Al Kooper and Stephen Stills – "Season of the Witch" (1968)

 

When I look over my shoulder

What do you think I see?

A few weeks ago, I was doing some research in preparation for writing about the 1968 Al Kooper-Stephen Stills cover of Donovan’s “Season of the Witch” – which I had chosen to be a member of the 2022 class of the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” ALBUM TRACKS HALL OF FAME.

In the course of that research, I was surprised to discover that the horn parts for that recording had been arranged by Kooper and a gentleman named Joe Scott – who I had interviewed for 2 or 3 lines some eight years ago.

Everything about the Kooper-Stills version of “Season of the Witch” is purt near perfect.  Most of the heavy lifting was done by Kooper (on the Hammond B-3 organ) and Stills (on electric guitar).  But the frosting on the cake of that record are the horns.  

The horns come and go as the volume and intensity of the various segments of the eleven-minute-long “Season of the Witch” wax and wane.  When they cut loose about eight minutes in, they help create a truly ecstatic thirty seconds of let-it-all-hang-out music that is the emotional climax of the record.

The horns keep quiet during the remaining two and a half minutes of “Season of the Witch,” which gives us a much-needed opportunity to catch our breath and let our pulse rate return to normal.

Click here to listen to “Season of the Witch.”

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In 2014, I became more than a little obsessed with the Arbors’ 1969 recording of “The Letter.” (You may not remember that record, although it did peak at #20 on the Billboard “Hot 100.”  But I’m sure you’re familiar with the original recording of that song, which was a #1 hit for the Box Tops in 1967.)  

Joe Scott

With all due respect to the Arbors and the instrumentalists who backed them, what made their recording of “The Letter” so extraordinary was its inspired arrangement – which was the work of Joe Scott (né Joseph Scaduto), who was not only an arranger but also a very talented pianist and composer.

I eventually was able to track Joe Scott down and interview him.  I don’t remember exactly how long we spoke on the phone, but it was a very long conversation – Joe very kindly kept answering my questions until I finally ran out of them.

Here are links to the three 2 or 3 lines posts that I wrote after that conversation:

Click here to read my first Joe Scott post.

Click here to read the second post.

Click here to read the third one.

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I’ve written almost 2000 2 or 3 lines posts since 2009.  Most of them are trifling – personal reminiscences of no great interest to anyone except their narcissistic author, or “humorous” pieces that occasionally work but most often do not.

Every once in a while, I write a post that digs deeply into a record’s overarching structure and its component parts.  Despite sometimes losing sight of the forest for the trees and succumbing to pedantry, I think those posts are worthwhile because they provide some illumination of what makes a record tick.

But I’m proudest of the posts I’ve written that feature interviews with musicians who may no longer be  well-known (if they ever were) but who were responsible for producing great records that are still worth listening to.

Among that latter group of posts, I think the ones that feature my interview with Joe Scott may be the best I’ve ever done.  He helped create a record that was so unique and utterly beautiful that I can’t imagine I will ever tire of listening to it, and I think that his contribution to that work of musical art deserved to be explored in detail.

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When I discovered that Joe Scott had contributed to making “Season of the Witch” the great record that it is, I couldn’t wait to contact him and ask him what he remembered about his arranging collaboration with Kooper – who is only one of the most multitalented musicians of his generation.

But I was saddened to learn that Joe Scott died in February of this year after a long battle with leukemia.  

Joe Scott at the piano

From his obituary in the Palm Beach Post:

Joe was born to Sicilian immigrants Felipo and Maria Scaduto.  At an early age, Joe showed an extraordinary aptitude for music. In his teens, he attended Arts High School in Newark while working professionally on weekends and nights playing piano and accordion.  He went on to Manhattan School of Music where he earned a Bachelor and a Master degree.  During the sixties, Joe had a successful career arranging and conducting for such varied talents as Frank Sinatra, Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, and Phyllis Diller, to name a few.

Always full of surprises, in the seventies Joe decided to go to law school.  After practicing law for almost fifteen years, Joe retired to Palm Beach County with his family in the late eighties and returned to music.

