“I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore” and Neither Should You
I’ve been writing about the Rascals, and/or The Young Rascals, more than I expected. As a teenager growing up in the New York suburbs, we felt a kind of ownership of the Rascals, as they had grown up in nearby New Jersey and New York’s Westchester County, and signed a record contract after drawing big crowds and music industry insiders to their 1965 summer residency at The Barge. Long Island can claim them because of their gigs at The Barge, a semi-floating nightclub in Westhampton Beach, where the now fabled Hamptons begin and run east.
Celebrities and record company executives joined teens from the tri-state area to dig the Young Rascals at the Barge, who became the first white rock group to sign with Atlantic Records. Even their corny Little Lord Fauntleroy outfits, and knickers (soon discarded) couldn’t crush their cool. Atlantic’s head of publicity and longtime veteran of the music business trade magazines, Bob Rolontz, wrote the album-back liner notes for their debut album, The Young Rascals, in 1966.
The Rascals had an A-team behind them: Beatles’ Shea Stadium promoter Sid Bernstein was their co-manager when his clout mattered. The Young Rascals get production credits on their first two albums, but the recording engineers behind them were Tom Dowd, Atlantic’s finest pair of ears, and Roy Cicala, who in 1968 became synonymous with New York’s Record Plant studio. Dowd and Arif Mardin get “production supervision” credit on that first album.
When summer was over, the Rascals moved their act to Manhattan in 1965, playing at Harlow’s on East 79th Street, and The Phone Booth, on East 55th Street (the former Blue Angel). According to Rolontz, Bob Dylan, various Rolling Stones, and Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits all stopped by to catch the buzz.
It could have been one of those early rock celebrity bar band burnouts, except that the Rascals — Felix Cavaliere, organ; Gene Cornish, guitar; Dino Danelli, drums; Gene Cornish, guitar; and Eddie Brigati, vocals and maracas — were the best bar band since the Beatles played the Star Club in Hamburg and the Cavern in Liverpool. They didn’t write a lot of their own songs at first, but their covers offered an original twist to familiar or obscure material.
The Rascals in 1969. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/publicity photo/public domain.
My first experience with the Rascals was on the car radio. In 1965, I took out the family car for a spin around the neighborhood. There were few cars with FM radio in those days, especially in my beat-up Pontiac Catalina, but we were blessed with numerous AM radio music stations, including WABC/770, WMCA/570, WINS/1010, not to mention soul station WWRL/1600. The Rascals would eventually appear on all of them, including WWRL (“People Got to Be Free”) as the most convincing and natural torch bearers of what became known as “blue-eyed soul.”
I was driving around the neighborhood, up Shelter Rock Road to where the Northern State Parkway and the Long Island Expressway met and paralleled, still a confusing density of traffic lights and turn signals. WABC’s afternoon DJ Dan Ingram had picked the Young Rascals’ “I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore” as his song of the week, and the moment Eddie Brigati’s voice jumped out of the speakers, my brain circuits overloaded and I told myself to get away from the traffic, pull over, and play it loud.
It was written by the team of Pam Sawyer and Laurie (aka Lori) Burton. Cicala would marry Lori Burton, and they ran the Record Plant together for many years. British-born Pam Sawyer became a staff writer at Motown, and among her many co-writes was “Love Child” for Diana Ross and the Supremes. Sawyer had the Jackson 5 make a demo of “I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore,” (it appears on a discounted J5 Motown hits album), but even young Michael can’t touch the Rascals version.
I found a short review of “I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore,” on the site Newspapers.com, to which I pay a lot to subscribe and is difficult, at times impossible, to navigate. The short item is from the Worcester News...Not Worcester, Mass., but Worcester News of Worcester and Hereford in the U.K., December 10, 1965. “Opens with a crashing drum roll and then a voice [that] part sings, part talks the first line, which builds at the end with the rest of the group joining in. Follows the same pattern throughout the record. Very effective, with an organ dominated backing. Way-out instrumental break.” [Four stars.]
