The Music of Johnny Rivers

By Robert Reynolds

Johnny Rivers seemingly became an "overnight" success when music lovers discovered his popular shows His rise to fame resulted in a #2 hit with "Memphis. Many more followed, including his #1, "Poor Side of Town" and #3 "Secret Agent Man".The Music of Johnny Rivers tells the story of how young John Ramistella of Baton Rouge, Louisiana pursued his dream to follow in the footsteps of Fats Domino and Elvis Presley and make a career in music. But, success did not come easy, nor did it come quickly. A name change by legendary disc jockey Alan Freed began Johnny's journey to stardom. Not simply an entertainer, Rivers sang, wrote and produced hit records, and formed his own record company. He traveled to Vietnam to entertain the troops and he won a Grammy for producing a 5th Dimension #1 hit. Among Johnny's other major hits are: "Mountain of Love", "Rockin' Pneumonia", "Slow Dancin'", "Baby I Need Your Lovin'. RIvers placed 17 records in the Top 40, and sixteen LPs in the top album charts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Nov 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9781365550942

Robert Reynolds

Based in Calgary, Robert is an emerging author who spends his days working in the oil and gas industry but has been a big fan of the spy thriller genre ever since his childhood when he read one of his grandfather's original James Bond paperbacks from the late 50's. He is married with a young daughter and when he's not day dreaming about dangerous adventures in exotic locales he enjoys running and other outdoor pursuits.

Book preview

The Music of Johnny Rivers

THE MUSIC OF JOHNNY RIVERS

Robert Reynolds

Copyright:  2016 

Contents

INTRODUCTION

Success didn’t come easily or swiftly for southern transplant John Ramistella.  Over several years until he hit the big time, he recorded for at least eight different record companies, most of which were small-time players in the music industry.  In fact, his fame didn’t begin with his records as much as it did with him thrashing out rousing dance beats in a Los Angeles discotheque called the Whiskey à Go Go—under the name Johnny Rivers.

Celebrities and music lovers flocked to the club in droves. 

Signed by Imperial Records, home of early R&R recording giants Fats Domino and Ricky Nelson, Rivers’ new live dance/rhythm records shot up the charts during the mid-60s.

He’d continue to roll out hit after hit, first with a series of energetic live recordings, then R&B tunes, a folk standard, a self-composed smash #1, some Motown covers and hits from a stable of first-rate songwriters that he’d discovered.  One of them would go on to pen countless top hit tunes for a variety of other singers. 

A master song interpreter, Johnny Rivers constantly reinvented himself musically.

His career thrived through the sixties and seventies as his records continued to make regular visits to the record charts.  He achieved a #1, #2, two #3s and nine more singles at various reaches within the Top 25.  Seventeen albums registered on the Top LP charts, one of them topping out at a lofty #5.  In the eighties, he released a pair of Christian/gospel albums and the nineties and on saw a return to contemporary albums more in line with his rock and roll roots.

Johnny Rivers was no one-hit wonder, nor was he limited to simply strumming his guitar and belting out rocking tunes from an earlier era.  Rivers sang hits, wrote hits, produced hits, started his own hit producing record company, co-founded the Monterey Pop Festival and continues today to perform before large audiences and to support various charitable organizations.

This is how it happened.

1

RAMISTELLA

John Henry Ramistella was born in New York City on a crisp autumn day, November 7, 1942.  Thousands of miles east, Allied forces were invading North Africa in opposition to Nazi aggression. Halfway around the world to the west, Australian and Japanese forces clashed fiercely along Papua, New Guinea’s Kokoda Trail.  It was an ominous time for someone so innocent to come into this unpredictable world.

WWII would rage for two more years, but the world’s enemies would soon be halted and defeated.  By the middle of 1945 Germany and Japan surrendered and those who’d been fighting returned home and melded back into the workforce.  There were more workers returning home than there was work. 

At the age of five, and with the elder John Ramistella out of work, little Johnny’s Italian/American parents packed up the family and moved 1,300 miles southwest to Baton Rouge—Louisiana’s capitol, itself some 81-miles northwest of New Orleans, the Big Easy.  Each mile of tired pavement took them farther from the snow and ice of East Coast winters and carried them further into the Deep South—a land of Cypress knees, Spanish moss and scented magnolia blossoms.

