wrote them down in an exercise book...It was just the lyrics and indications of the chords. We would have to remember the melodies, with indications of the 'oh's that would be the back-up vocals; I had no way of writing them down."
-Paul McCartney

"Many times the starting point of a (Beatles) song is a basic piece of rhythm; then words are fitted to it so that the rhythm, which originally consisted of only three or four notes, can be gone over and over and developed, either in the head or on piano."
-Hunter Davies, Beatles biographer

The above quote was chosen because it is interesting to think that Beatles' songs begin with "a basic piece of rhythm."

"In fact, at one time there were only three of us in the band, and we were all guitarists--George, John and me. We were playing here and there, around Liverpool, and after a while everyone else had dwindled away to get jobs, go to college, whatever. We would show up for gigs just with three guitars, and the person booking us would ask, 'Where's the drums, then?' To cover this eventuality we would say, 'The rhythm's in the guitars,' stand there, smile a lot, bluff it out. There was not a lot you could say to that, and we'd make them very rhythmic to prove our point."
-Paul McCartney

"As far as I know, that was the first electric piano on record that I ever heard. 'What'd I Say' seemed to be the start of all the guitar-lick records. None of us had electric pianos so we did it on guitar to try and get that low sound. Before that, everything was mainly licks like on Little Richard records, like 'Lucille' where the sax section and the guitar played it. 'What'd I Say' started a whole new ball game which is still going now."
-John Lennon

"If you play "Blue Suede Shoes" 2,000 times, you have got to find ways to do it differently and this is when innovation happens--you put in sevenths, and ninths and elevenths. That is what Hamburg can do for you--you become something else, but I believe it is the only way is to become spontaneous."
-Tony Sheridan

'"Come on Little Mama," by Ray Harris, is a typical rockabilly song for its time. It was recorded in June 1956, the year of the rockabilly gold rush. The description of this song could serve for hundreds of other contemporary songs. Over electric guitar, acoustic guitar, acoustic bass, and drums, the lone vocalist, of fairly limited abilities, sings enthusiastically within a small range and in a raspy voice. Hw wrote the song with his guitar-playing friend; it's about "rockin'," and it uses a standard twelve-bar blues progression played nine times. The electric guitar solos through the third and sixth time. A stop time rhythm figure (accent on the first beat of the measure followed by an empty space) is used in the first four bars in five of the seven verses. When this rhythm is used, it is followed by a refrain that begins in bar 5: "come on, come on, come on little baby, everybody rockin' tonight."'
-Craig Morrison, from his book Go Cat Go!

During the mid sixties garage bands rose up throughout the world. It was the beat group era, so for established groups it became a matter of changing styles to fit the times. Some groups started from scratch, while others combined a variety of levels of musical experience.

This style of music was thought to be "kid's stuff" and sure enough many young kids were forming groups. Their music was performed in front of other kids who would dance to the rockin' sounds they made.

Some of these line-ups actually made a record or two and these 45s are often killer diller great!

To my great disappointment I found that the compositional quality of these songs was impossible to match, both for me as well as many of the "sixties revival" groups from the mid eighties. What did a 14 year old kid have in 1966 (besides talent) that I, we, didn't have in 1986? Here are some of possible reasons that I just made up...

One reason was that the beat era gave folks great styles to emulate. Another was that some of the styles were relatively easy for beginners to perform. The garage band form itself with its typically featured instrumental line-ups were both full sounding yet not excessive. Original songs would have to be performed to a crowd that typically expected to dance. And the lack of musical experience led to inventive musical solutions that sounded great & interesting largely because they weren't what everyone else was playing.

But the best explanation may be that the basic garage band form (along with the above) naturally works well. The kid who knows only chords forms exciting progressions, the singer sings a vocal over this, the bassist provides an interesting bottom boom, the drummer keeps it steady but interesting, the organist (if you have one) adds interesting riffs, rhythms, chords, and that combo organ sound, and the lead guitarist blasts out an exciting break. This obviously is a gross generalization but the point is that all of this stuff works together to make great music.