Here in Florida, Joe performed and shared his love for classical music and jazz with students of all ages at Palm Beach State College and Floria Atlantic University Lifelong Learning in Jupiter, Boca Raton and Vero Beach.  For more than thirty years, Joe Scott was a well-known figure on the Palm Beach music scene.  Although Joe was incredibly modest about his musical achievements, the sound of his piano was loved by many and delighted thousands throughout his life.

Click here to watch a video of Joe performing with the Joe Scott Trio.

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As the Palm Beach Post obituary notes, Joe Scott’s many years of playing jazz piano in the Palm Beach area earned him many fans.  But I’m guessing very few of those people knew what an accomplished arranger he was.

I hope that my 2 or 3 lines posts about Joe Scott’s contributions to “The Letter” and “Season of the Witch” – two truly remarkable records – will help remedy that. 

Arbors -- "I Can't Quit Her/For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her" (1968)

She had a woman's touch

A young girl's eyes

And in a second flat

I was hypnotized

The last two 2 or 3 lines posts have featured the Arbors' cover of "The Letter," which was released on a 1968 album titled: The Arbors Featuring "I Can’t Quit Her/The Letter."

Today we're featuring a track from that album that combines Al Kooper's "I Can't Quit Her" – which originally was released on the first Blood Sweat & Tears album – and a Simon and Garfunkel song, "For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her," from the Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme album.

(Apologies to all you Simon and Garfunkel fans, but if there was a one-to-ten scale for song/album title tweeness, "For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her" and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme would both score an eleven.)

Joe Scott arranged the songs on that Arbors album.  In the previous 2 or 3 lines, we spoke with Joe about his astonishing arrangement of "The Letter."  Click here if you missed it.

Here's part two of our interview with the Joe Scott.

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2 or 3 lines: Joe, how did you get your start in music?

Joe Scott:  I started at nine, taking piano lessons.  There was no doubt that that was what I was going to do, even at the age of nine.  I had tremendous support from my parents – particularly my father, although he didn’t play an instrument.  My parents were immigrants from Sicily. 

2 or 3 lines:  Where did you grow up?

Joe Scott:  I grew up in Newark, New Jersey, which was really a great place to grow up.  I went to the Newark Arts High School.  

Newark Arts High School

[NOTE: Newark Arts High School, which opened in 1931, was the first public high school in the United States for visual and performing arts.  Its graduates include singers Sarah Vaughn, Connie Francis, and Melba Moore, jazz composer and saxophonist Wayne Shorter, and tap dancer and choreographer Savion Glover.]

Joe Scott:  At that time there were really only three public schools that focused on the arts – the one in New York that was made famous in Fame, and one in California, and Newark Arts High School.  Pretty much the most talented people were there, and I was just surrounded by talent. The high school was so advanced – they were doing operas and had a symphony orchestra.  There were so many guys who played jazz and we had so many jazz groups and guys who were writing arrangements, and when I got into high school, I knew that I wanted to be an arranger – that was when I made up my mind. 

2 or 3 lines:  What kind of music classes did you take there? 

Joe:  Obviously, if you played piano, you couldn’t be in the band or the orchestra, so all of us who played keyboard instruments learned another instrument.  I played clarinet for two years and then trombone for two years, and then we took music theory and learned sight-singing – we had all of that.  It was an incredible education.  One of my classmates was Melba Moore – there were all kinds of gifted people there – it was amazing.  I was just one of many.  I wasn’t more gifted than anybody else. 

2 or 3 lines:  What did you do after high school?

Joe Scott:  When I graduated, I wanted to go to Manhattan School of Music. 

Manhattan School of Music

[NOTE: The Manhattan School of Music, which was founded in 1917, offers bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in jazz and classical performance and composition.  It currently has about 900 students from over 40 countries.]

Joe Scott:  My father had died, and there really was no money, so I had to work.  I was playing in a band, and then after a year, I entered Manhattan School of Music as a theory/composition major and I went through all the way to my master’s.  

2 or 3 lines:  Tell me about the jazz scene in New York City in those days

Joe Scott:  The late fifties and the sixties were really the heyday of jazz – Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson, Art Blakely, Cannonball Adderly.  We had a wonderful [radio] station in Newark that played jazz every night.  I started playing nightclubs when I was in high school.  After high school, when I was working my way through the Manhattan School of Music, I worked four or five nights a week in a nightclub with a band – there were a million nightclubs where you could work and you could make great money. 

