Only Solitaire Reviews: The Applejacks

	THE APPLEJACKS
	Album released: October 1964	V	A	L	U	E	More info:
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Tracks: 1) Tell Me When; 2) Wishing Will Never Make It So; 3) Over Suzanne; 4) Hello Josephine; 5) As A Matter Of Fact; 6) Too Much Monkey Business; 7) Memories Of You; 8) Ain’t That Just Like Me; 9) Kansas City; 10) I Wonder; 11) Three Little Words; 12) Baby Jane; 13) No Time; 14) See If She Cares; 15) What’s The Matter Little Girl; 16) What’d I Say; 17) Like Dreamers Do; 18) Boom-Boom-Boom-Boom (Everybody Fall Down); 19) You’re The One For Me; 20) I Go To Sleep.
REVIEW Despite being mildly notorious for being yet another early UK pop-rock act with a female member playing an instrument (this time, the bass guitar), the Applejacks were nowhere near as special as the Honeycombs — perhaps because their producer, Mike Leander, was nowhere near as «special» as Joe Meek, and because their sources of musical material were far more scattered and chance-dependent than the Honeycombs’ connections. Nevertheless, both bands made history as essentially one-hit wonders, and in both cases, this was not fully justified. If the Honeycombs, in an alternate universe, might have gone on to become a leading force in the psychedelic revolution, then the Applejacks, in the same imaginary universe, could have enjoyed a solid career in power-pop, becoming the equivalent of a Big Star or a Badfinger.
The fact that they did not, I think, owes more to unfortunate circumstances and a lack of willpower than to a lack of talent; at least, what little musical legacy the Applejacks left us is certainly no worse (and I’d say, somewhat better) than, say, the early singles of a young Davy Jones, a.k.a. David Bowie. They may have started out as Solihull’s humble imitators of the Shadows (going quite a long time without a singer, before recruiting Al Jackson in 1962), but by the time Beatlemania came along, they’d played enough gigs around their hometown to work out a steady, cohesive groove and begin putting their own group touch on the rock and pop numbers covered in their setlist. And it was a fairly independent groove — not too similar to the Merseybeat, not at all close to the Tottenham sound, and quite far removed from the typical R&B trends of the time. The most important musician in the band, who really gave the Applejacks their own sound, was, I am sorry to say, not Megan Davies (though she did hold that bass steady, she got nothing on Tina Weymouth), but rather keyboard player Don Gould (no relation to Glenn, I’m afraid), who had a chirping, lilting, smoothly flowing sound, among the best piano sounds you can hear on early British Invasion records (and many, if not most of those bands did not even have a regular keyboard player). One thing the band did not have, unfortunately, was a songwriter from their own ranks. They could play, but they could not compose at all — depending on strokes of luck for success. The first such stroke was also the biggest: ‘Tell Me When’, written by outside songwriters Les Reed and Geoff Stephens and offered to the band just as they were being signed to Decca. It’s not a great song, just a happy, upbeat pop-rocker, but it’s catchy enough and it has the distinction of seducing you from its very first notes: I am not quite sure how Gould gets that sound, it’s either electric piano or regular piano run through some whacko sound effects, but anyway, its chiming overtones are just as weird for the time as the electronic wizardry that Joe Meek ran for the Honeycombs. It went all the way to #7 in the UK, grazed the American charts for a brief while, and temporarily reassured Decca that they made the right choice signing those guys up. Their second single, not included on the original self-titled LP but now available as a bonus track, was ‘Like Dreamers Do’ — a Beatles reject, generously donated to the band by Paul, which you can now hear the way it was done by the Beatles on the Anthology series. Much to the Applejacks’ honor, they reworked the song to match their own style — and, repeating the formula of the first single, enriched it with another perfect piano riff from Gould. They most certainly made it less rockier than it used to be, but the proto-baroque pop piano riff compensates for this fully, in a certain way bringing the song to completion. It sounds now less than the Beatles and more like a rich, autumnal Europop explosion; unfortunately, listeners did not feel the pull nearly as strongly as they did with ‘Tell Me When’, and the record only hit #20. Third time was hardly the charm, either, with ‘Three Little Words’, an even slower and more bombastic single contributed by Gordon Mills, who was making his career as a songwriter at the time (the Searchers’ ‘Hungry For Love’; the Pirates’ ‘I’ll Never Get Over You’), and would later go on to manage the likes of Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck. Again, the song starts out with a simple and sharp piano riff from Gould, but its insistent three-note pattern is neither as weird as the one on ‘Tell Me When’ nor as chic as on ‘Like