PLEDGE WEEK: “Hey Little Cobra” by the Rip Chords

This is a bonus episode, part of Pledge Week 2021.

Patreon backers get one of these with every episode of the main podcast.

If you want to get those and to support the podcast, please visit patreon.com/slash Andrew Hickey,

to sign up for a dollar a month or more.

In today's main episode, we look at the most prominent surf and hot rod duo of the early 60s.

So in this bonus, we're going to look at another duo who came from the same scene.

Or were they a trio?

Or a quartet?

Or a different duo?

Or were there six of them?

We're going to look at the rip chords and at their big hit, Hey Little Cobra.

Spring, little Cobra, getting ready to strike.

Spring, milk, cobra, with all your might.

Spring,

The Ripcords started out as a duo, Phil Stewart and Ernie Bringus, from Inglewood, California, the next town over from Hawthorne, where the Beach Boys grew up.

Stewart and Bringus originally called themselves the opposites, because they regarded their occupations as the opposite of each other.

Stewart was a private detective, while Bringus was studying to become a priest.

They noticed that Jan and Arnie had started out on Arwen Records, but then moved to another label, and so they tried to sell themselves to Arwen as a replacement for them.

Indeed, since Stewart's middle name was Jan, for a while they were going to be billed as Jan and Ernie.

That never happened, but they ended up getting signed as songwriters to Arwen's publishing arm, Daewin, and so coming to the attention of Terry Melcher.

Melcher signed Stewart and Bringus to a deal with Columbia, but changed their group name to the Rip Chords.

Their first single was actually by the Duo.

Here I Stand was a cover of a minor RB hit by Wade Flemons and featured Bring Us on lead, and the two Rip Chords overdubbed all the vocals themselves.

Here I stand.

All alone in my world of dreams.

All alone with my memories.

Yeah, here I stand.

The musicians on that track were all members of the session collective later known as the Wrecking Crew, including keyboard player Leon Mussell, guitarist Glenn Campbell, and drummer Earl Palmer.

The arrangement on that, and on many of the Rip Chord's future recordings, was by Jack Nitchy, who also did Phil Spector's arrangements.

Nitch's wife Gracia was also involved in the second Rip Chord single.

She was a session singer who was a member of The Blossoms for a while, and The Blossoms added vocals on Gone, and Gracia did the spoken intro.

turn, baby.

So I'm saying bye-bye.

The man singing, Yeah, she's gone, whoa, she's gone there wasn't either of Stewart or Bringus, but Terry Melcher's regular collaborator, Bruce Johnston.

We've seen Johnston turn up a few times in the main podcast, but at the time he'd just started making surf records in an attempt to jump on the latest bandwagon.

I said, Come up

and do the superstar.

Johnston came in to thicken the vocals on Gone, but he would soon be an essential part of the rip chords.

As the group were touring regularly, they got in another couple of musicians, Rich Rotkin and Arnie Marcus, to back them on stage.

Rotkin and Marcus didn't take part in the recordings, recordings, but Johnston and Melcher added additional voices.

But then Bringus, the lead singer, had quit the live line-up of the group because he couldn't perform live and keep up with his studies for the ministry, but he stayed in the studio.

So the live line-up of the band was Stewart, Rotkin, and Marcus, while the studio line-up was Stewart, Bringus, Johnston, and Melcher.

Their third single, Hey Little Cobra, was written by Carol Connors, the former lead singer of the Teddy Bears, who had started her own solo career a couple of years earlier with My Diary.

My diary,

oh my diary,

most precious thing I own.

In you, I write the dearest secrets I have known.

Connors spent much of the early 60s collaborating with people like Roger Christian and Gary Usher on beach party songs, but Hey Little Cobra was her first solo composition, though both Usher and Melcher have claimed to have helped her with it.

While all four studio rip chords are apparently on the record, The only vocalists who can be easily distinguished are Melcher and Johnston, who were never credited on the the records as anything other than producers.

According to the liner notes of the Rip Chord's original albums, the vocals were all by the official group members.

Hey Little Cobra, with Melcher on lead, ended up making number four on the charts.

Spring, little cover, getting ready to strike.

Spring, little cover, with all your might.

Spring, little cover, getting ready to strike.

Spring, little cover, with all your might.

Hey, little Cobra, don't you know you're gonna shut them down?

The follow-up, Three Window Coop, was a cover version of a January Dean album track written by Jam Berry and Roger Christian and made the top 30.

Three window coop, you're the toughest machine in

By this time, Johnston and Melcher were also recording as a duo under the name Bruce and Terry, making records like Summer Means Fun, a minor hit for them in 1964.

Yes, summer means fun,

But the age of the studio surf and hot rod group only lasted about 18 months, and the Ripcord's fourth single only made number 98, while the fifth didn't chart at all.

After that, the group split up.

Bruce and Terry continued recording as a duo until 1966, and some of their records were truly excellent, like the majestic Girl It's It's Alright Now.

We both know you did wrong,

but it's over now,

and you're back where you belong.

Girl, it's alright now,

all right

now.

You've come home, and what if you tied down?

It's all

right now.

By the time that came out, though, both men had gone on to the work that would be what they were remembered for in later decades.

Johnston joined the Beach Boys, and we'll be hearing much more about him throughout the 60s and 70s, and Terry Melcher was producing acts like the Birds, and we'll hear more of him, too.

The Rip Chords remain largely a footnote to their work, to the extent that much of the time when people talk about the rip chords, they don't even know that there was a real band at all.

Stewart, Rotkin, and Marcus reformed the rip chords and have sometimes toured under the name in recent decades, and put out an album of re-recorded versions of the hits a few years back, while Melcher and Johnston briefly revived the name for recordings to fill out a compilation cassette of hit re-recordings, mostly by Mike Love of the Beach Boys and Dean Torrance of Jan and Dean, released only in Radio Shack stores in the 80s.

Ernie Bringus now teaches theology and also seems to be the primary author of the group's Wikipedia page, which is largely devoted to making it very clear that Bringus really sang on the records his group put out.

the spell

of the drop and rockin' rhythm of the sea.