The early Beatles were a group often in need of filling out their line-up. At times they needed a bassist and at other times they needed a drummer. When they finally had The Shadows' two guitars, bass, and drums line-up they were a complete unit that needed nothing else. The Shadows backed Cliff Richard and formed essentially what eventually became The Rolling Stones' line-up of vocalist, two guitars, bass, and drums (though one may argue that The Rolling Stones also included Ian Stewart on piano). The point here is that the basic group line-ups lack excess.

"The focus on Hamburg as a music centre was that it was one of those constellations of the right time, the right people, the right situation. The nearest German word for it is Zufall - which means literally 'to fall into one'. We don't have a precise word for it, but that's how it happened as far as I'm concerned: the pieces fell into place"
-Tony Sheridan

Maybe it was just a matter of luck.

Interview with Ellie Greenwich.

How To Write A Hit Song by Ellie Greenwich.

"I was getting paid--which I thought I was privileged to--to learn a craft. That's how things were in those days. They didn't think (song) writers could come out of anywhere. What they thought you had to do was start a school for them..."
-P.F. Sloan

"We (Sloan and Barri) spent two years straight working together. We wrote hundreds of songs. We were the Goffin and King of the West Coast follow-ups. We'd be given a list on Monday morning by Lou Adler with 30 names on it of the groups who needed follow-ups to their hits. We were in the studio for five hours every day, just me and him doing demos....The record companies wanted the follow-up to sound exactly like the hit. It had to be virtually the same song, but set in a different way; the same changes even, because they were looking for a follow-up, not a new direction. So we were limited in that direction. So we wrote hundreds and hundreds of songs, and none of them were recorded. Not a one."
-P.F. Sloan

"He (John Lennon) said, 'The Beatles were based on one idea -- to improve our record collection. We would take favorite records and then make better versions of them. We stopped being a group when we stopped trying to improve on records we liked.'"
-Kim Fowley

'"Woody (Guthrie) had told him (Bob Dylan), "Just write. Don't worry where the tune comes from. I just pick up tunes I heard before and change them around and make them mine. Put in a couple of fast notes for one slow one, sing a harmony note 'stead of melody, or a low note for a high one, or juggle the rests and pauses--and you got a melody of your own. I do it all the time."'
-from the book DYLAN by Anthony Scaduto

"Tucked away in a little cubicle at the Screen Gems offices, Sloan would play the guitar and (Steve) Barri would accompany him on the ukulele. Someone would hum a melody and, if there was any eye contact, a discussion about lyrics would ensue. If not, then a new melody was exorcised. Once a melody was accepted for further enhancement, the lyrical content would then essentially be formulated....Everything was constantly open to change. If lyrics did not fit, they were modified. If the title was not mutually satisfying, it was left for a later date....In some cases, various melodies would all be worked into one song."
-Steven J. McParland from his book P.F. Travelling Barefoot On A Rocky Road.

"Steve (Barri) always said, 'I can't play an instrument, but I can play the ukulele,' and he knew two chords. So all of his songs would have two chords in them. I would take the two chords and say, 'How about if we through three chords in between your G and D. How about it if we put in a B minor and an E minor and an A minor and a C? It was very difficult at that time, because I was so overloaded with inspiration. And if one line didn't work, I would find one line that did. I would work 18, 20 hours, if that's what it took to ring off some electrical charge in him. So we would go, 'That's it! That's the formula minus the formula plus creativity plus inspiration plus magic. That's it!'"
-P.F. Sloan

Brian Wilson once pointed out that the harmonies to "Surfer Girl" carry on "unconsciously" in the mind of the listener. What is implied here is that we are consciously attracted to the melody while the unconscious harmony works its magic. It's as if music mirrors our conscious/unconscious selves in a way that other art cannot.

"There's a lot of songs giving juice and it's really incredible to find out what it is that's the juice giver. It's a chord sometimes. It's the offbeat chord change. It's like there are three principles to a song. There's the fantastic inspirational lyric that can take you over even if the music is nothing. There is something that is so musically divine that that takes you over; and then there's something with either the vocalist or instrumental artist that is so divinely inspired that that takes you over. Then is you put all those three together, you have something that has the juice that is going to last for a hundred years. I guess the blues did that and the juice is still going. So that's what I found myself running on."
-P.F. Sloan

I think that some of "the juice" that P.F. Sloan refers to in the previous quote is provided by an uptempo vocal. One can find this type of vocal in r&b songs, doo-wop, rockabilly, and skiffle styles which would seem to make it a hallmark of rock'n'roll styles.

