Showing posts with label Riot in Cell Block #9. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Riot in Cell Block #9. Show all posts

Thursday, October 23, 2014

The Robins' "Riot in Cell Block #9"

This morning I listened to a compilation album of The Coasters, which also includes two songs by The Robins (an earlier group that evolved into the Coasters).  I found "Riot in Cell Block #9" interesting because of the connections it has to Ritchie Valens' "Framed," which I listened to a few days ago on a compilation album of Valens (I'm in the midst of the The Very Best of albums).  While listening to "Framed," I noticed some musical similarity between it and "Riot in Cell Block #9" - specifically that both songs are built around a riff that separates each line of the verses.  Both also have repetitious choruses and feature verses that - aside from the punctuating riff - are unaccompanied by any instruments (or mostly unaccompanied, there's slight percussion throughout the verses in "Framed").  So I noticed that they were similar, but I didn't think any more about it.

But then I listen to "Riot in Cell Block #9," and the first line is "On July the 2nd, 1953."  That was pretty good evidence for the two songs' being related since "Framed" contains the line "He says, 'Where were you on the night of July 1953?'"  Both songs are musically similar, refer to July 1953, and mention law enforcement in one form or an-other.

But then I looked up the publication data and discovered that both were written by Leiber and Stoller, so the two songs are irrefutably related.  They both seem to have the same setting, although the singer/speaker couldn't be the same in both.