Jazz pianist Oscar Peterson (1959)

2 or 3 lines:  Were you a fan of rock or pop music in those days?  

Joe:  I don't like fifties music.  Elvis Presley did nothing for me.  I loved what we now think of as classic rock – the Beatles, Motown, all of it.  I love great songs.

2 or 3 lines:  How did you make the move from playing jazz in nightclubs to becoming a composer and arranger?

Joe Scott:  I knew that to break into the scene in NY was going to be very difficult – very competitive.  In 1965 I made a connection with a guy who was a studio player in New York City and he was trying to produce records.  He cut a deal with Chappell Music, which was a very prominent music publisher.  At that time music publishers were important.  They aren’t now, because everybody publishes their own music, but we were still at that time where you went to a publisher with your songs so that the publisher could get it to the artist, and they were still using contract arrangers as opposed to self-contained groups.  There was still a lot of arranging to be done.  So he said to me, “I think you’ve got some talent as a songwriter, so we’ll put you under contract with Chappell.”  And he said, “In the meantime, what you can do is to get your experience writing and arranging for a recording studio, which is a different animal from writing for a live band.”  So he explained to me that every time they sent a new song out to an artist who might want to record it, they would cut a demo of the song.  He told me I could do the arrangements for those demos – I didn't get paid for that work, you understand.  

2 or 3 lines:  So a publisher would get some studio musicians to record a new song that the publisher was hoping a big singer would want to record, and if the record sold a lot of copies, the publishing company would get a share?

Joe Scott:  That’s right.  I was there every day, and I would write songs and I would meet people and I just kept doing demos and kept getting a lot of experience.  So I’m plugging away there, and one of the producers – a young guy who was something of a scatterbrain – walked in one day, when I was sitting there with the guy who got me the job for Chappell Music.  He tells my friend, “I’m stuck.  I’m doing this R&B record, and we’ve got the rhythm down but I need sweetening with horns.”  So my friend says, “Here’s Joe,” and the producer says,  “You want to do this?  We’ve got to have it done by tomorrow morning.”  And not only did I have to write the arrangements, I had to copy the parts out by hand.  But I said I could do it, and he says, “Here’s the deal. I’ll give you $50, but my name goes on for the arranging credit – not yours.”  I said that was no problem.  

2 or 3 lines:  Because you just wanted to get your foot in the door with this producer, show him you could get the job done – you didn’t care as much about the arranging credit?

The Brill Building – then and now

Joe Scott:  Exactly.  It was late in the afternoon and everyone who worked in the Brill Building – which is where we were – was closing up, and there was no piano I could use. So the producer brought a tape recorder up with a tape of what they had already recorded with the rhythm section.  We were in a hallway in the Brill Building and I took some diet pills so I could stay awake.  The guy sang the licks that he wanted and I picked up on it – I knew what he was looking for.  I think there were eight horns, so I had to write eight parts.   I listened to the rhythm section recording and wrote the eight horn parts.  I was able to write the arrangements without the use of a piano.  I had that skill because of the training at the Manhattan School of Music – that was the way they taught you to orchestrate.  So anyway, that all worked out, and so I got my $50 and he got the credit, and that was the end of that.  It was not a hit that I know of, but it was for Scepter Records, which was Dionne Warwick and the Shirelles and the Isley Brothers and a bunch of others. 

2 or 3 lines: In 1968, the Arbors released an album titled The Arbors Featuring "I Can’t Quit Her/The Letter."  As you can tell from the title, it featured covers of Al Kooper’s “I Can’t Quit Her” (which was on the first Blood Sweat & Tears album), and the Box Tops' #1 single, "The Letter."  It also included a couple of originals and covers of the Doors’ “Touch Me,” and Bob Dylan and Beatles songs.  You did the arrangements for all those?

Joe:  All those.  As you can hear, there are different instrumental combinations on those tracks – some have horns, some have strings, some have whatever.

2 or 3 lines: What were the Arbors like to work with?

Joe Scott:  They were amazing to work with. Not only were they the nicest guys in the world, but they were so gifted – great musicians.  I mean, that was a once in a lifetime to work with them.

