This was a very important record for Johnny Rivers and represented a change from the musical style that provided him with his early hits and acclaim. With “Poor Side of Town”, Rivers moved into the pop-soul style. However, he found his record company reluctant to tamper with a winning formula. He recalls,
Al Bennett and those guys were goin’ ‘Man, don’t start comin’ out with ballads. You’re gonna kill your career. You got a good thing goin’ with this funky trio rock sound, stay with that’.
I had this tune I’d been working on, and I kept playing it for Lou. It took me about 6 months to finish. We cut it with Larry Knechtel, Joe Osborn and Hal Blaine [members of the renowned Wrecking Crew session musicians]. I did my vocal performances live with the band. I sat and played my guitar and sang. There weren’t any overdubs. So we said it could use some singers and maybe some strings. That’s the time we got together with (arranger) Marty Paich.
The melody is a soulful version of California-based pop, with some strong folk elements as well. Marty Paich, who arranged for Mel Torme and Ray Charles, provided the song’s string arrangement. There are two versions of the song. The single edit version fades out earlier, in order to avoid repetition due to its length, following the repeated lyric line: “Oh with you by my side”. The longer version goes on, finishing up the verse, and following the repeated guitar riff, repeats the sung introduction of the scatting, before the song fades out. The background vocals are by The Blossoms: Darlene Love, Fanita James, and Jean King.
While this was his only #1 chart hit, his legacy is extensive and long-lived. His career total is 9 Top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 and 17 in the Top 40 from 1964 to 1977; he has sold well over 30 million records. With over 60 years writing, recording, and producing records, he is still touring today. He is the definition of a living legend.
Johnny Rivers was born November 7, 1942 as John Henry Ramistella in New York City, of Italian ancestry. When he was about five, his father wound up out of work. The Ramistella’s moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana where an uncle, head of the Louisiana State University art department, got John’s dad work painting houses and antiquing furniture. Influenced by the distinctive Louisiana musical style, Rivers began playing guitar at age eight, taught by his father and uncle; “My dad and uncle used to get together and play these old Italian folk songs on mandolin and guitar.” As John started playing, he listened to R&B on the late-night radio, megawatt stations like WLAC in Nashville. However, R&B was a way of life in Baton Rouge. “When I went to Baton Rouge Junior High, Fats Domino, Jimmy Reed and guys like that used to play at our dances” Rivers says.
By junior high, he was sitting in with various local bands, including one led by Dick Holler, who later wrote “Abraham, Martin And John.” Holler’s guitarist was the still-unknown Jimmy Clanton. Holler, Rivers says, “introduced me to a lot of R&B artists and opened up a whole new world for me.” Johnny formed his own band The Spades in 1956. “We played all Fats’ tunes… Little Richard, Larry Williams, Bobby Bland,” Rivers says. “We became the hot little band around Baton Rouge. Then Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis hit so I took on a little touch of rockabilly.” Ramistella made his recording debut, at 13 years old, leading the Spades in 1956 with the song “Hey Little Girl,” issued on the Suede label. (There is some debate whether this is in fact that original recording, but it does seem to be him).
In 1957, John flew to New York during a school vacation and stayed with an aunt there. He wanted to meet Alan Freed, at the time the most influential DJ in the US. And he did.
It was like a scene out of an Alan Freed movie. I stood in front of the radio station. It was freezing cold and he came up with Jack Hooke who was his manager. I said ‘My name’s Johnny Ramistella. I’m from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and I have a band. I play and write and I’d like you to hear my music.’ Alan gave me his card and said ‘We have an office down at the Brill Building on Broadway. Why don’t you come down tomorrow afternoon?’ I went down and Jack Hooke was there and I played four or five songs.
Jack Hooke called George Goldner, owner of Gone and End Records, whose office was also in the Brill, the infamous grouping of early songwriters and producers. Legendary songwriter Otis Blackwell, author of “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Great Balls Of Fire”, arranged John’s debut single “Baby Come Back” b/w “Long, Long Walk.” Freed also gave Johnny a new name.
I was sitting around with Jack and Alan and they were gettin’ ready to release the record. Alan (said) ‘Your name… you need to come up with something a little more musical.’ We were talkin’ about where I grew up on the Mississippi River and somehow Rivers came out of that, That was the first time I used that name.
