What’s in a Song: Fever (1)

[This is another in an occasional series on popular songs with appeal across the generations. This post will be broken into two parts; Part 2 will appear in a few days is here.]

As a kid, I once read a “funny” comic-book episode in which aliens landed in mid-20th-century America and reported back to their home planet about all the strange things the natives did. The one which struck me the most was this: the lunatic creatures leave the comfort of their homes; climb into sheet-metal boxes each weighing several tons; move the metal boxes out amongst hundreds, thousands of others; and play a game whose object is to accelerate your metal box to screaming speed, aim it at all the others, and come as close as possible to all of them without actually hitting a single one — all without dying in the process.

Ha ha, I know: comic books. Can’t take ‘em seriously. For in the real world, of course, the aliens are reporting back about the truly strange Earthling behavior: our fascination with sex.

We construct elaborate religious frameworks of abstention and lifelong celibacy, and equally elaborate ones of fetishism and promiscuity — and everything between. Both as societies and as individuals, we underwrite costly technological improvements to its experience. We try to cure ourselves of the obsession; we throw ourselves into it. We have ecstatic dreams about it and hair-raising nightmares. We write about it, and we write about everything but (in the process, creating a gigantic sex-shaped vacuum that’s awfully damned hard to ignore). We celebrate the level-headed old-timers who seem to do just fine without it… and cheer the friskier ones still nuts about it.

And oh boy, do we ever compose music about it — music explicit and implicit. (Some of this music doesn’t even have words.) We pay performers to entertain us with this music, to mime their having sex with us — even to mime the act with their voices, while their bodies barely move onstage.

Somewhere out there, a civilization of little green men and women is scratching their little green noggins about all this. Procreation, they concede: yes, very important. But truly civilized creatures of the universe, they will insist, focus their creative energies on the practice of xormling. You know, where you get either five or fourteen— Oh, never mind.

So we come to the song. Nearly every pop singer tries her hand with it at some point. You can pretty much count on at least one American Idol contestant each season, using it to establish his credentials as a bona-fide heartthrob. (God help us all if Robert Pattinson ever records it: the thud of all those bodies simultaneously swooning to the floor could set off shock waves around the world.)

Enter “Fever.”

In the early 1950s, singer/songwriter Otis Blackwell was pretty much unknown. (That’s a photo of him at the top right, probably taken about this time.) Oh, he was hanging around the Brill Building — you know, where songwriters used to linger in hopes of getting noticed by record companies and performers. He had a recording contract, with the Jay-Dee label, and with them he’d scored a minor hit with a tune called “Daddy Rolling Stone” (later covered by The Who on the My Generation album).

But he didn’t care how he earned his money at this point: he just wanted to pull in enough of it, at least in the short run, to buy Christmas presents for his children. So on Christmas Eve, 1955, he sold his demos of six songs, at $25 each. (It was probably a good Christmas for the kids that year.)

One of those demos featured Blackwell singing over a piano and “drum” — actually a cardboard box. Even so, it was good enough to catch the ear of Elvis Presley’s song publisher, Hill and Range, who wanted it for the King-in-the-making. Just one catch (and isn’t there always?): Elvis would get co-writer credit, and split the royalties 50% with Blackwell. As reported in Elvis for Dummies and other sources, Blackwell reluctantly went along with it (emphasis added below):

Blackwell was uneasy about the deal, but the talented yet down-on-his-luck songwriter realized he stood to make a lot of money from royalties — even at half-credit — if Elvis recorded the song…

The practice derives from the fact that songs become hits because certain performers record them. After a song becomes a hit, other entertainers want to perform or record it, but the original singer responsible for its popularity gets nothing unless he or she was the songwriter. Elvis may not have written “Don’t Be Cruel,” but if he hadn’t recorded [it], Blackwell wouldn’t have made the money on it that he did. Blackwell understood this, and when interviewers later asked him about it, he wasn’t critical of the practice.

Furthermore, as Tim Parrish, in his Walking Blues, notes:

Elvis himself was upset that his name would appear on the songs since, as he told anyone who asked, “I’ve never written a song in my life… it’s all a big hoax.”

Okay, you’re wondering: So what was the song. damn it?!? Elvis finally recorded it in the summer of 1956 as the B side of “Hound Dog,” which it quickly passed in sales and long-term regard: “Don’t Be Cruel.”

(Blackwell obviously didn’t sour  on working with Elvis afterwards, given their ongoing relationship. Besides “Don’t Be Cruel,” he also came up with “All Shook Up,” “Return to Sender,” and “Paralyzed” for him. Nor was Elvis the only beneficiary of his genius: Blackwell also contributed “Great Balls of Fire,” “Breathless,” and “Let’s Talk About Us” to Jerry Lee Lewis; “Hey Little Girl” to Dee Clark; and a whole boatload of other songs to other performers — making him one of the greatest songwriting influences on rock’s early development. Yet most people think, Otis who?!? when they hear his name.)