The Arbors

2 or 3 lines: After this album they did one more single, then they started to do TV commercials and didn’t really do any more records. 

Joe Scott:  I think it was simply because the follow-up single to “The Letter” was not successful.

2 or 3 lines:  Joe, you stopped arranging in 1971.  What happened?  Why did you leave the record business?

Joe Scott:  I was really at the peak of my profession in 1969 and 1970 -- I was keeping very busy, and making a lot of money.  That was important to me because my dad had died when I was young, and we were in poverty during much of my childhood.  I loved music but I began to get disillusioned with the music business.  I was getting tired of what I had been doing, plus music was changing – groups started doing everything themselves, and that was a trend that was going to result in a lot of arrangers like me being eliminated from the picture.

2 or 3 lines:  So what did you do?

Joe Scott:  I entered Seton Hall University's law school in 1972.  I thought I wanted to do entertainment law, but that would have meant working in Manhattan, which I didn't want to do.  So I became a business lawyer – did commercial real estate law, that sort of thing.  

2 or 3 lines:  Joe, I'm a lawyer, too.  But I've often fantasized about having a career in music instead.  I can't imagine giving up a successful music career to go into the practice of law.  I think there are a lot more lawyers who would be musicians if they could than musicians dying to become lawyers.  Did you ever regret your decision to give up music?

Joe Scott:  After about ten years, I really started to miss music.  In the mid-1980s, I started to sneak out of the office and play in local jazz clubs.  By 1986, I was married and had a young daughter, and we bought a condo in Florida so we could spend winter vacations there.  A few years later, I went to the managing partner of my law firm and asked if I could take two or three months off so my wife and I could live in our condo and decide if we wanted to move to Florida permanently.  I think my partner knew that I planned to try to get back into music in Florida, and he gave me his blessing.

2 or 3 lines:  So you've been in Florida since then?

Joe Scott:  That's right.  We moved to the Palm Beach area and never looked back.  I teach some courses at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, and I usually play jazz piano three or four nights a week – I'm so lucky at my age to still be getting paid for playing the piano.

2 or 3 lines:  I'm sure that the people who come to hear you perform are glad you made the decision you did to leave the legal profession and put your musical talent to use again.

Joe Scott:  I never thought that much of myself as a musician because right from Newark Arts High School to the peak of my professional career, I was surrounded by such great talent.  It wasn't until I gave music up for the practice of law that I realized how special music is and really appreciated the talent I had.

Joe Scott today

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My thanks to Joe Scott for agreeing to be interviewed.  He was very generous with his time, and couldn't have been nicer.

Joe's arrangement of "I Can't Quit Her/For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her" isn't quite as mind-blowing as his arrangement of "The Letter," but it is very, very good.

Medleys of two or more songs were relatively common in live performances by singers in the sixties, but recorded medleys were relatively rare.  The most successful medley from that era is probably the Lettermen's masterpiece, "Goin' Out Of My Head/Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You."

In Scott's arrangement, each of the first two verses of "I Can't Quit Her" is followed by the last two lines of "For Emily" – "Oh, I love you, girl/Oh, I love you" – which function like a chorus.

The Blood Sweat & Tears version of "I Can't Quit Her" closes with an extended instrumental coda, and Scott does something similar in his arrangement: the Arbors repeat the "For Emily" lines over strings, guitar, and bass for almost a full minute before finally fading out.  

I've always loved the BS&T cover of "I Can't Quit Her."  It may be the best track on one of the greatest albums of the sixties, Child Is Father to the Man.  

Al Kooper

Al Kooper's arrangement is rougher around the edges, propelled by great piano playing and a fabulous horn section.  Joe Scott's version substitutes strings for horns and incorporates the four-part harmony the Arbors were known for.  The lushness of the strings and vocals is leavened by the great studio bass and guitar players Scott brought in to play on the album, who are given free rein – by the end of the song, they are tearin' it up big time.

There's one thing I would change about the Arbors' cover.  Check out the lines from the song quoted at the top of this page.  Instead of "hypnotized," Al Kooper originally wrote "proselytized," which I think was a much better choice.

Whoever changed that word in the Arbors' version probably figured that most of the audience wouldn't know what "proselytized" meant, and that person was probably correct.