By 1961, he was 18 years old and a veteran performer with six years’ professional performing under his belt and relatively little to show for it except the experience; even a lot of the established figures in the business who’d tried to give him various breaks over the years, including Alan Freed and George Goldner, had fallen on hard times by then. He moved to Los Angeles and began aiming for a career as a songwriter and producer.
Fate played its hand in 1963, when a friend who ran a restaurant, Gazzari’s, on La Cienega Blvd in Los Angeles, appealed to Rivers for help when his house band, a jazz group, suddenly quit. He reluctantly agreed to perform for a few nights in a stripped-down version of his rock & roll act, with just his electric guitar and a drummer, Eddie Rubin. That was when lightning struck — it turned out that audiences at the restaurant liked the way he sang and played, and soon the crowds were growing and his performing stint turned into an open-ended engagement. Bassist Joe Osborn was hired to join the combo and fill out the sound and suddenly seeing Johnny Rivers was becoming the thing to do.
Bill [Gazzari], you don’t want the kind of music I play in here because I’m basically a blues-rock guy. But he said ‘You gotta help me out. I don’t care what you play; just don’t play too loud.’ So, I told him I’d see what I could do.
So, I called (drummer) Eddie Ruben who was playing with Don Randi at the time. They were playing a place called Sherri’s Lounge up on Crescent Heights and Sunset. So I asked him ‘Eddie can you fill in for a couple nights just to sit in until this guy can find another trio or jazz group?’ So Don let him do it. By the second or third night everyone started getting up and dancing! The fourth night we were there Natalie Wood came in with a group of friends and she started dancing and it got in the trades. The day after that you couldn’t even get near the door. All of a sudden it became the new hot spot in town.
That’s when Elmer Valentine, then approached me, who was one of the owners of a place called PJs, which was the hot place in town at the time. He came in there and said, ‘You know, there’s a club up on Sunset called The Party, and some guys and I are looking at it. We think you’d be great there, and if you sign with us we’ll take over that place. I want to call it The Whisky A Go Go’ I said ‘What kind of a name is that?’ He said ‘Well, I just got back from a vacation in Europe. In Paris, France, there was this teeny place that was the hot club. All they do there is play records and let people dance. It’s called The Whisky A Go Go, and they call it a discotheque. What I’d like to do is to have you play three sets a night, and between each set I’ll have these gals playing these records so people can be dancing.’ I said, ‘Well, all right.
So, I went to Bill Gazzari and asked him for a raise and he turned me down. So I called Elmer and asked him if he still wanted to do that thing with that new place on Sunset. He said ‘Yeah.’ ‘OK, let’s do it.’ So, I signed up with him in December of ’63 and then at January 15 of 1964 we opened. It was a smash. I brought my following from Gazzarri’s and they PR’d it to death. Every night it was slammed with celebs and movie stars and this and that. Then in August of ’64, after their first Hollywood Bowl appearance, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr came in to see us, and that created a riot in there. It was just one of those things where everyone was hanging out there.Steve McQueen was in there every night, Jane Mansfield, and all these huge movie stars were out there dancing.
In 1964, Elmer Valentine gave Rivers a one-year contract to open at the Whisky a Go Go on Sunset Strip in West Hollywood. The Whisky had been in business just three days when the Beatles song “I Want to Hold Your Hand” entered the Billboard Hot 100. The subsequent British Invasion knocked almost every American artist off the top of the charts, but Rivers was so popular that record producer Lou Adler decided to issue “Johnny Rivers Live at the Whisky A Go Go”, which reached #12. Rivers recalled that his most requested live song then was “Memphis”, which reached #2 on the US Hit Parade in July 1964. It sold over one million copies and was awarded a gold disc. According to Elvis Presley’s friend and employee, Alan Fortas, Presley played a test pressing of “Memphis” for Rivers that Presley had made but not released. Rivers was impressed and, much to Presley’s chagrin, Rivers recorded and released it, even copying the arrangement (Fortas writes: “After that, Johnny was on Elvis’s shit list” and was persona non grata from then on). Rivers’ version far outsold the Chuck Berry original from August 1959, which stalled at #87 in the US.
Rivers continued to record mostly live performances throughout 1964 and 1965, including “Go-Go-style” records with songs featuring folk music and blues rock influences including “Maybellene” (another Berry cover), after which came “Mountain of Love”, “Midnight Special”, “Seventh Son” (written by Willie Dixon), plus Pete Seeger’s” Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”, all of which were hits.