"...they're listening to your voice slappin' a lot of words together, and you can run 'em together, you can do most anything you want with it, long as you've got that hard driving beat."
-Malcolm Yelvington, quoted in Go Cat Go!

"'Man, it took me all night to figure out how to say: "Bo-Didd'ley-bought-his-babe a-di'mond-ring", because that's where it got tricky! At first, I was sayin': "Bo Diddley, he bought his baby...", you know, an' that just didn't fit. Took all damn night before I finally stumbled upon it."
-Bo Diddley

"We were just middle class kids from the suburbs (Forest Hills). We always liked Rock'n'Roll. We were always listening to music. I liked early rock, guys like Little Richard, Elvis, Bill Haley, Buddy Holly, the early Beatles. The early Beatles were great you know when they had leather jackets and were playing stuff like Roll Over Beethoven. An' we wanted to be a rock group like the Beatles cause rock'n'roll was always the thing with us. People are always saying we're punk. We're no more punk than old Presley or Beatles were."
-Johnny Ramone

I have to admit that over the last 35 years or so I've been trying to write songs but haven't been able to figure out how to do it and why all my stuff sounds like crap. I'd read all this stuff about great rock'n'roll songs being so simple & basic & primitive but couldn't come up with anything nearly as good. Usually all that materialized were little bits & pieces of songs and they weren't all that hot.

A lot of my failure has to do with Neil Sedaka. You see, Neil was on the TV many years ago and he explained that he wrote music by coming up with a nice chord progression and then singing a melody over it. Actually NOW I realize that he had something to a degree, but at the time I sure didn't want to sound like Neil Sedaka. My conscious choice to rebel & come up with melody first & then chords sort of led me to decades of frustration.

What Neil was sort of saying is that there are some basic chord forms which sound great in sequence (P.F. Sloan referred to these as "the changes"). Using these chord forms and sequential patterns gives one's music constructive structure and musical logic. I'd like to add that a chord progression benefits by having a definite distinctive rhythm, it has to swing, it needs a groove. So while the progression needs to make sense musically for your noggin to get it, it also needs to make sense rhythmically for your body to get it as well.

If you think of Doo-Wop often just a few basic chord patterns come to mind. This style is relatively easy to parody because of this. And yet, even though there were just a few structural chordal variations this still enabled a musical genre with a rich vibrant deep catalog of great songs. How is this possible with such little variation of patterns? One reason may be that there are loads of ways to put these chords together vocally, especially when one considers the infinite variations of meter and rhythm.

The other great variant in Doo-Wop is the main melody which may be somewhat limited by the number of notes possible but is unlimited in the timing of the delivery of those notes. It is as if 3 or 4 chord music actually promotes the creation of exciting melodies and rhythms out of creative necessity. The same could be said of other basic musical forms such as Skiffle and Rhythm & Blues.

You can even do your vocal bits in pure rhythms (the Dave Clark Five did this well).

You can start with melody and then add the chord changes or you can put your distinctive melody or vocal part over a chord progression. If one method isn't working...try the other.

One idea I completely missed in my 35 years of songwriting futility was to write melody in complete musical sentences. This gives melody structure in much the same way that chord changes ad harmonic structure.

Sometimes melody sounds cool without harmony and sometimes it's best to sing nothing at all & let the chords do the talking. You can even alternate the two and try different combinations.

Think of "Twist And Shout" or "Louie Louie" (the Kingsmen's version). Both songs pretty much have a nice rhythmic groove to their backing chords and then pretty obviously have vocals added against that swinging musical background. The vocals don't necessarily follow the backing and sometimes the vocal parts vary while the backing stays the same. The vocals also seem to have a bluesy quality to them (and the chords are pretty standard blues stuff as well).

"Twist And Shout" also has that great exciting moment when the song stays on the same chord while the vocals build harmony. By introducing another rhythm to the backing chord structure the song adds a new exciting dimension.

Songs like "Jailhouse Rock" or "Blue Suede Shoes" are three chord songs with catchy beginnings that appear to be written "melody first." Later on the song's melodies seem to follow standard Blues chord changes. The start and stop rhythms at the start of, and during, both songs make things real exciting.

