The man credited with writing (and copyrighting in 1962) Hey Joe is folk singer Billy Roberts who never actually recorded it himself until years after its popularity. Billy was very active on the folk scene circuit for quite a few years so I imagine there are still a lot of people out there who heard him sing it. On the website that lists 1600 recordings, a lady submitted her experience of busking on Paris streets with him and Dino Valenti in the summer of 1960 and he was playing it then.
Hey Joe has a question-answer lyric about a man on the run, to Mexico, after killing his lady. It's a theme that is found in a number of traditional folk songs. In 1953 hillbilly singer Carl Smith had a hit with an uptempo song called Hey Joe. That has nothing to do with this Hey Joe other than putting the snappy title into a lot of people's heads in the 1950's just as any big record might. In 1956 it seems Billy had a brief romantic and musical relationship with another folk singer on the Greenwich Village scene by the name of Niela Miller who wrote and sang a song called Baby Please Don't Go To Town that has a very similar chord progression as Hey Joe, so that may have been an influence. She never recorded her song until 1961, I believe, and that was a demo acetate. I was going to put that recording right below here, but it really doesn't have that much to do with it and ultimately neither did Billy Roberts singing it coffee houses.
The next twist in the strange tale of Hey Joe is that of Dino Valenti - a.k.a. Chet Powers - a.k.a. Jesse Farrow. He was another guy that could be found in coffee houses and folk clubs from San Francisco to LA to DC to Greenwich Village to Cambridge (MA) to P-Town to London....to the streets of Paris busking with Billy in 1960 as mentioned above. I think Chet Powers was his real name. He wrote the song Let's Get Together that was popularized by the Kingston Trio and We Five in the mid-60's and later the Youngbloods had a hit with it. It became sort of a hippy anthem. So Dino picked up Hey Joe from his time playing with Billy Roberts. At some point he tried to copyright Hey Joe as his own and there's a story that Billy Roberts gave him credit to help him raise defense money to get out of Folsom State Prison where he was doing time on drug charges. Since nobody had even recorded the song at that time I can't see where owning part of the copyright was going to make him any money.
I could write a song now, copyright it and give you all a percentage and you know what that would get you? Anyway, Dino-Chet-Jesse later found fame in the late 60's with Quicksilver Messenger Service and was responsible for their big 1970 hit Fresh Air, which is an excellent song. So - Dino Chet Jesse never recorded the song either, at least not during those years.
The next step involves the LA folk scene and Dino's acquaintance with guys like Roger McGuinn and David Crosby who later formed the Byrds. David Crosby became a Hey Joe enthusiast and in the early days of The Byrds they often played the song when they frequently played at a club called Ciro's but the other Byrds didn't want to record it and only did so after it became a hit for others.
Next up comes another Valenti acquaintance, the folk scene veteran Tim Rose. Tim had come up through the DC / Greenwich Village scene with John Phillips and Mama Cass of the Mama's & Papa's fame, Scott McKenzie and Jake Holmes, the guy Led Zep stole the song Dazed And Confused from. In the mid-60's post-British Invasion a lot of folkies were plugging in and grouping up to cash in. Rose headed west to the California scene where he too picked up on Hey Joe. Tim seemed to think a lot of songs he heard were public domain traditional songs and he tried claiming Hey Joe and Bonnie Dobson's Morning Dew as his own. Starting in the later 60's he found a lot of success and popularity in England.
So it's 1965....we have Billy Roberts to Dino Valenti who had Tim Rose on one side and David Crosby on the other.....and still nobody had ever recorded Hey Joe.
When the Byrds were playing at Ciro's on Sunset Boulevard there were other up-and-coming bands listening in the wings and one of them really liked Hey Joe and they became the first people to record it in November 1965. The band was The Leaves and their take on the song wasn't very "folkie".
It was their second single, Mira #202. The record did nothing, even in LA, and the band didn't like the sound of the recording and after a few weeks it was pulled from distribution. They released a couple more singles and in early 1966 they recorded Hey Joe a second time.
Tim Rose must have been listening. He was probably thinking "hey! that's my song!" As it happened, in the spring of '66 he was signed by Columbia Records and began recording singles and the following year released a LP that remains influential to this day. The second single Columbia released, around the time the Leaves record was making national waves in the summer of '66, was Hey Joe. At that point Hey Joe became two songs. There was the fast Hey Joe as done by The Leaves and there was the slower Hey Joe as done by Tim Rose and nearly all of those 1600 recordings since went one way or the other. Both recordings were very good and very different from each other.
Love
The Standells
The Tangents
and after The Leaves went #1 the other members of The Byrds finally gave in to David Crosby and they recorded it on May 17, something Crosby later regretted.
The Byrds
everyone was recording fast Joe, from Los Angeles across the country all the way to Saco, Maine
Euphoria's Id
to Mexico
Los Locos Del Ritmo
and across the Pacific to Japan
The Golden Cups
So that's Fast Joe. What about Slow Joe, you ask? Well, Tim's record came out that summer of 1966 and he was back east in Greenwich Village playing at Cafe Wha? at the same time Jimi Hendrix was playing in the King Curtis band and also with his new band, The Blue Flame, who also played Cafe Wha? Shortly after that former Animals bassist Chas Chandler brought Jimi to London, set him up with his new band, The Experience, and in December they cut their first single: Hey Joe.....Slow Joe.
It would be another 6 months before the Jimi Hendrix Experience made an impact back in the U.S., but other British bands picked up on it and them....like The Creation
back in the USA, Cher gave Slow Joe a go in 1967 too
back to England, in 1968 Deep Purple recorded their first LP and closed it with their popular 7½ minute version of Slow Joe, which didn't do much in the UK but was huge in the USA as it broke around the same time the major radio focus in most large metropolitan areas shifted from singles-oriented AM stations to LP-oriented FM.
So now you see the difference between Fast Joe and Slow Joe, but it wasn't limited to just that. In Los Angeles, in 1966, Sammy Lee & The Summits did a Boogaloo Joe
In early 1969 there were a couple of Soul Joe's recorded at Fame Studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. The first by Wilson Pickett and the second by King Curtis with Duane Allman on guitar.
In 1971, Lee Moses did a Deep Soul Joe
After about 5 years, Hey Joe seemed to disappear about as quickly as it burst on the scene in 1966.
On May 1, 2009, 6,346 guitarists assembled in Wroclaw, Poland and played Hey Joe setting a new record, according to Guinness World Records, for the largest ever guitar ensemble.
The Music Machine did a slow trippy Joe late in '66. The Creation were playing the song live in '66 and some say Jimi heard their version and was inspired to record it. But I believe the Tim Rose story.
ReplyDelete