Dreamers Do’, and the song as a whole is just a bit too cumbersome and lumbering to match the light, bouncy excitement of the first two singles (though I could most certainly envisage it turned into a rip-roaring distorted power-pop classic by the likes of Cheap Trick). Still, the Decca people were nice enough to allow the kids to record an entire LP — the one and only Applejacks LP ever released. Produced by Mike Smith, who’d previously worked with the likes of Billy Fury (not to be confused with Mike Smith of the Dave Clark Five), the album included two of the band’s three hit singles (no idea why they omitted ‘Like Dreamers Do’ — probably did not want to have to pay Lennon and McCartney any extra royalties), a bunch of classic rock and roll covers, and a few more contributions from contemporary outside songwriters. Unfortunately, it failed to chart; I guess that by October ’64, people had had enough of seeing ‘Too Much Monkey Business’ covered by everybody, and passed up on the occasion to uncover yet another dimension to this pillar of rock’n’roll. It’s actually not the worst version of ‘Too Much Monkey Business’ out there — while some may say that the Applejacks are stripping the classics from their rippin’ energy, I’d rather say that they are giving them more of a consciously emphasized pop shine. In this case, for instance, they slightly slow down the tempo in order to make Chuck’s proto-rap lyrics more melodic and understandable, while also injecting a bit of nastiness into the vocal performance to preserve the song’s pissed off meaningfulness. Martin Baggott’s lead guitar is the weakest element — too stiff and amateurish; it would have been much better to just edit him out and replace the guitar solo with something from Don Gould (whose sprightly piano playing does a lot of good to their rendition of ‘Kansas City’). There is also a hilarious rendition of Fats Domino’s ‘Hello Josephine’, which the kids lift from Jerry Lee Lewis rather than Fats — speedier, rock’n’rollier, and with the famous laughing bits of the Killer remade in a more thuggish British fashion: so silly it is almost guaranteed to put a smile on your face, especially when the band goes completely bonkers during the final bars (in a way the Beatles never allowed themselves — you only hear them having that much chaotic fun in the studio on the archival outtakes). Less impressive are their takes on Ray Charles (‘What’d I Say’) and the Coasters (‘Ain’t That Just Like Me’), but there is still enough liveliness in the performances to make them quite listenable. Unfortunately, when it comes to less familiar songs, particularly the ones written specially for the band, very few, if any, of them rise to the level of ‘Tell Me When’ and ‘Like Dreamers Do’. On bouncy numbers like ‘As A Matter Of Fact’, they try to recapture the muse of ‘Tell Me When’, but even despite more of Gould’s pretty piano tone, the melody feels too clichéd and the vocal flourishes in the chorus lean too close to generic Merseybeat, which is precisely what the hit singles tried to avoid. Slower numbers are occasionally more interesting, like ‘Over Suzanne’, which tries to marry the slow, moody and morose blues-waltzing of Ann-Margret’s ‘I Just Can’t Understand’ to a somewhat poppier vocal melody; but they can also feel draggy, like ‘What’s The Matter Little Girl’, whose echoey mystery is intriguing for the first thirty seconds but then just repeats itself over and over with absolutely no interesting development. In the end, the Applejacks turn out to really thrive on second-rate ideas by their betters, with enough talent to bring a half-baked great idea to completion but not enough talent to rework mediocre ideas into great ones. Thus, it is nice to see the CD edition of the album, loaded with bonus tracks, end on their early 1965 single ‘I Go To Sleep’, where they take a beautiful Ray Davies demo (the one you can now hear as a bonus track on Kinda Kinks) and turn it into another pretty, Gould-dominated, pop ballad, with Megan Davies adding her chirpy vocals as an echo to Jackson’s lead. In some ways, Ray’s lonesome, melancholy solo demo is superior — it certainly agrees better with the idea of a brokenhearted protagonist locked away in his room at night — but it also makes sense to give the song a bit of an enchanted fairy-tale arrangement, and this is something the Applejacks were quite capable of doing. Unfortunately, the band lost their Decca contract soon after that, and in 1966, financial troubles led them to accept a 3-year contract to serve as official entertainers on board of several trans-Atlantic luxury liners, which pretty much isolated them from every scene and eventually broke up the band. Who knows what might have happened, had Decca been more lenient and had the band members been more persistent in improving their power-pop schtick? Just add this question to the never ending pool of unanswered mysteries of the universe, right next to the superstring theory, the Loch Ness monster, and the exact number of B. B. King’s children.

Recording years	Main genre	Music sample
1964–1967	Classic pop rock	I Go To Sleep (1965)