Some folks might say that rhythm in music works because after all we all have a heart that beats & so we naturally dig rhythm. But to be honest with you; constant rhythms suck big time. Drum machines, techno beats & all that are as boring as it gets. Music, if done properly, doesn't even need drums because the rhythms are advanced by the instruments and vocals. If you want a "natural" heartbeat type of analogy, think of when you fall in love and the other person dumps you, or think of when you meet a person and hit it off and things get interesting. Your heart is beating all over the place. Real emotion isn't one rate of rhythm(that's sleeping!), it's all over the place. It's lots of different rhythms messing with your body & mind and you're not sure what's coming next.

So my advice to get some exciting music is to vary the rhythms of your chord changes and vocal parts and make sure everything makes musical sense (keep the stuff that sounds good, chuck the crap).

It's important to keep things moving by trying to have at least two things going on at all times. A melody against a chord that just sits there and does nothing isn't going to excite anybody. Put some movement into the chord by giving it a rhythm, or maybe add in a few more chords instead of the one, or maybe play an additional riff over the chord to add dynamics.

When you write music it should be exciting even if it's a slow song. Real good music is exciting.

"We all write songs. Sometimes together, sometimes separately. The thing that's important is knowing what's good and what's bad. A lot of times we write a small bit that sounds good but it goes nowhere. So maybe we put it aside and later something comes up that works nice with it. The big thing is to know what's good an' what's bad."
-Johnny Ramone

"We started to write songs...Joey has a one-string guitar that he uses to write songs. At first, it was hard for me to tell when his chords were minor or major. Sometimes it gets pretty confusing, but now I can pretty much tell."
-Johnny Ramone

Ramones' songs often use chord changes by themselves almost as a melodic device. The varied tempos of the chord changes adds interesting structure & excitement to the songs.

Many people have picked up on the seemingly obvious: Ramones' songs are loud, fast, and short. Perhaps folks aren't considering songs like "Babysitter," "Ramona," and "I Want You Around." These songs defy the aforementioned "punk ethos" and much of their magic lies in their slower timed subtle changes. But even up-tempo Ramones' songs like "Now I Wanna Be A Good Boy" let the songs breath with drum beat spacings, measured metered chord changes, and even some dead spots. In essence, the songwriting is what makes these songs great. They're not loud, fast, and short, they're direct, carefully timed, and lack excess.

"I'd come up with one guitar riff, or a rhythm in my head, and then come up with a three or four chord combination that felt like something--and then find another part to complement. I would also try my best to get off the rhythm of the first part into a different rhythm on the second part."
-Johnny Ramone

Many people seem to think that great music is delivered in pristine fashion. They think good music is when everything is presented flawlessly, like a drum machine. But this sterile musical delivery method seems to rob the listener of the unexpected, chance, and uniqueness. It robs the listener of the reality-of-the-moment realness.

Did you ever notice how when a song has a bum note or a one of a kind vocal ad lib you remember it? Ever catch a song's rhythm going out of sync, or an instrument being out of tune? Ever notice recording levels being uneven? These are things that we're drawn to and they make for an interesting listening experience. So, if we are naturally attracted to the anomalies, why do people strive to eliminate them?

Let's face it, some mistakes and ad libs can ruin a performance. But, on the other hand, if a performance feels right and sounds great...then leaving in the odd stuff can add to the song's appeal.

"I'm an entertainer. The only time I ever say I'm a musician is when you have to fill out forms, when they ask you what your job is. I write down musician, but I'm never comfortable with it."
-Johnny Ramone

"A lot of kids bought guitars and started playing rock'n'roll because of us."
-Johnny Ramone

"Some guys play with real mellow tones that I could never do. I'm not what you call a guitarist; I'm a showman, an' I'm not downin' myself when I say that. There is a difference: the cats that do all that pretty finger-work, now they are guitarists. I could never do that: my fingers are too slow... but my hands are fast, y'understand?...My fingers are more educated now, but I didn't used to do no finger-work. I was all rhythm. I could drive you outta your tree with chords, you know, an' that fast wrist-work. This is the key to me, right here."
-Bo Diddley

"Then, guitars started sellin' like mad because kids wanted to play like Bo Diddley"
-Bo Diddley

Updated 9-2-2010.
william.tobelman@snet.net