Early in 1956, Blackwell partnered with his friend Eddie Cooley on a song which Cooley had been obsessing about for a while (or so Cooley said), but just hadn’t been able to get on paper. They shortly had it ready to go.

And within a few weeks, they’d offered the song in question, “Fever,” to a singer named Little Willie John. (That’s him over at the left.)

(A further side-note about the dangers of being a pop songwriter in the 1950s: when “Fever” was published, credit went to Cooley but not to Blackwell, but rather, to someone named “John Davenport.” This was Otis Blackwell’s step-father’s name. Why? Blackwell was still under contract to Jay-Dee, but Little Willie John recorded for a different music publisher. Blackwell was afraid he’d lose the rights to the song if he used his own name: “John Davenport,” conveniently, worked for nobody.)

Eighteen-year-old “Little” Willie was so-called because he barely topped five feet in height. The nickname certainly had nothing to do with his voice, a big, powerful instrument — especially given the right song and accompanying context.

Even so, he reportedly didn’t like “Fever” when it first came his way. (I haven’t seen any reasons why, exactly.) But once he warmed to it and settled on an arrangement he was comfortable with, the song quickly became a great hit, reaching #1 on the R&B charts for several weeks starting in May, 1956.

John’s take on the song may surprise anyone who’s heard only the classic torch version. Here’s how it’s described in Fever: How Rock’n'Roll Transformed Gender in America, by Tim Riley:

On the surface, “Fever” was coy bump and grind. But Little Willie John’s deliveries poured scorched gravel into songs that turned his come-ons into threats. John’s “Fever” had finger snaps that goaded the anxious silences and guitar twangs that cinched knots in the singer’s stomach… [John's] fever was romantic, but it also surged with contempt and despair, the kind of desire that warned of how much grief many men kept in check. The record was all hook and repetition; its sense of danger thrillingly seductive.

Here’s the Little Willie John version. (Lyrics below the little audio-player thingum.)

[Below, click Play button to begin. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left -- a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:38 long.]

Lyrics (as recorded by Little Willie John):

You never know how much I love you
Never know how much I care
When you put your arms around me
I get a feelin’ that’s so hard to bear

You give me fever when you kiss me
Fever when you hold me tight
Fever (fever, burn through) in the mornin’
An’ fever all through the night

Listen to me, baby
Hear ev’ry word I say
No one could love you the way I do
‘Cause they don’t know how to love you my way

You give me fever when you kiss me
Fever when you hold me tight
Fever (fever, burn through) in the mornin’
An’ fever all through the night

Bless my soul, I love you
Take this heart away
Take these arms I’ll never use
An’ just believe in what my lips have to say

You give me fever when you kiss me
Fever when you hold me tight
Fever (fever, burn through) in the mornin’
Fever all through the night

Sun lights up the daytime
Moon lights up the night
My eyes light up when you call my name
‘Cause I know you’re gonna treat me right

You give me fever when you kiss me
Fever when you hold me tight
Fever (fever, burn through) in the mornin’
An’ fever all through the night

Umm-mmm-mmm-mm-mmm-mm
Umm-umm-umm-um-um
Umm-mmm-mmm-mm-mmm-mm
Umm-umm-umm-um-um.

If you simply read the lyrics to that version, you can almost hear an exasperated teenager rolling her eyes: “Oh for heaven’s sake, Daddy. It’s just a song about kissing.” Hearing the song performed by John, of course, “Daddy” would barricade the doors and windows.

But for “Fever” to really turn up the heat in Daddy, Mommy, and teenaged kids alike, it needed the services of an outsider: Miss Peggy Lee.

Peggy Lee had been singing a good long while by the time she latched onto “Fever” in 1957. As early as 1938, as a teenager, she’d moved from North Dakota to Hollywood to attempt a professional career. After a throat problem forced her to return home for a tonsillectomy, she’d knocked around Fargo, Minneapolis, and St. Louis sometimes working at a radio station, sometimes at a hotel, and sometimes on tour with a band. She had another operation for what she called “a lump in my throat” and then, in 1940, returned to Hollywood.

Outside Hollywood, in Palm Springs, she found regular work at a club called the Doll House. Here’s what 1001 Songs: The Great Songs of All Time says of her experience there, and its effect on her style:

Naked but for bass, drums, voice and seductively clicking fingers, Peggy Lee whispered her way into history. Lee developed her style of singing in a nightclub called the Doll House in Palm Springs. Unable to be heard above the noise in the room, Lee dropped her voice to a whisper and the audience, intrigued, suddenly quietened themselves…

The New Yorker‘s music critic Whitney Balliett put his finger on it when he wrote, “Peggy Lee sends her feelings down the quiet centre of her notes. She is not a melody singer. She does not carry a tune; she elegantly follows it. She is a rhythm singer who moves all around the beat, who swings as intensely and eccentrically as Billie Holiday.”

(The Balliett quote comes from a review/profile in The New Yorker of August 5, 1985. That link takes you to an abstract, but if you’ve got a subscription you can read the whole three-page piece online.)

From Hollywood, having been lured to Chicago by a club owner there, she caught the eye of Benny Goodman.

