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The Letter

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve always been very fond of the 1967 hit “The Letter” by the Box Tops. I had a long-distance boyfriend at the time, about to be drafted and sent to Vietnam, and the song had particular resonance. But it was also just a catchy, catchy song. I never thought that later popular versions, such as the one by Joe Cocker, could hold a candle to it. Your mileage may differ, but I loved and still love the bouncy carnival-type instrumentation of the original, the beat, and the roar of the airplane at the end. Here’s the original:

Here’s Joe Cocker:

And this is so funny; apparently some sort of TV appearance where the Box Tops were required to lip-sync, and they’re not even pretending. Lead singer Alex Chilton was 16 years old here but looks (and more importantly sounds) older to me:

As with so many songs of that early era in rock, “The Letter” has an interesting backstory – interesting to me, at least:

Wayne Carson wrote “The Letter”, built on an opening line suggested by his father: “Give me a ticket for an aeroplane”. Carson included the song on a demo tape he gave to Chips Moman, owner of American Sound Studio in Memphis, Tennessee. When studio associate Dan Penn was looking for an opportunity to produce more, Moman suggested a local group, the DeVilles, who had a new lead singer, sixteen-year-old Alex Chilton. … Penn gave the group Carson’s demo tape for some songs to work up. With little or no rehearsal, the group arrived at American Sound to record “The Letter”. Chilton recalled:

“We set up and started running the tune down … [Dan] adjusted a few things on the organ sound, told the drummer not to do anything at all except the basic rhythm that was called for. No rolls, no nothin’. The bass player was playing pretty hot stuff, so he didn’t mess with what the bass player was doing.”

Penn added: “The guitar player had the lick right—we copied Wayne’s demo. Then I asked the keyboard player to play an ‘I’m a Believer’ type of thing.” Chilton sang the vocal live while the group was performing; Penn noted: “I coached him [Chilton] a little … told him to say ‘aer-o-plane,’ told him to get a little gruff, and I didn’t have to say anything else to him, he was hookin ’em, a natural singer.”He later explained, “[Chilton] picked it up exactly as I had in mind, maybe even better. I hadn’t even paid any attention to how good he sang because I was busy trying to put the band together … I had a bunch of greenhorns who’d never cut a record, including me”.

About thirty takes were required for the basic track. Then Penn had Mike Leech prepare a string and horn arrangement to give it a fuller sound. Leech recalled: “My very first string arrangement was ‘The Letter’, and the only reason I did that was because I knew how to write music notation … Nobody else in the group did or I’m sure someone else would have gotten the call.” Penn also overdubbed the sound of an airplane taking off to the track from a special effects record that had been checked out from the local library.

“Checked out from the local library.” I love these stories – there are so many of them in early rock and pop music. I recall finding out about how hard it was to get sound effects back then compared to today, and how creative people had to be, in connection with the Bee Gees hit song “Tragedy”:

By the way, Wayne Carson, writer of the song “The Letter,” was the child of two professional musicians. Here’s another great story:

In the mid 1960s he returned to Springfield, where he began working with music publisher and promoter Si Siman. Together they pitched songs for years, without success until Siman’s friend and producer Chet Atkins took a liking to a tune called “Somebody Like Me” and wanted to have Eddy Arnold record it. Carson was taken aback when he got a call from Arnold, one of the most successful country acts of all time. “Eddie said, ‘Wayne, I love the song, but it needs another verse’,” Carson recalled. “So I said, ‘Well, the third verse goes like this’ and I just wrote it right there over the phone.” The song became his first number one hit in late 1966 and spent four weeks on top of the country charts.

“The Letter” wasn’t a country song, but I suppose it could have been one if recorded in that style. Carson was also a co-writer on the following big hit, a song I like a great deal but which I never would have linked with “The Letter.” The song was recorded by many people, including Elvis, but I’m very fond of this version:

Comments

The Letter — 46 Comments

  1. I read Ray Davies sort of biographical book ‘Americana’ and in it he recounts the story of when he was shot by a mugger in New Orleans in 2004 and one of the people that befriended him after that was Alex Chilton who lived in New Orleans. They made for an interesting pair and they recorded this version of the Kinks song ‘Till The End Of The Day’.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvxUi6YAYXY

  4. The power of repetition in media – radio, and the filling of the mind with useless fluff.

    Not having heard the song in probablly 50 years, I can now remember the lyrics and the melody without having to click any of the links.