Click here to listen to "I Can't Quit Her/For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her."

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Arbors -- "The Letter" (1968)

Listen, mister, can't you see

I gotta get back

To my baby once more

The last 2 or 3 lines featured the Arbors' astonishing 1969 cover of "The Letter," which had been a #1 hit for Alex Chilton and the Box Tops in 1967.

I vaguely remember hearing the Arbors' version of "The Letter" on top-40 radio stations when I was a 16-year-old high-school junior.  But I vaguely remember hundreds of such songs.

I somehow rediscovered "The Letter" last year – don't ask me about the circumstances of that rediscovery, because I don't remember.  What I do remember is how bowled over I was when I heard it.

Joe Scott, who arranged "The Letter"

This week is a very special week for 2 or 3 lines.  It marks the fifth anniversary of everyone's favorite little wildly successful music blog.  So we're featuring a very special record – one of the most special pop records ever recorded.

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In the previous 2 or 3 lines, I described how I tracked down Joe Scott, the arranger of "The Letter" – and the man most responsible for the utterly astonishing middle section of the record.

Joe Scott started taking piano lessons when he was nine.  Later, he attended the Newark Arts High School, a public high school for the visual and performing arts whose alumni include a number of world-famous singers, instrumentalists, dancers, and composers.

Newark Arts High School

He then got a degree in music theory and composition at the Manhattan School of Music, playing jazz piano in New York City nightclubs to pay for his schooling. 

By 1965, Joe was working in the famous Brill Building, writing arrangements for record producers like Phil Ramone and Bob Gaudio.  The breadth of his assignments was remarkable.  One day he might write some horn parts to help sweeten a Moby Grape album or Supersession.  The next day he’d do arrangements for Phyllis Diller (who released an album that included “Hello, Young Lovers” from The King and I, “Bei Mir, Bist Du Schon,” and a cover of the Stones' “Satisfaction”).  

Joe also wrote and arranged the music for TV commercials for major corporations like American Airlines, Pepsi, and Texaco – for example, he did the arrangements for nine different “You can trust your car to the man who wears the star” TV spots for Texaco.

And he released two albums under the name “Joe Scott and his Orchestra” that featured arrangements of pop and rock songs for a symphonic orchestra.

Without further adieu, here's what Joe Scott had to say about "The Letter" when I interviewed him on the telephone recently.

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2 or 3 lines:  How were you chosen to do the arranging for the Arbors’ cover of “The Letter”?  That was 1968, I believe.

Joe Scott:  I was hired by Roy Cicala and his wife, Lori Burton, who produced “The Letter.”  Roy was a great recording engineer, and Lori was a very successful songwriter and a great singer.  

[NOTE: Roy Cicala, who died earlier this year, engineered or produced albums by the Amboy Dukes, the Cowsills, Frank Sinatra, Alice Cooper, and many others, but was best known for his work with John Lennon.  Lori Burton, who released a solo album titled Breakout in 1967, wrote songs that were recorded by Lulu, Patti LaBelle, the Young Rascals, and Shania Twain.]

Roy Cicala with John Lennon and Yoko Ono

Joe Scott:  Roy and Lori wanted a new and unique arrangement, and they knew I had good skills from my schooling, so they thought I could do it.  The Arbors didn’t have an album deal at the time – the single of “The Letter” was done on spec, and the album came later.

2 or 3 lines:  Joe, I took piano lessons for a long time, and I took a couple of music theory and composition classes in college, but I’m really just an amateur compared to a professional like you.  A couple of weeks ago, I e-mailed you my analysis of “The Letter” – did it make any sense at all?

Joe Scott:  I got that and I said to myself, “What, is this guy kidding me?”  It was so complicated, I couldn’t even follow it.  [Laughter.]  I’m looking at this thing and saying, “Is that what I did?”  I didn’t even remember “The Letter” very well.

Lori Burton

2 or 3 lines:  Have you listened to it recently?

Joe Scott: Oh sure -- I went to YouTube after I got your e-mail.

2 or 3 lines:  Well, I think the whole thing – especially the arrangement -- is just remarkable.  How do you feel about it?

