"Sally Go 'Round the Roses," by The Jaynetts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaBq6elSTwU
Hadn’t realized that it was mostly all Artie Butler on this record. Also forgot about Lucy Sante making it the centerpiece in a recent book.

https://lucsante.com/e-s-p/

https://artiebutler.com/sally-go-round-the-roses/

I love me some creepy r & b.

It's like some predecessor to "T.V.O.D."

DO U SEE?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v7FZwyOdvU

I love "Sally Go Round the Roses." My dad used to put it on mixtapes when I was a kid, so as with most things you just grow up with, it took me a while to notice how odd it is.

The whole Jaynetts album is good. It prompted me to look into this Harlem thing.

I first heard it as a cover by Anny Celsi. It's a trippy little song, proto-psychedelic.

Of course, Grace took the "proto" out of that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NSy4i-5Qxw

I love me some creepy r & b.

Perhaps a dedicated thread is in order? Unless one already exists…

I would love that!! I keep digging and digging trying to make a playlist.

Don’t like that Jefferson Airplane version as much as I was hoping.

I played all the instruments except the guitar. First I played the piano. Then I added the drums. When I added the bass, I borrowed the secretary’s lipstick and marked the locations of the notes I needed on the upright bass.. since I did not play bass at all. Then I played the B3 organ and tambourine

Organ? Really sound like an electric bass to me.

this is one of my favorite songs!

Pentangle play the lick on an upright bass. Maybe on the original it was an upright with some kind of special pickup.

Jefferson Airplane version

it's akchoo-ly The Great Society (just FYI)

Oh right, thanks.

I will work on a creepy / spooky oldies list over the next few days.

There are also any number of tracks from the "Dusties" (mid 60s-early 70s) period that fit this bill.

The oldies station I used to listen to used to loosen up on Sunday nights and play weirder oldies, so every Sunday I take a few hours to listen to a pile of oldies...I'll go through my stuff and start a running thread.

Super classic song... I got into it as a teen through the Best of Chess Rock & Roll comp, which my dad owned on cassette.

Its placement there as the last track, walled off from all the rockin' tunes by "Rinky Dink," heightened the feeling of strangeness that suffuses the recording. Wherever they're trying to keep Sally from going, it's a lot chancier than wherever the couple putting on high heel sneakers was going... Maybe close to the alley down which Bo Diddley's ice-wagon flew. (It was much later that I realized the huge time spans covered by Chess's comps.)

The secret ingredient is surely the long decay on the backing vocals - "another girlllllllll" dissolving into a cloud of spooky nighttime fog. It's like they were going for the Wall of Sound, but it was 4 a.m. and most of the orchestra had gone home. Wonderful sound.

I heard it was Andy Warhol's favourite song.
Do love that Great Society version and that lp. I like their other release, How It Was a little less so but is still pretty good. The 2 are combined on the Live At The Matrix lp. There is another live set but I think it hasa lot more David Minor on so less room for Darby or Grace.
Darby Slick is one of my fav guitarists on the strength of that set though. Shame there is little else by them around. & Darby took off to India after Grace left for the Airplane. So the SF scene was down one distinctive guitarist who i assume would have just continued to improve. oh well whatifs etc.

Tim Buckley reworked the song almost entirely. Pentangle did it good, not sure what other versions I've heard.

Richie Unterberger confirms that Warhol liked the song but where is the original quote or source that this was Andy’s “favorite”?

There is this from Warhol's memoir of the '60s POPism where he's describing a drive across the country to LA in October of 1963:

The radio was on the whole time - full blast. As a matter of fact, I was the one who insisted on blasting it because I get very nervous about people falling asleep at the wheel. You sure get to know the Top Forty when you make a long trip like that - over and over again, the same songs: Lesley Gore, the Ronettes, the Jaynettes, Garnet Mims and the Enchanters, the Miracles, Bobby Vinton...

I'm not sure of source could be one of several I read over the last few decades.
Do remember reading it though.

I'm pretty sure it's in Uptight, the Bockris/Malanga book about the Velvets, and I can picture one of the movies made abt Warhol in the 90s (?) having it playing in the background while he's working at the Factory. Thought it was the Solanas one, but it's not listed on the OST.