    The brain is truly an awesome thing, and sometimes useful.

  10. Lead singer Alex Chilton was 16 years old here but looks (and more importantly sounds) older to me…

    –neo

    I was blown away by Chilton’s age, when I learned it.

    What a great, perfect pop song! Sure, I’ll take the Box Tops over Joe Cocker, but Joe was great too.

  11. Cocker wasn’t a songwriter. He wasn’t even black, though he could do Ray Charles better than anyone else alive and the world was better for it.

    I never “heard” Cocker competing with the originals he covered. It was clear he loved the material and he went in swinging with the best that he had. His best could even impress Paul McCartney:
    _____________________________

    Paying tribute after Cocker’s death yesterday [December 23, 2014], McCartney looked back fondly on that cover [“With A Little Help From My Friends”], which Cocker further made his own during his appearance at Woodstock in 1969.

    “Joe was a lovely northern lad who I loved a lot, and like many people, I loved his singing,” he recalled. “I was especially pleased when he decided to cover ‘With a Little Help From My Friends.’ I remember him and [producer] Denny Cordell coming round to the studio and Saville Row and playing me what they recorded. It was just mind-blowing. He totally turned the song into a soul anthem, and I was forever grateful to him for doing that.”

    –Paul McCartney, “Is ‘Forever Grateful’ to Joe Cocker”
    https://ultimateclassicrock.com/paul-mccartney-joe-cocker-comment

    –Joe Cocker, “With A Little Help From My Friends”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXV4WyQMHFM

  12. huxley,

    Cocker’s version of ‘With A Little Help’ is definitely better than the original Ringo version and he also did a cover of ‘She Came In Through The Bathroom Window’ which was a McCartney song from the Abbey Road medley that I don’t think was as good as the original.

    Then there was ‘Feelin’ Alright’ by Traffic which he also covered.

    Cocker did write a little, He cowrote anyway songs like this

    ‘High Time We Went’

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mYgA9PFYz8

  13. Griffin:

    Lawsy! Joe did indeed cover “She Came In Through The Bathroom Window.” Maybe not as well as the Fab Four, but in the vicinity.

    (The song is actually a mostly true McCartney anecdote from the Apple Scruffs era.)

    For me, “Space Captain” was my Joe Cocker acid imprint, from which I’ve never recovered:
    ________________________________

    Once while traveling across the sky
    This lovely planet caught my eye
    And I flew close by
    And being curious I’m caught here
    Until I die
    Until we die
    Until we die
    Learning to live together
    Learning to live together
    Learning to live together
    Till we die

    –Joe Cocker, “Space Captain”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-407iUd_pFY
    ________________________________

    Maybe you had to be there.

    Or dosed, anyways.

  14. Any documentaries on YouTube about Chilton and Big Star (his 2nd band) are worth your time. The guy never hit it big or made much money. The Box Tops got ripped off by their record company. Big Star put out 2 great albums and had a cult following but their records were hard to find until 20 years after they split up and their guitarist died in a car crash.
    Chilton lived a modest life in New Orleans in a working class neighborhood. He quit music for a time and washed dishes in a restaurant. It helped him to quit drinking. He died of a sudden heart attack and had no health insurance at the time.
    Very interesting story, sad.

  16. I was more or less indifferent to “The Letter” at the time, and completely missed Big Star until years later. Now I can fairly be considered a devotee, if not cultist, of Big Star’s third album, which is basically an Alex Chilton solo album. Earlier this year I gave all three albums a close listen and did a pretty long blog post about them, if you’re interested:

    https://www.lightondarkwater.com/2023/02/big-star.html

    Chilton said in an interview somewhere that he really thought of himself as a performer, not a songwriter, which is maybe part of the reason why his later work does not get that kind of devotion–maybe he just didn’t normally put all that much effort into his writing, after Big Star. I listened to his 1979 album Like Flies On Sherbet (?!?!) one time and thought it was awful. Haven’t looked into any others.

    The band’s name is in part a reference you wouldn’t get unless you lived in the general area (Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama). I used to live not far from a Big Star grocery.