I would only add that after that opening drum roll, the voices led by Eddie Brigati give out with a roaring “Yeah!” that must have been packaged with a hormonal audio stimulant, some extra serotonin boost that made me giddy. It is a weird and wonderful track that was mainly a hit on the East Coast: It didn’t make the top 50 nationally.
But the Rascals first trip to the West Coast was newsworthy. The Santa Ana (Orange County) Register ran a story (Dec. 28, 1965) about the Young Rascals “set to invade Hollywood” to reopen the Whiskey A Go Go with a two-week run in January, 1966, “after the group closes at the Teenorama Show at the New York Coliseum . . . after eight record-breaking weeks at The Phone Booth in New York.” Somehow, the Teenorama show flew right under my radar.
There was only original song on The Young Rascals debut album: a hip-shaking, high energy rocker “Do You Feel It” by Cavaliere and Cornish, sung by Felix. But the covers conveyed the band’s R&B savvy mixed with the kind of ballads a wedding band might need to give the old folks a spin on the dance floor: “I Believe,” a standard written in the 1950s by my LI neighbor Ervin Drake and three others, was a song of hope and recorded by everyone from Frankie Laine to Mahalia Jackson to Elvis Presley. There was another Sawyer-Burton song, “Baby, Let’s Wait,” which was about going to the altar before going “all the way”; and a mid-tempo song by an American band that pretended it was British, “Just a Little” by the Beau Brummels.
The album opener, and B-side of “I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore,” was “Slowdown,” by Larry Williams, already part of the Beatles’ early repertory. The Rascals gave it their own identity, especially when Felix takes it to a pause, shouting: “Now cool it!” That is the version the garage bands in my neighborhood copied.
It is side two where the Young Rascals emerge as the soul group they always would be. I mean, they cover two gritty Wilson Pickett songs: “Mustang Sally” and “In the Midnight Hour.” (The “Wicked Pickett” was one of Atlantic’s great soul stars.) Also, there was the tricky decision to do “Like a Rolling Stone,” the full six minute version, rather than finding a less well-known Bob Dylan tune at a time when seemingly scores of artists were having hits with Dylan album tracks, from the Byrds to the Turtles. Since we have photos of Dylan at the Atlantic Records party for the Young Rascals, I wonder if they played “Like a Rolling Stone” and what his reaction might have been: It had been a hit, making Dylan a rock star, only months before the Rascals version.
Of course I’m leaving one song out. The track, and song from this album that made The Young Rascals rock stars was “Good Lovin’,” which went to No. 1 on the Billboard singles chart in March 1966.
This was not a Rascals original, but had been a minor R&B hit in 1965 by the West Coast group The Olympics, best-remembered for their novelty humor songs in the vein of Atlantic and Leiber and Stoller’s vocal group The Coasters: Olympics hits included “Big Boy Pete” and “Western Movies.”
Soon the Rascals would drop the “Young” from their name, but not until they started having hits writing their own songs: The second album, “Collections” (also 1966), includes band-written originals such as “Come On Up,” “Love is a Beautiful Thing,” “Lonely Too Long” and “What is the Reason,” along with ballad standards such as “More” and “Since I Fell for You. There are soul covers like “Mickey’s Monkey” and “Land of A 1000 Dances.” (If you, like me, were foolish enough not to buy The Miracles’ “Mickey’s Monkey” album when it came out, you might not have discovered how well Smokey Robinson sings “Land of 1000 Dances.”
By the following summer, and for nearly 60 summers on, we’d be smokin’ and “Groovin’” (“on a sunny afternoon”), until the inevitable pressures took their toll. (I’ve left out many more Rascals hits.) But through the 1960s, only the Beach Boys could match the Rascals string of hits that broke the UK British Invasion chart monopoly. Truly American bands.
This article is reprinted from Wayne Robins’ Substack and is used here by permission. Wayne’s Words columnist Wayne Robins writes the Critical Conditions Substack:
https://waynerobins.substack.com/.
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