Episode ninety of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Runaway" by Del Shannon, and at the early use of synthesised sound in rock music. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.

Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Blue Moon" by the Marcels.

Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/



A note

Almost every version of “Runaway” currently available is in stereo, and the stereo version of the song has a slightly different vocal take to the original mono version. Unfortunately, there appear to be multiple “original mono versions” too. To check that what I'm using here, a mono track available as a bonus on a reissue of the album Runaway With Del Shannon, is actually the hit single version, I downloaded two vinyl rips of the single and one vinyl rip of a mono hits compilation from the sixties that had been uploaded to YouTube. Unfortunately no two copies of the song I could find online would play in synch – they all appear to be mastered at slightly different speeds, possibly due to the varispeeding I talk about in the episode. I've gone with the version I did because it's a clean-sounding mono version, but it may not be exactly what people heard in 1961.

Resources

As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This one is in two parts because of the number of songs by Del Shannon in the mix. Part one, part two.

Only one biography of Del Shannon has ever been written, and that's out of print and (to judge from the Amazon reviews) not very well written, so I've relied again on other sources. Those include the liner notes to this CD, a good selection of Shannon's work (with the proviso that "Runaway" is in stereo -- see above; the articles on Shannon and Max Crook on This Is My Story, the official Del Shannon website,  and the Internet Archive's cached copy of Max Crook's old website.

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Transcript

Today's episode is an odd one to write, as just as I put the finishing touches to the script I discovered that Max Crook, the keyboard player at the centre of this story, died less than two weeks ago. The news wasn't widely reported, and I only discovered this by double-checking a detail and discovering an obituary of him. Crook was one of the great early pioneers of electronic music, and a massive talent, and he's a big part of the story I'm telling today, so before we go into the story proper I just wanted to take a moment to acknowledge his passing, and to regret that it hasn't been more widely noted.

One of the things we've not talked about much in this podcast so far is the technology of music. We've discussed it a bit -- we've looked at how things like the change from 78s to 45s affected the music industry, at the transition from recording on discs to recording on tape, at the electrification of the guitar, and at Les Paul's inventions. But in general, the music we've looked at has been made in a fairly straightforward manner -- some people with some combination of guitars, bass, piano, drums, and saxophone, and maybe a few string players on the most recent recordings, get together in front of a microphone and sing and play those instruments.

But today, we're going to look at the start of synthesisers being used in rock and roll music. Today we're going to look at "Runaway" by Del Shannon:

[Excerpt: Del Shannon, "Runaway"]

Synthesised sound has a far longer pedigree than you might expect. The use of electronics to create music goes back to the invention of the theremin and the ondes martenot in the 1920s, and by the 1930s, people had already started using polyphonic keyboard-based ele