  17. Thanks for this post, Neo, great song. Back then pop music sounded like humans, not robots.
    But that picture, are they on a *train*??

  19. Going against the grain here. I never liked any of Joe Cocker’s work. I found everything he did grating and diminishing to the originals in all his covers. And in a similar sacrilegious vein, except for maybe one or two songs, I never was much of a fan of Janis Joplin either.

    Jordan Rivers: that’s because almost everything is autotuned nowadays and also limited to just 2 chords. See Rick Beato for reference.

  21. physicsguy

    I never was much of a fan of Janis Joplin either.

    I wasn’t a fan of hers, either. Her voice wasn’t that good. Not at all.

    I also liked The Letter. At the time it came out, I was still in high school and was working the counter at the local hippie hangout “greasy spoon,” run by two Chinese brothers. (The third had to sell out his interest when he got in trouble with gambling debts. Interesting tale, but will cut it short.).

    At the time, The Letter came up pretty often on the juke box plays.

    But “greasy spoon” was not quite fair. Its grinders (a.k.a. subs) were great. Toasted in the 500 degree oven for several minutes. Ditto their baked goods were pretty good.

  22. Leon Russell was Joe Cocker’s secret weapon. The combination of Cocker’s singing and Russell’s arranging/playing really worked. That said, I’m with neo, I like the original Box Tops version of “The Letter” better. I give the nod to Cocker on “Feelin’ Alright,” but mostly because of the piano riff. (Russell’s riff?)

  28. Yeah, sound effects were very different. I had a dozen or so albums of nothing but raw sound effects. Some pretty surreal. I was also into groups that used them a lot like Hawkwind.

  29. Did you know that “The Letter” by The Box Tops was a minute and 58 seconds long? Means nothing. Nil. But it takes them less than two minutes to accomplish what Jethro Tull takes hours to not accomplish!

    Phillip Seymour’s Hoffman as Lester Bangs in Almost Famous. God I love that movie.

    https://youtu.be/ED3mufU58bk?si=zHwsAeTTIdsEAPK0

  31. Leon Russell was Joe Cocker’s secret weapon. The combination of Cocker’s singing and Russell’s arranging/playing really worked.

    Bauxite:

    Agreed. Most people don’t know how good Leon Russell was.

    First off, he was a member of the Wrecking Crew, that elite group of LA session musicians who seemed to have backed half the radio hits which came out of LA in those days.

    So, when Cocker discovered he had a contractual obligation to tour in eight days, Russell had the chops and connections to put together a large rock band quick, although Cocker had just gotten off a tour and was dead tired. This would become the “Mad Dogs & Englishmen” tour.

    Russell rehearsed and led the band. Eight days later they took the show on the road and gave one of the great rock tours, also turned into a concert film.

    When I watch the film, I see Russell as the Duke Ellington of Rock, a master musician leading a big band — over 20 members, the only big band I can think of in rock — as a perfect glorious unit.

    After Russell’s star had faded, Elton John, who was influenced by Russell’s keyboard work, sought Russell to collaborate on a double-album, which became “The Union.” It went gold and was nominated for a Grammy.

    RIP Leon Russell (2016)

  32. Cocker rose to the occasion on “Mad Dogs & Englishmen” — it is my favorite album of his — but it seemed his existing fatigue, conflicts with Russell, and weaknesses for drugs and alcohol, left him seriously depleted.

    He got lost in LA for two years, running himself down, and making no music. Later he got back on track and had some hits, but he never recovered that groove of his first three epic albums.

    RIP Joe Cocker (2014)

  33. Didn’t follow the music, nor the backstories as so many commenters have. But, in dorms and apartments and cars…it was all over the place.
    Liked “The Letter” for its beat, tune, such as it was, and its sentiment. Guy’s been away, doubting what he left behind and suddenly…it’s all coming together for him and it’s glorious.
    Never been in that situation, so it’s vicarious good feelings for the lucky guy.
    My arrangements were more conventional.

  37. Windy by The Assocaition
    ==
    “Windy” is fun. So’s the work of Spanky and Our Gang. A valuable but different quality.

  38. I find Cocker and Joplin’s singing and performances cartoonish and grating.
    —
    Not familiar with the one. The other was a fine performer.

