HARD-LOVIN’ BABE
One garage rock compilation album that I picked up by mailorder sometime along the line is We Had the Beat / The Heart Beats & Other Texas Girls of the 60’s. The Heart Beats were a good enough band, as were the other featured bands; mostly they recorded serviceable covers of songs like “Little Latin Lupe Lu”, “Poor Side of Town” and the Nancy Sinatra hit “How Does that Grab You, Darlin’?”.
But my ears really perked up when I heard toward the end of the album “Hard-Lovin’ Babe” by Linda Pierre King: That song had a pounding beat, great organ work, and haunting vocals with about as strong a vibrato as I have heard this side of Buffy Sainte-Marie.
Mostly it is just Linda Pierre King and her guitar, but that is a full-blown band backing her on “Hard-Lovin’ Babe”. They are named the Outcasts, and the people at Collectables Records hinted that they were the famed Texas garage rock band called the Outcasts, but former bandmember Denny Turner disavows the recordings on his website, so they are a mystery for now.
(April 2012)
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So who is she? Linda Pierre King is a native of Houston and moved to New York in the mid-1960's. She became active in the folksinging circuit and spent a lot of her time at a beatnik coffee house called Beanie Baby's Java Hut. Apparently the recordings featured on the Heart Beats CD were made in New York but had never been officially released before this.
Meanwhile, Norm Wooster was adrift in the Big Apple after seeing his musical career evaporate. The self-styled "king of barbershop" had numerous hit songs in the 1950's and later became a talent scout for Play-Tone Records. After a bitter dispute in 1962 with Play-Tone chairman Sol Siler, the #1 hit "Lovin' You Lots and Lots" was released in 1964 under the name Norm Wooster Singers, though Wooster did not perform on the record and had his songwriting credits excised. This song was also the opening track on the soundtrack album for the 1996 Tom Hanks movie That Thing You Do! about a one-hit wonder rock band called (naturally) the Wonders.
Norm Wooster then immersed himself in the folk music world in New York and saw Linda Pierre King perform at the Beanie Baby club. He fell in love with her, and they were later married. Through her, Wooster eased his way back into the music scene and performed in a variety of styles from psychedelic rock to disco to country.
Linda Pierre King might also have helped moderate Norm Wooster's right-wing political beliefs; he had been friends with members of the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), whereas King was a follower of philosopher and author Ayn Rand. The HUAC connection had exacerbated the falling-out with Sol Siler, since HUAC was investigating actress Suzanne Pleshette, whom Siler was dating at the time. (See below).
(April 2012)
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Well, apparently I got fooled by some of the back story that was created for the 1996 Tom Hanks movie called That Thing You Do!, about a one-hit wonder rock band called the Wonders; I have never actually seen the film. There is no such person as Norm Wooster or Sol Siler, and Play-Tone Records was the fictitious record company that released the single by the Wonders. The supposed hit song by the Norm Wooster Singers, “Lovin’ You Lots and Lots” was actually written by Tom Hanks. Linda Pierre King evidently remained in the Houston area and never moved to New York City.
I ran across the biography in more than one location that appeared to be reliable, such as the post on last.fm that gave a biography called “Norm Wooster: The Myth and the Legend” (and several Amazon.com and YouTube items, though one YouTube video disclaimed the New York City connection). Birth dates, parents’ names, recordings, and name dropping peppered the entry; besides Linda Pierre King and Suzanne Pleshette (who was apparently not ever investigated by HUAC), the biography also mentions white soul singer Timi Yuro, Jerry Murad and the Harmonicats, Bob Dylan, and Kurt Cobain. Turns out that last.fm is a wiki like Wikipedia; the real story can be found in several entries on Wikipedia. It sure seemed legit to me at the time; I figured, how many people named Linda Pierre King could there be in the world who were folksingers?
Anyway, sorry about that, and I apologize for my part in propagating this nonsense. But that doesn’t make Linda Pierre King’s music any less wonderful.
(October 2014)
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YouTubehas several songs by Linda Pierre King, including her best, “Hard-Lovin’ Babe” that was recorded with some band called the Outcasts, but not the Outcasts that I talked about above that included Galen Niles. This song can be heard here, as taken from the new CD that has a somewhat cleaner sound than my copy: www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CF_BWyxfNg .
Someone else put “Hard-Lovin’ Babe” on YouTube and disputes what I wrote about her in my UARA post: “Don’t believe the BS on the web about LPK, no one has come forth to know her biography. She didn’t get into Any Rand (sic), nor end up in Greenwich Village, etc., and she wasn’t from Houston, either.” Fine by me if you don’t believe what I wrote, but considering that there are only gripes there, I will stand by what I said. (See above).
However, the same person also added two previously unreleased songs by LPK; here is one of them, “More” (the theme from the unusual 1960’s movie Mondo Cane): www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3hLC5iOMLg .
(April 2014)