Joe Scott: I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done.  But it's important to remember that great records take more than one person.  The talents of Roy and Lori and the great sound of the Arbors were vital to the outcome.

2 or 3 lines:  So I’m not crazy to think it was a great record?

Joe Scott:  Not at all! [Laughter.]

2 or 3 lines: “The Letter” opens with a four-measure guitar introduction – it reminded me a little of Jose Felicano, or maybe the guitar on “Ode to Billie Joe.”

Session guitarist Ralph Casale

Joe Scott:  There were two guitars on that -- an acoustic guitar plays first, and then an electric guitar answers.  Jay Berliner did the acoustic.  Ralph Casale played the answer on the electric. 

2 or 3 lines:  The arrangement of the next minute or so of the record -- the first verse, then the second verse, and then the chorus – is fairly straightforward.  But the middle section of “The Letter” – the part that begins at about 01:20 and ends 90 seconds later, at 2:50 -- is anything but straightforward.  

[NOTE:  I suggest that you click here and listen to “The Letter” as you read the description of the middle section of the record that follows.]  

2 or 3 lines:  The middle section of “The Letter” starts off pretty quietly at 1:20, with eight measures of strings, accompanied by guitar.  At the end of those eight measures (1:38), the strings subtly modulate into a new key, and sustain a held note for four more measures.  Then all hell breaks loose.  Out of nowhere, the Arbors come in (at 1:48) with the chorus – gorgeous harmony over the sustained note in the strings.

Joe Scott:  That's called a pedal tone.  It's a device used in classical music.  The beauty of a pedal tone is that it does not change even when the harmony changes.

2 or 3 lines:  At 2:08, the Arbors repeat the chorus, and things really start to get interesting – the tempo retards dramatically as the volume increases, and the tension begins to build.  At 2:32, they get to the last word in the chorus – ‘‘more” – and the singers and the strings land on a fortissimo dominant seventh and hold it until the listener’s need to have it resolve back to the tonic is almost unbearable.  But you never resolve that dominant seventh – instead, you just slide into the four-measure guitar intro once more and then the Arbors sing the last verse.

Joe Scott:  You know the record better than I do!  [Laughter.]

Joe Scott at the piano

2 or 3 lines: Joe, I’ve never heard anything like that middle section – where in the world did that all come from?

Joe Scott:  It’s going to be hard for me to tell you exactly what I was thinking.  What I do want to tell you is this: whatever we do in life, in our vocation, we are influenced by different forms of education and experiences.  What I can tell you is that being a composition major – a classical  composition major at Manhattan School of Music – that  is where that comes from.   That’s totally classical.  When you are a music composition major, you do about 25% writing your own music and 75% analyzing the music of other composers.  So the idea of bridging the two keys with the high pedal note would have been a classical thing. That’s where that comes from.

2 or 3 lines:  And the same applies to the vocals – when the Arbors come in with the chorus at 1:48?

Joe Scott:  Yes, where they come out blasting – what I call the “fanfare” -- that’s classical, that’s not rock at all.  That’s totally classical.  

2 or 3 lines:  I’ve never heard “fanfare” applied to vocal music, but that’s the perfect word for it – it’s almost like a trumpet fanfare.

Joe Scott:  When you hear the fanfare by the Arbors, that’s a new take.  That starts brand new.  We give them the pitch and they came in – they overdubbed it.  That’s how that was done.  The record was recorded in three different sessions – sections that Roy Cicala and our engineer had to put together.  Now, my guess is that in that instrumental section, we were going to do an instrumental solo.  Maybe we did one, I don’t know – but I do know that Roy and Lori were listening to it and said, “We’re not going to put any solo here, just let the rhythm section play.”  I’m sure that was their idea.  Otherwise there probably would have been a guitar solo or something in there.

2 or 3 lines: And that would have been something a little more conventional for an instrumental break, you’re saying.

Joe:  That’s right.  But instead we just let the rhythm run.  And we have to go back to the musicians now.  When you’re arranging this kind of music, as opposed to Frank Sinatra . . . you hire those players in the rhythm section, you know their style.  You know what they’re capable of.  You pretty much know what the feel is going to be with the Arbors, you know what you’re looking for, so you hire the people who you believe can play in that style.  