Quaint old plantations from an earlier period sprouted up along slumbering bayous, where gators lounged in the sunlight on the muddy banks.  Narrow bridges that seemed to have been spawned in Tennessee Williams plays spanned the Mississippi, as the mother of all American rivers slid slowly through silt-rich delta country.  Below the roadways, cargo laden barges labored their way upstream in the greenish-brown waters toward Memphis and St. Louis, Hayti and Cape Girardeau. A forlorn horn echoed along the river and then they were across the bridge and angling southward, mile after humid mile. Then out of the delta mist appeared the outskirts of the river town.

At the time of their arrival roughly 40,000 inhabited Baton Rouge, a far cry from the millions of impatient citizenry crowding the sidewalks of NYC.  It was quite a change for the Italian Ramistellas coming from the Northeast seaboard and the hustle and bustle of one of the world’s largest cities to the laidback semi tropical small town Baton Rouge. 

The city, they say, was christened as such more than 300-years before by French explorer Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville, upon spotting a reddish cypress pole adorned with bloody fish and animal remains atop a Mississippi River bluff—bâton meaning stick, rouge meaning red. This bloody warning served as the primitive boundary between the hunting grounds of the Bayougoula and Houma Tribes.

The land there is basically flat delta country with the lazy Mississippi curling back upon itself like an old cottonmouth that’s been run over by a Gulf Coast oil truck.  Oxbows and mosquitoes are abundant on this flat as a flapjack retched piece of soil. Snake infested swamps and stagnant bayous. Hanging moss and rundown Confederate estates.

Towns like Plaquemine, Atchafalaya, Gross Tete, Ponchatoula and Slaughter were but a short drive away through the swamps and marshes.  Depending on which way a person went, you could find Bayou Goula, Maurepas, French Settlement, Dutch Town, Thibodaux, and Shexnayder. 

No major metropolitan area other than New Orleans was further south than Baton Rouge until you got to Florida—not even Mobile was farther south.  To claim that Baton Rouge resided in the Deep South was a major understatement. 

***

Five-year old Johnny Ramistella’s uncle headed the Louisiana State University Art Department and his connections led to little Johnny’s father getting work painting houses. There was plenty of hard work to keep an honest man busy, as new paint didn’t have a prolonged life in that damp, humid place along the lazy, muddy Mississippi.  

More familiar with the speech of Italianos, Puerto Ricans and Irish, the Ramistella kid would come to find that folks down that way dabbled in a little Cajun, a smattering of French, a dash of Creole, with some Anglish tossed in for good measure. It seemed that southern folks jawed away with lazy drawls like they were about to fall asleep.

Nor was he clear on their culinary choices.  These southern folks dined on mudbugs (crawfish, crawdads), chitliins, etoufee, cornbread, jambalaya, hush-puppies, beignets smothered in powdered sugar and washed it down with an ice-cold bottle of Dixie Cola.  Times were slow and gentle there.

At the edge of town, smoky locomotives chugged through dense forests as lonesome whistles moaned across watery bayous and boggy marshland.There in the warmth of day, hardworking John Ramistella Sr. made long sweeping strokes with his paintbrush, taking care of the family’s needs.

On those lazy, sweltering Baton Rouge days shirtless, barefoot lads might lay back in the tall grass with a Moonpie and RC Cola, listening to steel wheels rumble along rusty tracks, while dreaming of taking a Sentimental Journey on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. The boys sipped their Royal Crowns and dreamed of riding those rails.  Clack, clack, clack… 

Johnny would later remark about this time of uncertainty in his young life as, we weren’t poor, we were double poor.[1]

***

The 1940s was a magical era with console radios blaring in most every living room—it was called the Golden Age of Radio, in fact—bringing into the nation’s households static-laden news of the day; vivid play-by-play athletic broadcasts described so precisely that you felt as if you were at the ballpark; hilarious situation comedies such as Fibber McGee and Molly, The Burns and Allen Show, The Great Gildersleeve, Amos and Andy, and Blondie; thrilling drama and mystery theaters with ensemble casts, like The Whistler, Lights Out, The Green Hornet, Dick Tracy, and Inner Sanctum; and a variety of extremely popular live entertainment shows like the Arthur Godfrey Show, Don McNeil’s Breakfast Club and Houseparty.  Even small fry had their shows:  Big John and Sparky, Junior G-Men, Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders, the Cisco Kid, Space Patrol, Clyde Beatty, The Howdy Doody Show—and on Sunday mornings, a child could follow along in the newspaper as a narrator read the Sunday Funnies over the air.  Certain console models even had a self-contained 78-RPM phonograph so families could play their favorite records anytime they