Was 'Gimme Some Lovin'' by the Spencer Davis Group Stolen?
- edgarstreetbooks
- 4 days ago
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‘200 Greatest 60s Rock Songs Vol. 2’ Book Excerpt
Frank Mastropolo
Guitarist Spencer Davis, bassist Muff Winwood, and Muff’s 14-year-old brother Steve Winwood on keyboards and vocals formed the Spencer Davis Group in 1963. The group had №1 hits in the UK with two songs by Jamaican-born Jackie Edwards: “Keep on Running” and “Somebody Help Me.” In 1966, manager Chris Blackwell decided the band had to write a song of their own.
Blackwell brought in Brooklyn-born producer Jimmy Miller to work with the group in a rehearsal room at London’s Marquee Club.
“Muff played this bass riff at me,” Davis said in Classic Rock. “I thought it was nice, so I added some ascending chords while I told him to keep playing it. I started playing minor chords, but Steve went: ‘No, play majors.’ Then — bang! — it worked. There were no lyrics at that point.”
“We started to mess about with riffs, and it must have been eleven o’clock in the morning,” Muff recalled in the liner notes of Eight Gigs A Week: The Spencer David Group — The Steve Winwood Years. “We hadn’t been there half an hour, and this idea just came. We thought, bloody hell, this sounds really good. We fitted it all together and by about twelve o’clock, we had the whole song.
“Steve had been singing ‘Gimme, gimme some loving’ — you know, just yelling anything, so we decided to call it that. We worked out the middle eight and then went to a cafe that’s still on the corner down the road. Blackwell came to see how we were going on, to find our equipment set up and us not there, and he storms into the cafe, absolutely screaming, ‘How can you do this?’ he screams.
“Don’t worry, we said. We were all really confident. We took him back, and said, how’s this for half an hour’s work, and we knocked off ‘Gimme Some Lovin’’ and he couldn’t believe it. We cut it the following day and everything about it worked. That very night we played a North London club and tried it out on the public. It went down a storm.”
“Gimme Some Lovin’” was a №7 hit in 1966. Decades later, the band was accused of stealing the bassline of “Gimme Some Lovin’” from Homer Banks and Willa Dean Parker, who wrote the 1966 soul tune “(Ain’t That) A Lot of Love.” An unsuccessful lawsuit followed.
“I think I came up with the bass line,” said Muff, “then somebody played me the Homer Banks song and said that I’d copied it. But I hadn’t even heard that record, even though it’s extraordinarily similar. I could have heard it subconsciously in a club somewhere, but I know that the two records are almost identically timed as far as release dates go.”
Frank Mastropolo is author of 200 Greatest 60s Rock Songs Vol. 2, part of the Greatest Performances series. For more on our latest projects, visit Edgar Street Books.
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