Hmm, thanks. It is indeed in Up-Tight, although hard to know who exactly is saying it, it appears that Bockris himself is asserting it. Seems to be pretty widely accepted though. Still, would be nice if there were a quote of Andy himself saying it, if not Paul Morrissey or something. Somebody even made this, although I also don’t think it is “real,” the only legit one seems to be from 2002, for Warhol’s 74th birthday.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQyVd2xzbKs

( how big a thing are Fan Made Google Doodles?)

hunted the internet for quite a long time looking for the BBC TV show that used this song -- the pentangle version -- as its themetune, before i remembered that it was actually another pentangle song on the same LP ("light flight" on basket of light) and the show was take three girls: three young women share a flat in swinging london, two series, only a few eps still now exist :(

RETVRN

Sorry for my OCD pedantry but there is a qualitative difference between something someone listens to and hears all the time and a song that they declare their favorite especially if that someone is the oracular sphinx that is Warhol.

I will work on a creepy / spooky oldies list over the next few days.

Just revisited the Great Society version, and I think it's pretty cool... almost VU-like.

How about the Susanna Hoffs version?

Great Society version is growing on me, but now I really want to here Micky Dolenz singing in his psychedelic Grace Slick voice accompanying himself on his Moog.#onethread

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkveh4vguz8
? and the Mysterians version disappoints, sorry to say

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRq3YLJ3GpU
Peter and Gordon cover adds its own brand of brassy Britishes weird though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J--eQV1aaQE
Peter Tork version not doing much for me.

And here is the Susanna Hoffs version I mentioned a few posts back, which follows her traditonal winning practice of approximating the original track as closely as possible and singing the heck out of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpfMN7R2zHk

this is part of my childhood so i can't hear it clearly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t__2FVjuDng

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfrZJ-UWvKU
Medicine version explicitly psychedelic in a pleasing fashion.

woah, that's pretty cool. finding the kinship between the original and Tomorrow Never Knows.

Quite an odd song for Pentangle to pick up on, I think; not really their usual source material.

Finally hearing the upright bass on the original. Also some bells near the end.

big fave

next track on the proposed creepy r&b mix, gotta be this -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-IkHciQ6gQ

then maybe this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1-f1YhbH-s

ok this prob'ly oughta be its own thread

Thread does not seem to mention Joan Baez singing it to Sally Grossman in Don’t Look Back.

some of these covers are interesting but sally go round is interesting not because of the lyrics & music but as a record. it's an aura. the rhythm section is great and the reverb on the bgvs is great and the way the lead vocal is further back in the mix than the bgv is great and the way the bgv trade places with the lead for position of lead is afaik without parallel and the way it's funky but the mood it leaves in the room is ghostly instead of jubilant is great, and all this feels like something that happened one day where all the variables clicked for that day including the tiny little farisa-ish hits in the song and the "see 'cause the" right before the final "saddest thing in the whole wide world," everything sounds like it happened exactly right to make the record what it is and that right there is a perfect swing, if you step into the box after you're just trying to something the batter before you did already

fantastic post, otm

I love that Carolyn Sullivan

completely otm, JCLC.

Forever thankful to Lucy Sante's blog for first introducing me to this song.

never heard this version before today, it's cool.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmelmWd4hIw-

JCLC hugely otm

Butler states the entire recording of "Sally..." was done "on an old Ampex tape machine at 71⁄2 IPS mono....Each time when I added another element" – including the final element: the vocalists – "I added a different type of reverb. Each generation [ie. development] seemed to add to the distinct sound of the record."

"Anybody that came in the studio that week, [Spector] would put them on [the track]. Originally, I think he had about 20 voices on 'Sally.'"

makes sense

"Sally Go 'Round the Roses" peaked at number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 dated 28 September 1963, remaining at number 2 on the Hot 100 dated 5 October, both weeks kept out of the top slot by "Blue Velvet" by Bobby Vinton.

tough but fair

I will work on a creepy / spooky oldies list over the next few days.

I'll go through my stuff and start a running thread.

did this ever end up happening?

never had the slightest notion it was anywhere close to that big of a hit! don't know that I've ever heard it on the radio, and was only ever introduced to it as a definitive compilation deep-cut, as i proclaim upthread.

Note that the Spector in question was one Abner Spector.

The radio hit/deep-cut dichotomy is making me think that part of its ineffable, ineluctable quality is that it has the weirdness and oddness of a found object but was in fact recorded by a talented professional arranger with the assistance of some other studio pros.