Boys will be Girl Group, or the Johnettes

Between 1958 and 1965 the sound of Girl Groups — such as Rosie and the Originals, the Chantels, the Ronettes, the Cookies, the Raindrops and the Shangri-Las — reigned high in the US Top Ten. Many of their songs were written by successful couples like Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. There was something deceivingly naive and consciously uncomplicated in the way the songs were sung. The musical and textual elements also contained subtle innovations.

The chord progressions showed a modal approach, mixing up scales that would traditionally be separated into major and minor. Glorifying the naughty and illegitimate aspects of the female peer group and using innocence as their weapon, the lyrics — expressing the joy of new love, the sadness of love lost, the interplay of alternating jealousies — emphasized emotional honesty. As their love-object they often addressed the antihero, the "leader of the pack". Next to the rhythm and blues and the rock 'n' roll — Greg Panfile shows — this style exerted an important influence on the music of the Beatles and their fellow musicians of the British beat explosion.

Lyrically, the themes as you'd expect revolve around manic-depressive romantic themes: the joy of new love, the sadness of love lost, the alternating jealousies and ecstasies of puberty. But just as the occasional trick chord or modulation gave Girl Group music an additional level of sophistication beyond its root forms, so too the lyrics often broke new ground by raising social and class issues previously unheard of in American pop music, certainly something the Beatles did, and in spades.

This distinction is best supported by anecdotal evidence. Girl group records were often the only one ever produced by a given label. Some hits of the era are the actual demo tapes, as in the case of He's The Kind Of Boy You Can't Forget, or overdubs onto demo tapes, like the Shirelles' Baby It's You with keyboard break by Burt Bacharach. Line-ups and lead singers changed on the spot, along with group names, lyrics, you name it. It was basically chaos.

And there's a lot more overlap; even the Beatles' covers reflect an immense Girl Group influence. First off, the Beatles consistently covered Girl Group material, as has often been noted elsewhere: the Cookies' Chains, the Shirelles' Boys and Baby It's You, the Donays' Devil In His/Her Heart, the Marvelettes' Please Mr. Postman. Beyond that, the Beatles also covered the same material that almost every Girl Group covered, things like Twist And Shout and Shout. From the Girl Group fans' point of view, then the Beatles were a triple threat: they wrote and performed originals in the style, covered hits from the style, and covered the songs that the Girl Groups covered. Masters of the milieu, all the way.

Of the Beatle songwriters, the influence of Girl Groups is most strongly felt in Lennon and Harrison's material, with a smattering from Paul. Notice, for example that when the Beatles cover a Girl Group song it's almost always Lennon on lead vocal and most rarely Paul; add to the ones already mentioned the BBC cuts Keep Your Hands Off My Baby, To Know Her Is To Love Her, Soldier Of Love, and Don't Ever Change. Besides the Spector and Arthur Alexander cuts, note that we've got two more Carole King songs here, and the themes of both are interesting: jealousy, a big Lennon hangup, and the rejection of standard, appearance and fashion-based ways of assessing romantic partners.

Those background voices, besides adding variation to the vocals and providing esthetically pleasing moments, are strong contributors to the content. In songs such as Devil In Her Heart, Baby It's You, You Can't Do That, You're Going To Lose That Girl and many others the chorus acts as a social context, playing the role of the other teenagers in the crowd — besides the speaker, love object, and rivals —, commenting on the action and widening the perspective.

As mentioned earlier, one of the Spector/Girl Group trademarks were those little noises, fills, riffs and so forth that helped distinguish one song from another within the limited harmonic vocabulary of the day. Ringo excelled at this trick, something that poor Pete Best never really caught on to. John Lennon's famous triplets-over-fours were a Girl Group trick — listen to Don't Ever Change from the BBC tapes —, and the tambourines on Revolver descend from the triangle on It's My Party.

No, we're not done yet ... it's there in When I Get Home, Yes It Is, Day Tripper, You Won't See Me, Girl (backing vocals with dirty words!), The Word, Rain, Here There And Everywhere, Got To Get You Into My Life, and She Said She Said. Over time, the influence lessens in the psychedelic/backwards era, and is diminished as Lennon and McCartney generally withdraw from one another's work and stop singing together. Still, it's a contributing element to Good Morning Good Morning, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, With A Little Help From My Friends, Happiness Is A Warm Gun, Sexy Sadie, Hey Bulldog, Revolution, Something, Oh! Darling, Octopus's Garden and Because. Many of these songs have extremely formulaic structures or passages, vocal hooks, arrangement tricks, and so forth that go all the way back to the earliest Girl Group influences. It's a thread throughout.

Without closely examining the American Beetles phenomenon (what phenomenon? exactly!), consider as a mismanagement example the career of Darlene Love. Hardly anyone knows who she is today — although she's still to be seen as Danny Glover's wife in the Lethal Weapon movie series —, yet here's a list of the songs she sang lead on in the Girl Group heyday: He's A Rebel, Zip A Dee Doo Dah, He's Sure The Boy I Love, Why Do Lovers Break Each Other's Hearts, Today I Met The Boy I'm Gonna Marry, a great gospel Chapel Of Love that was never released, Not Too Young To Get Married, Wait Till My Bobby Gets Home, and A Fine Fine Boy. There is some great singing in there, yet Darlene remains an unrecognized talent by the general public, all of whom know who Diana Ross is. From another angle, my Marvelettes' Greatest Hits CD has Smokey Robinson's name on it about ten times for his various songwriting and production roles ... but nowhere does it list the names of the women who sing.

The true sleazy side of the business was another factor. Plenty of artists and songwriters got ripped off by the proverbial cigar-chomping whomevers. Payola had already stained the industry, but the distribution channel was particularly corrupt and totally insensitive to what teenagers would consider good art. One can certainly imagine that records by black performers in those days were not distributed as widely or in the same way as what was considered "white" music. Racism reminiscent of Elvis and Pat Boone versus Little Richard and Chuck Berry in the Fifties.

• Betrock, Alan (1982), Girl Groups. The story of a sound. New York: Delilah, 1982