Coming up next... Tipsy from some serious ‘daydrinking,’ two members of one of England’s premier bands, The Hollies, composed a song about the Prohibition Era when alcohol was illegal. Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress was a rock epic that evolved into a mystery about a beautiful woman in a sexy dress. The Hollies purposely mimicked Elvis’s sound on the song using a vocal effect to give it some pop. It became the band’s biggest hit in the States, as well as one of the most played songs in classic rock radio history. But then The Hollies got sued for plagiarizing the song. But they didn’t get sued by ELVIS who they were deliberately trying to sound like… They got sued by a rival band Creedence Clearwater Revival. Then they found out that the song was used by the FBI on their twoway wrist radio to solve crimes. Find out what happened to the band next on Professor of Rock.


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Hey music junkies, Professor of Rock, always here to celebrate the greatest artists and the greatest songs of all time. If you’ve wondered what certain lyrics mean in a random song you hear on the radio, This is your place. Nostalgia all the time. Make sure to subscribe below right now by clicking the red button and click the bell so you never miss out. I’m excited about this one!

One morning, in June, 1971, The Hollies front man, Allan Clarke, met with the writing team of Roger Cook & Roger Greenaway at Cook’s office on Park Street in London to start a writing session.
Cook & Greenway didn’t just write songs, they composed huge hits, such as the International singalong anthem “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” that was a Top 10 record for two acts The Hillside Singers, and the New Seekers, as well as being used as the theme song for an iconic media campaign by the Coca Cola Company in the 70s:

Although it had been a very fertile room for them to collaborate, on that day, the inspiration wasn’t flowing in Cook’s office, so the guys decided to break away in the middle of the day to get some lunch, and have a few drinks at a nearby pub. After downing a bottle of wine, and capping their lunch with a little brandy, the guys grabbed the halfempty bottle of Brandy, and left the pub, returning to Cook’s office to resume their writing session.

The boys may have been ‘under the influence', but the alcohol didn’t impair their songwriting. Actually…the liquor, inadvertently, provided a ‘creative buzz,’ so to speak, that inspired the theme of a new song. In their ’tipsy’ state, they decided it would be fun to write a tune about bootleggers being chased by F.B.I. agents in the backdrop of Prohibition Era New York City. "Saturday night I was downtown working for the FBI sitting in a nest of bad men."

Clarke & Cook LOVED old Hollywood gangster films, like those James Cagney movies of the 30s and 40s with the bad guys shooting it out with the cops, smashing beer barrels and whiskey bottles in the street. They had the theme of the song, so the next move was coming up with a melody to continue to build the song’s structure. Cook took his place at an upright piano, with Clarke sitting in a chair next to the piano with his guitar in his lap.

Cook fooled around with a couple of sequences, and then locked into a sinistersounding blues riff one that he said he couldn’t take credit for. It was just some oldblued rock riff that was milling about in his head.