Lee had a successful couple of years and several hits with Goodman in the early 1940s but left, ultimately, to strike out on her own — free of constraints from any particular band, and indeed of the big-band style in general, which had pushed her away from the subtlety of delivery she’d developed on her own.

Off she sailed into her solo nightclub and recording career, mostly with Capitol Records. She even wrote the lyrics for the songs and provided several voices for Disney’s Lady and The Tramp in 1955. Remember the two sneaky-mean Siamese cats?

Yeah: that’s Peggy Lee, overdubbing herself in a song of her own composition.

She finally crossed paths with “Fever” in 1958. Says the Peggy Lee Discography site:

This song was initially brought to Peggy Lee’s attention by Max Bennett, who played bass for her during the mid-1950s… Lee was looking for a torch number to add to her nightclub act. She wanted something with a suggestive bass line. On a night when Bennett was playing a gig with Nino Tempo, an audience member requested a song that neither Bennett nor Tempo knew. After the audience member taught it to them, the bassist immediately thought that the bass line of “Fever” was strong enough to suit Lee’s intentions…

Aside: I would love to know who that audience member was!

Lee agreed with Bennett that the song they were hearing [on an earlier, non-Little Willie John recording] had potential… Nonetheless, neither the music nor the lyrics struck her as fully congenial with her taste. Ignoring the R&B and rock ‘n’ roll leanings of the 45 version, the artist and her musicians stripped the melody to its bass line and then proceeded to rebuild “Fever” into a number notorious for its otherwise spare accompaniment. Lee also skipped one or two choruses from the original lyrics, and added newly written choruses.

This was still Otis Blackwell’s and Eddie Cooley’s song, in short — but only in the same way that (say) a movie adaptation still “is” the book it’s based on. As you listen to Lee’s version, below, notice how the lyrics — whatever else they do, with all that history-of-fever stuff — have been turned inside out. Little Willie John had grabbed the song, wrestled it to the ground, shown it who was boss; Peggy Lee makes it wholly a woman’s song: the song of a woman who knew exactly how fevers start, and how to keep them burning. Even more, the woman in some ways resembles the one over whom Little Willie had agonized: Here’s the point that I have made/Chicks were born to give you fever…

[Below, click Play button to begin. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left -- a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:22 long.]

Lyrics (as written and recorded by Peggy Lee):

Never know how much I love you
Never know how much I care
When you put your arms around me
I get a fever that’s so hard to bear

You give me fever when you kiss me
Fever when you hold me tight
Fever in the morning
Fever all through the night

Sun lights up the daytime
Moon lights up the night
I light up when you call my name
And you know I’m gonna treat you right

You give me fever when you kiss me
Fever when you hold me tight
Fever in the morning
Fever all through the night

Ev’rybody’s got the fever
That is something you all know
Fever isn’t such a new thing
Fever started long ago

Romeo loved Juliet
Juliet she felt the same
When he put his arms around her
He said, Julie baby, you’re my flame

Thou givest fever when we kisseth
Fever with thy flaming youth
Fever, I’m afire
Fever, yea I burn forsooth

Captain Smith and Pocahontas
Had a very mad affair
When her daddy tried to kill him
She said Daddy-o don’t you dare

He gives me fever with his kisses
Fever when he holds me tight
Fever, I’m his Missus,
Oh Daddy, won’t you treat him right

Now you’ve listened to my story
Here’s the point that I have made
Chicks were born to give you fever
Be it Fahrenheit or centigrade

They give you fever when you kiss them
Fever if you live and learn
Fever till you sizzle
What a lovely way to burn
What a lovely way to burn
What a lovely way to burn

Peggy Lee died in January, 2002. Her obituary in The New Yorker (which you don’t need a subscription to read), says:

All entertainers have, to use Noël Coward’s phrase, a talent to amuse, but Peggy Lee, who died last week at the age of eighty-one, had something else as well: a talent to be amused. She swung with a sense of humor, and handled lyrics with an uncynical knowingness, letting you in on the little secret of whatever song she happened to be singing, or, at least, letting you know that she had a secret. Unlike Frank Sinatra, her peer in musical intelligence, she had a voice that didn’t command you to pay attention; it suggested that you might have a lot of fun if you did…

Peggy Lee had a torchy, nighttime side, but she also had an aura of natural, daytime light about her. Her bent was optimistic—she wrote songs with titles like “It’s a Good Day” and “I Love Being Here with You” and “There’ll Be Another Spring.” Listening to her, you feel the breath of life against your skin.

“A talent to be amused”: I love that.

Part 2 of this post, about some of the other of the hundreds of versions of “Fever” recorded since 1958, will appear in a few days is here.

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P.S. As for Little Willie John: a young man of reportedly violent temper, he got into a fight in 1966, after a show in Seattle. One man died of knife wounds, and John was convicted of manslaughter and sent to prison. He died there in 1968, age 31. The official cause of death was a heart attack, although Wikipedia cites rumors of “pneumonia or asphyxiation.”