FROM THE AUTHORS

Every week brought a new batch of records, some on labels we knew so well, and some on labels impossibly exotic. We analyzed and deconstructed them only to reconstruct them in our reedy teenage voices. We scrutinized them more closely and with more gravity than we scrutinized newspaper accounts of the Cuban Missile Crisis that threatened to vaporize us all. The voices that came from those blessed 45s were disembodied.If we were lucky we'd see the singers on stage for a few minutes in a package show coming to a "theater near you." Perhaps in a beach party movie. Maybe, just maybe, on television. 16 magazine might list their pet peeves, but the truth was, we had no idea who these people were. We had no idea who made the music and no idea what went on behind the scenes. Turns out, the back story was the story.

Every era is transitional. This was the Sixties, but not those Sixties. It was the day after "the day the music died." Something was stirring. A Jewish housewife, Florence Greenberg, in suburban New Jersey wanted to get out of the house. An African American songwriter, Luther Dixon, didn't see why he couldn't run a company and call the shots. And they didn't see why society shouldn't let them be together. Florence was the first to realize that the groups weren't interchangeable, and she made careers "instead" of one-hit-wonders. She recorded black artists, and put their faces on LP jackets, instead of graphics. In the studio, songwriters and arrangers found a hitherto undiscovered new world where the passion of black gospel fit itself into the formalism of classic American pop.

It all played out against Cold War confrontation and the first rumblings of civil unrest. Everything would change "Any Day Now." The soldier boys were now marching in a foreign land. The Beatles had left Hamburg, recorded "Baby, It's You" during their first sessions. They came to the United States, the rules changed about what got played, and what didn't. The Shirelles were the first real casualty of the English invasion. And in Detroit, Berry Gordy took the Shirelles' sound, toughened it a little, and molded several groups in their image: first the Marvelettes, then the Supremes, then Martha & the Vandellas, and then Gladys Knight & the Pips. The Supremes would get on The Ed Sullivan Show, while the Shirelles never could. Down in the Village, Bob Dylan began writing his own. "The times, they were a changing." In California, the folk rock sound had one of its first major hits when the Mamas & the Papas revived the Shirelle’s' "Dedicated to the One I Love."

Flower Power had a new voice, and spoke to a new listener, the culture of the country had changed, but Florence Greenberg survived. She survived the Beatles, the departure of Bacharach and David, loss of the Shirelles. And last of all she survived the loss of Luther Dixon. AM was fading, FM was on the horizon, rock 'n' roll had died, the "twist" was in fashion, and JFK was "Camelot"...it was a brief and shining moment. Florence and Luther's unrequited love story never came to pass, but the fire and passion inside, transformed to the music "that will last forever." The Shirelles disappeared, but their records never did... defined by the fragile innocence of the early Sixties. It was just a few years. A coda to the '50s; a prelude to the '60s... it was the end of an era, but for one magic moment, they were the real "Queens of the Hop," a time when their music echoed back to the whispered words of 1962, "Tell me again we'll be together forever." "Tell me again, 'Baby, It's You.' You and only you. Tell me again, baby... it's you..."