2 or 3 lines:  How much of the instrumental arrangement do you write out note for note?

Joe Scott:  The arranger – once he writes the introduction – really just writes the chords.  And then you tell [session guitarists like Hugh] McCracken or [Jay] Berliner or whoever it is, “This is what I need to feel.  Can you cop something for me?”  And they work with the bass player and drummer and give you something, and you say, “No – not quite that,” and finally they came up with that accompaniment, which was so critical on this record.  For me, it was those guys.  That’s who pretty much made the record.  Unless the arranger is also the guitar player, that is something he cannot take credit for.  I mean, those guys are so important in establishing the feel.  They just listen to each other.  I don’t tell the drummer to use this cymbal or use that cymbal – I mean, I would say, “Can you do something different, can you do something like .  .  .”  whatever.  But these guys create that feel.  That’s how it’s done.

2 or 3 lines:  So a record like this -- it’s truly a collaboration involving all kinds of people.

Joe:  Exactly -- as I said before.  Big time, big time.  

2 or 3 lines:  The way everything connects together –

Joe:  – You call that a happening, Gary.  If that was a Monday, we could have gone into the studio on a Wednesday and that wouldn’t have happened.  It’s spontaneous.  You have to be very fortunate.  And many times we never get what we wanted -- there was nothing special about it.  But the final product here was special.  And that wouldn’t have happened without the Arbors, without Roy and Lori, without the guitar players, and so on and so forth.

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We'll learn more about Joe Scott and the surprising turn his life took shortly after "The Letter" was released in the next 2 or 3 lines.

Click here to listen to the Arbors' cover of "The Letter."

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Arbors -- "The Letter" (1968)

She wrote me a letter 

Said she couldn't live

Without me no more

And after you listen to our featured song, you won't be able to live without it no more.

I've been saving this song for a special occasion, and today is as special as it gets – this week marks the fifth anniversary of your favorite wildly successful little music blog, 2 or 3 lines.

It's traditional to give a gift made of wood for the fifth anniversary of a wedding, but you and I aren't married . . . although there are a few of you out there that I wouldn't mind going on a honeymoon with, if you catch my drift.  (You know who you are!)

But I'm not looking for a gift from you – just the opposite, in fact.  2 or 3 lines has been giving you gifts three times a week for five years, and today is no exception.  

Instead of making you wait until the end of all my usual blah blah blah to hear today's featured song, I'm going to play it for you right now.

Click here to listen to "The Letter."  Pay very close attention at about 1:20 of the record -- which is just after the lines quoted above are sung for the first time.  What follows is nothing less than the most astonishing 80 seconds in pop music history.  

Now pick your jaw off the floor and listen to it one more time.

Forget "Day in the Life" or "Heroes and Villains" or "Eight Miles High" or "I Can See for Miles" or anything else that you used to think was utterly mind-blowing back when you were a long-haired, bell-bottom-jeans-wearing, dope-and-beer-addled slacker.  

The Arbors PONE the Beatles, and the Beach Boys, and the Byrds, and the Who.

If you don't agree with me, please send me your address so I can come over and cut your stupid head off, and burn your house down, and plow your yard and sow it with salt like I was Scipio and you were a Carthaginian, because you simply do not deserve to live another day IF YOU ARE THAT CLUELESS!!!

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Last year, 2 or 3 lines featured "Neon Rainbow," a song written by Wayne Carson Thompson and recorded by the Box Tops.  Click here if you missed that post.

The Box Tops' first single was another Thompson composition titled "The Letter."  It hit the #1 spot on the Billboard "Hot 100" in August 1967 and stayed there for four weeks.  It ended up as the #1 song for the entire year.

Wayne Carson Thompson

"The Letter" also made it to #1 in Chile, Israel, Norway, and Poland, and reached the top five in Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, South Africa, Sweden, and the UK.  In other words, it was a MONSTER hit.

The Box Tops' version of "The Letter" had a lot going for it – not least of which was the band's legendary lead singer, Alex Chilton, who was only 16 years old when the song was recorded.  (Think about that, guys – you're the lead singer on the #1 record of the year, and you are 16 years old.)

Alex Chilton

But as good as the original "The Letter" is, it's not the best version of the song.  