  39. But it takes them less than two minutes to accomplish what Jethro Tull takes hours to not accomplish!
    ==
    Pithy, but I doubt Mr. Bangs could have answered any follow up questions.

  40. Soul Deep was a bit too slow for me, somehow. And maybe the voice is not as soulful?
    I often like the deep whiskey smokin’ Tom Waits’ voice – but recently found one even better, and far far better than Joe Cocker:
    Tom’s Diner (Cover) – AnnenMayKantereit x Giant Rooks
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5r3B7yz6J68

    Can’t Get You out of My Head (Cover) – AnnenMayKantereit x Parcels
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RacxNskxySo

    Roxanne (Cover) – AnnenMayKantereit & Milky Chance
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI4ssGtfdxw

    His voice is fantastic in duets, but here he’s alone:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxUcmf8PI4o

    I’m planning to get, buy even (not pirate!), his album.
    German band, so … young. Amazing.

  41. Let’s get the debate going somewhere else. Willie Nelson? I don’t get it. Boring songs, below average voice and average guitarist. Just a cult

  42. Neo: The strings in the original version are one of the reasons it is so effective. They carry the feeling of longing and missing someone you care for remarkably effectively.

    I’ve always been impressed with certain instruments and how they carry a massive part of the feeling suited to a song. And with how a writer/lyricist can match up specific instruments to he mood they’re out to carry.

    The Australian New Wave band Split Enz was remarkably good at this — the lead singer/songwriter Neil Finn did a remarkably good job of picking his instrumentation.

    An example of this is their early hit, “One Step Ahead”, with an almost etherial, ghostly element to it:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NduGJ0F5sdI
    That song, on MTV, was what got me into the band in the first place. And they never disappointed me.

    Another is Finn singing about his child in the womb, “Our Day”, and he gets a beautifully demanding tone set to it…
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gNlaExfKvI&list=OLAK5uy_lB0aaphR0gWms1pf3M4HnKJgQ5BEApdYo&index=5
    “we have promised him a future so here’s hoping that tomorrow is, was, and will ever be” (mind you this is 1983, at the height of 80s Cold War tensions), followed by a shift to the pulsing demand, “And we’re waiting, now, waiting for our child, to… come… The old age is near the end, the new one’s just begun….” and there’s a plaintive element of hope as the last lyrics come forth.
    (That’s the whole “Conflicting Emotions” album at the link — highly recommended)

    Then there’s 1982’s “Take A Walk” (Aussies, mind you, so the meaning of the term aboriginal term “Walkabout” applies — anyone not familiar with it should look it up.)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Y3eKfjZMpQ&list=PLZVCiDcSBlchBP5VSt1GLyNFStEZbf_nP&index=7
    “Kind voice, from yesterday… give love, fill up every space… Now I laugh, at Simple Truth, sneer, and frown, like we all do… But when the long night awakes, with memories a midnight feast, feel the boy in me escape, there’s a field of frost beneath my feet… RUN, never tire! Run, BOY!! Forever and ever!!” and the piano so perfectly dances off the emotions… and flips back and forth between the discord of adulthood and the freedom and simplicity of youth.
    This link has the “Time and Tide” album, also highly recommended.

    Anyone who likes “Old Wave”, and hasn’t encountered Split Enz should check them out.

  43. I want to specifically mention this one, from Conflicting Emotions:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6YD4rjVIO8&list=OLAK5uy_lB0aaphR0gWms1pf3M4HnKJgQ5BEApdYo&index=3

    “Message to My Girl”.
    Its instrumentation carries such a wistfulness and desire, it’s almost overpowering, as he talks about his feelings for her, and how he keeps almost saying it, grazing past it every time… never ever actually saying “I love you”, but yearning to do so but hesitating at the final step, because of vulnerability and fear…

  45. Wow – not often you come across love for Split Enz. That was the band that made me realize I did, in fact, like alternative music, which wasn’t called “alternative” back then, just New Wave or Punk. One Step Ahead is great.

  46. Let’s get the debate going somewhere else. Willie Nelson? I don’t get it. Boring songs, below average voice and average guitarist. Just a cult
    ==
    Mr. Nelson cannot Jedi mindtrick people into attending his concerts or buying his records.

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