In 1963, Rivers began working with writers P.F. Sloan and Steve Barri on a theme song for the American broadcast of a British television series “Danger Man”, starring Patrick McGoohan. At first Rivers balked at the idea but eventually changed his mind. The American version of the show, titled “Secret Agent”, went on the air in the spring of 1965. The theme song was very popular and created public demand for a longer single version. Rivers’ recording of “Secret Agent Man” reached #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1966. It sold one million copies, also winning gold disc status.
Soul City Records was formed in 1966 by Johnny Rivers, which signed the 5th Dimension whose recordings of “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In” and “Wedding Bell Blues” were #1 hits for the new label. In addition, Rivers is credited with giving songwriter Jimmy Webb a major break when the 5th Dimension recorded his song “Up, Up, and Away”. Rivers also recorded Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”. It was covered by Glen Campbell, who had a major hit with it. Jimmy Webb was the first writer signed to Rivers Music Publishing.
Johnny Rivers continued to record more hits, including “Baby I Need Your Lovin'” and “The Tracks of My Tears” (cover of The Miracles), both top 10 in 1967. In 1968, Rivers released what many fans consider his best album, “Realization”, a number five album on the LP charts. The album was evocative of the psychedelic influences of the time and marked a subtle change in his musical direction, with more thoughtful types of songs, included such ballads as “Going Back to Big Sur”.
Johnny and producer Lou Adler also played a central role in helping to organize the Monterey Pop Festival, on June 16 to June 18, 1967 at the Monterey County Fairgrounds in Monterey, California where he was one of the featured performers, though Rivers is usually overlooked in favor of flashier participants such as Jimi Hendrix, the Who, and Janis Joplin.
By this time, rock & roll had evolved into rock and Rivers ran the risk of seeming increasingly out of step, musically and in terms of his image. His sound had evolved from its basic guitar-bass-drums configuration into more elaborate, though fairly restrained, productions, in which his voice was featured in an honest, white soul mode. He took steps to keep his music in touch with the current charts — the “Realization” album featured Rivers in a slightly more sophisticated soulful vein, covering songs like “A Whiter Shade of Pale” and “Summer Rain,” which became a number 14 hit in 1968. Cutting edge musicians by then were looking and sounding a lot shaggier than they had in 1964, however, and Rivers’ commercial appeal gradually slackened through 1969. Somehow, he couldn’t catch a break in those days, and while his music and image did change — Rivers let his hair grow longer and grew a beard — he seemed on the wrong end of the music world, even in his strategy of covering good songs by other composers. He inadvertently went head to head with James Taylor with his version of the latter’s “Fire and Rain” which got out first, but stalled when Warner Bros. got Taylor’s own recording out as a single.
In the 1970s, Rivers continued to record more songs and albums which were a success with music critics, but did not sell as well as some of his earlier hits. One of these albums, “L.A. Reggae” in 1972, reached the LP charts as a result of the top 10 “Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu” (a cover of Huey Smith & the Clowns). Other hits at that time were “Blue Suede Shoes” (a cover of Carl Perkins), in 1973, which would reach the top 40 on the Billboard Hot 100, and “Help Me Rhonda”, in 1975 – a cover of The Beach Boys on which Brian Wilson helped with backup vocals. In 1976 Soul City produced the 1977 top-ten hit “Slow Dancin’ (Swayin’ To The Music)” which was produced and performed by Johnny himself. It was his last entry on the charts.
Rivers continued recording into the ’80’s, although his recording career wound down somewhat. In spite of his music hasn’t reached the best seller charts for quite a while, Rivers is still touring, doing 50 to 60 shows a year, increasingly returning to the blues that inspired him initially.
In 1998, Rivers reactivated his Soul City imprint and released “Last Train to Memphis”, his first new studio album in 15 years.
In early 2000, Johnny recorded with Eric Clapton, Tom Petty, and Paul McCartney on a tribute album dedicated to Buddy Holly’s backup band, The Crickets.
On June 12, 2009, Johnny Rivers was inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame. His name has been suggested many times for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but he has never been selected. Rivers, however, was a nominee for 2015 induction into America’s Pop Music Hall of Fame.
On April 9, 2017, Rivers performed a song, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, at the funeral for Chuck Berry, at The Pageant, in St. Louis, Missouri.
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