Neither was Joe Cocker's cover, which was a top ten hit in 1970.  (Kudos to our old friend Leon Russell, whose arrangement of the song – featuring Russell's inimitable piano accompaniment – was fabulous.)

And neither was Deborah Washington's disco cover of the song (a hit in 1978), or Bachman-Turner Overdrive's cover, or the Beach Boys' cover, or Shaun Cassidy's cover, or Bobby Darin's cover, or Al Green's cover, or Brenda Lee's cover, or Trini Lopez's cover, or Barbara Mandrell's cover, or Peter Tosh's cover, or Dionne Warwick's cover.  (In case you're wondering, there have been over 200 cover recordings of "The Letter.")

The best recording of "The Letter" was the cover by the Arbors – a group you probably don't remember unless you are (1) as old as I am, and (2) you are totally obsessed with obscure pop singles from your high school days.  The Arbors' cover was the very first cover version of the song, and was a top 20 hit in 1969.

Who the hell were the Arbors – and how did they end up with such a lame name for their group?

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The Arbors were two pairs of brothers – Tom and Scott Herrick and identical twins Ed and Fred Farran.  (Ed and Fred?  What were Mr. and Mrs. Farran thinking?) 

Tom Herrick went to Michigan State, but the other three met at the University of Michigan.  Click here to read an article about the Arbors from the University of Michigan alumni magazine.  The University of Michigan is located in Ann Arbor, Michigan – hence, "The Arbors."

The Arbors were four-part pop harmonizers in the mold of the Lettermen.  You remember the Lettermen, right?  You don't?  How about the Association?  Or Harper's Bizarre?  (Bueller?  Bueller?)

The Arbors weren't a "rock" group in any sense of the word, although they covered a number of rock songs – not only "The Letter," but also the Doors' "Touch Me," Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone," and Jimi Hendrix's "Hey Joe."  (Think "the Ray Coniff Singers gone rock & roll," to quote Allmusic.)

The Herricks and the Farrans could sing up a storm, but I think you have to give most of the credit for "The Letter" to the production team behind that recording.  

The album that "The Letter" was released on – the clumsily titled The Arbors Featuring I Can't Quit Her/The Letter – was the first album produced by the legendary recording engineer, Roy Cicala.  Cicala was the engineer on albums by the Young Rascals, the Cowsills, the Amboy Dukes, the Four Seasons, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Alice Cooper, Gregg Allman, Three Dog Night, AC/DC, Patti Smith, and Garland Jeffreys.  (It's quite a distance from the Arbors and Cowsills to John Lennon and Patti Smith, boys and girls.)

Cicala's wife, Lori Burton, co-produced the album and worked with the Arbors on their vocals.  Burton was a blue-eyed soul songstress who released a  solo  album (Breakout) in 1967, but was better known as a songwriter.  She and her songwriting partner, Pam Sawyer, wrote for the Rascals, the Jackson 5, the Divinyls, Patti LaBelle, and Shania Twain (among others).

But the man who was most responsible for making the Arbors' version of "The Letter" the masterpiece it is was arranger Joe Scott, who also played piano and harpsichord on the album.

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It took me some time to track down Joe Scott.  I started by simply typing "Joe Scott" into Google, and got about 8.5 million hits.  

I then added "arranger" to my search.  It turns out that our Joe Scott is not the only Joe Scott who worked as an arranger in the sixties – for example, there was a songwriter/bandleader/arranger named Joe Scott who is best known for his work with R&B singer Bobby "Blue" Bland, but who also worked on records by Johnny Ace, Al Kooper, B.B. King, and many others.

Joe Scott today

Eventually, I tracked down a Joe Scott who taught adult-education classes at Florida Atlantic University.  I clicked on the "contact us" link on FAU's Lifelong Learning Society website, and asked them to pass along a message to that Joe Scott.  

A few days later, I got a one-line response from him:

Gary: I am the Joe Scott who arranged "The Letter."

After more e-mails, I arranged for a telephone interview with Joe Scott.  I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation – Joe couldn't have been nicer.

You can read the first part of my interview with Joe in the next 2 or 3 lines.  For now, why don't you click here to listen to "The Letter" one more time?

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: