EDDIE COCHRAN
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1955–1960 |
Early rock’n’roll |
Summertime Blues (1958) |
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- Singin’
To My Baby (1957)
- Eddie Cochran
(1960)
EDDIE COCHRAN
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Recording years |
Main genre |
Music sample |
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1955–1960 |
Early rock’n’roll |
Summertime Blues (1958) |
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contents:
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Album
released: Nov. 1957 |
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Tracks: 1) Sittin’ In The Balcony; 2)
Completely Sweet; 3) Undying Love; 4) I’m Alone Because I Love You; 5) Lovin’
Time; 6) Proud Of You; 7) Mean When I’m Mad; 8) Stockings And Shoes; 9) Tell
Me Why; 10) Have I Told You Lately That I Love You; 11) Cradle Baby; 12) One
Kiss. |
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REVIEW
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The way I see it, Eddie Cochran had precisely one talent which made him somewhat
special — he was a gifted and creative songwriter, putting his own special
musical and narrative twist on the rockabilly formula whenever Mother
Inspiration came down from the sky and cuddled him, which was not too often, but often enough for us to
fondly remember him even after he became too old for the 27 Club. As a
singer, as a guitar player, as a personality he was good, but no Elvis, no
Chuck, and no Gene respectively. Therefore, any intelligent talent nurturer
would have done the obvious — namely, let the boy write his own songs, and
let him write them the way he wanted to. Alas, Singin’ To My Baby simply miscasts Cochran by (a) having only
five of his compositions and (b) way too often featuring him as a young and
rowdy crooner rather than a young and rowdy rock’n’roll troubadour. The average sound of this album is that of a Gene
Vincent on tranquilizers: reverb- and echo-laden guitar and vocal tracks with
a country-derived melodic basis, but slower, softer, more «gentlemanly» than
the Blue Caps’ wild raves. A good example is the album opener ‘Sittin’ In The
Balcony’, originally released by struggling country artist Johnny Dee — if
you like the track and end up excited by it rather than bored, the rest of
the record will be «completely sweet»; but I somehow find this kind of
half-hearted «already not quite country, but not yet proper rockabilly» music
traitorous to the spirit of both country and rockabilly, and would rather
have me some Hank Williams and some
Gene Vincent instead, rather than an emasculated mish-mash of both. Eddie
does play a nice «twirling» guitar solo in the middle, though. The only song of Eddie’s own off this album, I
think, which has been occasionally covered by other artists is ‘Completely
Sweet’, with a non-trivial key and time signature change that makes it
half-pop, half-blues rock — a quirky little trick, even if the sum of the
parts ends up being more impressive than each individual part. The other four
songs, however, are doo-wop-influenced pop ditties and ballads which seem to
suck up to Elvis way too much:
‘Tell Me Why’ tries too hard to be ‘Loving You’, ‘Mean When I’m Mad’ tries
too hard to be ‘Too Much’, ‘One Kiss’ tries too hard to be ‘Teddy Bear’, and although
‘Undying Love’ has no immediate prototype that springs to mind, its overall
arrangement and style is still early RCA-era Elvis to the core. The problem
is, while Eddie did have a fairly impressive vocal range and could plunge
almost to the same trembling depths of warm bass as the King, it did not come
as naturally to him as it did to Elvis — Cochran’s singing style on ‘Twenty
Flight Rock’ and ‘Summertime Blues’ is far more his than this soulful stuff. And, of course, he never could boast
the same studio resources as Elvis when it came to backing bands and sound
engineers. And these are the self-penned songs: predictably, it
gets worse when we get to outside songwriters. At least when the songs
moderately rock out (Terry Fell’s ‘Cradle Baby’), the toe-tapping factor and
Eddie’s nicely shaped guitar solos push back the boredom factor; but the
ultra-slow, reverb-drenched, overdramatic rendition of ‘Have I Told You
Lately That I Love You’ needs to be heard in order to much better appreciate
the relatively listener-friendly Elvis version. Worst of all, after a brief
while, even if the album itself is mercifully short, all the songs start to
fall together — when you use the exact same production style to create the
exact same atmosphere, you at least have to be AC/DC and provide memorable
distinctive riffs to keep things afloat, and this is not the kind of material
that requires distinctive riffs. The truly cruel thing, of course, is that in the
next two years of Eddie’s career, when he was putting out a small, but steady
flow of really great singles (‘Summertime Blues’, ‘C’mon Everybody’,
‘Somethin’ Else’), his record label never gave him a proper chance — all of
his good stuff would appear on LPs posthumously. Perhaps he did not have the
musical vision of a Buddy Holly, but he did have the potential to grow into a
first-rate rock’n’roll songwriter, and although we certainly cannot blame the
executives at Liberty Records for failing to foresee the tragedy of April 16,
1960, we most definitely can and should blame them for misjudging and
misdirecting the talents of their most talented artist while he was still
alive. |
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Album
released: April 1960 |
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Tracks: 1) C’mon Everybody; 2) Three Steps
To Heaven; 3) Cut Across Shorty; 4) Have I Told You Lately That I Love You;
5) Hallelujah, I Love Her So; 6) Sittin’ In The Balcony; 7) Summertime Blues; 8) Lovin’ Time; 9) Somethin’ Else; 10) Tell Me Why; 11) Teenage Heaven;
12) Drive In Show; 13*) Jeannie, Jeannie, Jeannie; 14*) Pocketful Of Hearts;
15*) Don’t Ever Let Me Go; 16*) Teresa; 17*) Pretty Girl; 18*) Bo Weevil
Song; 19*) I Remember. |
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REVIEW
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Disentangling the chaotic track listing, we can see
that Liberty did indeed try to include here most of Eddie’s A-sides that
managed to chart during his lifetime — from 1957, ‘Sittin’ In The Balcony’
(#18 — already released on Eddie’s first LP) and ‘Drive In Show’ (#82); from
1958, ‘Summertime Blues’ (#8) and ‘C’mon Everybody’ (#35); from 1959,
‘Teenage Heaven’ (#99) and ‘Somethin’ Else’ (#58); and from early 1960,
‘Three Steps To Heaven’ (#108, but, ironically, #1 in the UK — apparently,
since Eddie perished while on tour in the UK, this was a bigger piece of news
for the British public than the American one, and they responded by sending
his latest single to the top of the charts, especially since it was so
gruesomely and prophetically titled). The most glaring omission in this list
of classics is, of course, ‘Twenty Flight Rock’, which still remains as one
of the best-remembered Cochran songs — but since it did not chart (rather,
its fame was tied in to the popularity of The
Girl Can’t Help It movie), there is at least some logic behind this which
we can understand, if not forgive. To this was added a cover of Ray Charles’
‘Hallelujah, I Love Her So’ from 1958 (did not chart in the US, but did chart in the UK — actually, I
believe that, rather than the
original, served as the role model for the Beatles’ early cover version);
‘Cut Across Shorty’, the B-side to ‘Three Steps To Heaven’; and three more
songs taken from Singin’ To My Baby
to pad out the record. The European release wisely deleted all that stuff,
replacing it with the somewhat unjustly forgotten ‘Jeannie, Jeannie, Jeannie’
from 1958 (#94 on the US charts), the non-charting ‘Teresa’ (also from 1958),
and a bunch of additional B-sides, most of them rather lightweight but still
a better choice than filling up the empty space with previously released LP
tracks that clearly did not belong there. All in all, if you only threw ‘Twenty Flight Rock’
into the bargain, this Memorial Album
would likely be the only Eddie Cochran album to own for a general lover of
Fifties’ rock, as opposed to a particular admirer of Eddie as an individual
genius of his generation. While he did leave behind a surprisingly bulky body
of material, allowing Liberty Records to feed off his hard-working ethics for
another half-decade (in much the same way that Coral Records would go on
feasting on Buddy Holly’s legacy), I don’t think it would be an exaggeration
to say that pretty much everything that truly matters about Eddie is to be
found here — at the very least, do not expect to find any additional depth or
breadth to his talent while rummaging through all those other posthumous
albums. But then again, you can more or less fit everything that truly
mattered about guys like Little Richard, Carl Perkins, or Gene Vincent onto
one CD as well — and none of those
guys died in a car crash when they were just 21 years old, so Eddie at least
can be excused. And the first thing that truly mattered about Eddie
on this particular album is, of course, ‘Summertime Blues’. Prior to that
one, all of Cochran’s singles were strictly about the ladies, either in terms
of achievement (‘Drive In Show’) or temporary failure (‘Twenty Flight Rock’);
‘Summertime Blues’ single-handedly established him as the leading rock
philosopher of the teenage mind set — what Mose Allison said in a more
generalized manner with "a young man ain’t got nothin’ in the world
these days", Eddie was professing with more specific examples, pointing
out how the entire world, from his parents to his employers to even his
politicians seems to be conspiring to keep him away from his girls and his
fast cars. Musically, too, ‘Summertime Blues’ remains his highest
achievement, with a boogie bass line from the rockabilly stock, a swingin’
acoustic riff from the Buddy Holly pop textbook, and the comic deep vocal
response by the song’s antagonists (allegedly inspired by the Kingfish
character from Amos ’n’ Andy,
although the most obvious musical associations would probably be with the
vaudeville bits from the Coasters). It’s a bit sad how the original recording has been
pretty much obliterated by the heavy versions of the Sixties — Blue Cheer, T.
Rex, and especially The Who, downplaying the song’s original lightweight
humor in favor of emphasizing its rebellious-aggressive potential. The cheery
Buddy Holly vibe would be completely wiped out, replaced by distorted power
chords, and while T. Rex and Blue Cheer would at least preserve the original
riff, Townshend shifted the accent from its last beat to the first one, thus
completing the song’s transformation into an in-yer-face-motherfucker! rock anthem. Naturally, I’m a simple
man and I’ll take the Who’s version over Eddie’s any time (if anything, there
is simply no competition for John Entwistle’s handling of both the bass
melody and the "no-dice-son-you-gotta-work-late"
bass vocals), but I do somewhat miss the easy-going nature of the original
(actually, T. Rex’s version still retains some of that — of all the classic
rockers, Marc Bolan was perhaps the most nostalgia-bound when it came to
modernizing the golden oldies). One shouldn’t perhaps forget that the actual lyrics
to ‘Summertime Blues’ were credited not to Eddie, but to his manager, Jerry
Capehart — ten years older than Eddie, with his teenage years largely falling on World War II — and it was he
who also wrote the words to the song’s two most obvious «sequels». The first
one was ‘C’mon Everybody’, clearly intended as a stylistic follow-up to the
success of ‘Summertime Blues’ — exact same bass line, similar acoustic riff,
similar vocal melody, similar stop-and-start structure, though without the
deep vocals — but this time, Eddie wants to be the solution rather than the
problem: since none of the grown-ups in this world are available for
assistance, let’s just fuck it and party all night long. Who cares? C’mon everybody! It’s a fun little romp alright, but, let’s face it,
it is essentially just a «sunny-side-up» rewrite of ‘Summertime Blues’ in the
end, which obviously explains its relative drop in the charts (#35 after
‘Summertime’s #8) and its relative failure to be as much of an influence on
future generations — I think the most (in)famous cover version this time
would be by the Sex Pistols on the Great
Rock’n’Roll Swindle album, which is sort of telling. You’d think that
people would be generally easier to lure in with a nonchalant happy vibe than
a bitter one, but not this time — seems like ‘Summertime Blues’ really struck
a nerve with both the American and the trans-Atlantic teen, whereas ‘C’mon
Everybody’ might have hit the same teen as somewhat less realistic. I mean,
just how many of them could actually experience that lucky moment of "the house is empty and the folks are gone",
so that "the house’ll be a-shakin’
from the bare feet a-slappin’ on the floor"? Looks more like a wet
dream to me — and there’s something a little disconcerting about that "hoo! c’mon everybody!" call to
action that gets no response whatsoever. (Perhaps what the song really needed
was a Phil Spector production and tons of backing vocals from boy and girl
choirs alike). For their next single, then, Cochran and Capehart
tried a slightly different approach. ‘Teenage Heaven’ is nowhere near as
musically innovative or interesting as ‘Summertime Blues’ — essentially, it
sounds like a mid-tempo country-rock song à
la Bill Haley — but at least it does
go into another musical direction, throws in a lively saxophone solo, and
features two verses of fantasy lyrics that get straight to the point and
remain relevant well unto the 21st century (I can kind of imagine Jimmy De
Santa from Grand Theft Auto V
adopting them as his personal anthem — "I want my own Coupe de Ville, make my Dad pay the bill...").
It’s kinda cute that the protagonist wishes for just "shorter hours in school" — you
can tell that we’re still a long way away from the age of Alice Cooper — but on
the whole, the expressed sentiments here are even more rebellious than in
‘Summertime Blues’. However, I don’t think the single flopped because Eddie’s
teenage fans all shared a strong work ethic and were deeply ashamed of
sharing the song’s fantasies; I think it just lacked a strong musical hook,
instead putting most of its attractive power into the lyrics. And then it all came back together again for the
last part in Eddie’s four-part teenage symphony: ‘Somethin’ Else’, which was
actually co-written by Eddie’s brother Bob and Eddie’s then-girlfriend Sharon
Sheeley (Sharon already had a reputation of a professional songwriter before
she met Eddie, with ‘Poor Little Fool’ for Ricky Nelson and other stuff). The
song is quite firmly rooted in Little Richard’s arrangement of ‘Keep
A-Knockin’, right down to the opening drum-and-bass «knocking» intro, giving
it a deep, rumbling, steady rock’n’roll energy that had up till then been
lacking in Eddie’s recordings — clearly the hardest-rocking number in all of
his catalog — but what is just as impressive is its lyrical structure, in
which the two first verses continue the subject of teenage fantasy (get the
girl, get the car), the third verse outlines a strategy for making that
fantasy come to life ("work hard
and save my dough", nothing too outrageous), and the fourth verse
triumphantly presents the results of realizing the American Dream (well, partially at least — "just a ’41 Ford, not a ’59" — I
like that struggle for accurate realism in the lyrics). So here, at the end
of things, is Eddie being both the problem and the solution in just slightly over two minutes, with a
pumping groove to boot that must have been one of the top candidates for
«best highway speedin’ song of all time» before Deep Purple’s ‘Highway Star’
(which was, without a doubt, both musically and lyrically influenced by
‘Somethin’ Else’, essentially «upgrading» it for the next generation of
rockers). Also, unlike all the other Eddie Cochran songs, ‘Somethin’ Else’
was never covered by anybody in a
better way than the original (I like the Move and the Flamin’ Groovies
versions, but they really add nothing to Eddie’s; and I absolutely abhor
Robert Plant butchering it on the Led Zeppelin live cover — his vocal style
simply does not fit the mood one bit). Perhaps Eddie, too, felt that with ‘Somethin’ Else’
he’d taken the «Teenage Dream Fantasy» genre as far as it could go, and
perhaps it isn’t even a coincidence that the teenager anthems stopped
appearing right after he turned 21 — that was on October 3, 1959, and a little
over a month later he came out with a significantly more «grown-up» sound,
exemplified by a cover of Ray Charles’ ‘Hallelujah, I Love Her So’. It’s not
a complete waste of vinyl — there’s something odd about how the corny, syrupy
string arrangement contrasts with the surprisingly tough, rocking electric guitar
solo, and Eddie’s passion for the song clearly comes out in the vocal
delivery — but if you’re really going to put ‘Hallelujah’ on the white boy
market, you’d at least need somebody of, say, Eric Burdon’s caliber to make
it work. All I really can say here is — well, thank God he did not take the
alternate decision to celebrate his 21st birthday with ‘When You Wish Upon A Star’. Those who sincerely believe in Fate and ill omens
shall, of course, grieve over Eddie’s inauspicious decision to team up with
the remainders of the Crickets in order to record the very Buddy Holly-esque bouncy
ballad ‘Three Steps To Heaven’, on which he plays a fairly tight, crunchy,
almost martial acoustic riff (various sources like to mention how Bowie would
later appropriate it for ‘Queen Bitch’, but I actually hear just as much, if
not more, similarity with the anthemic acoustic riff played by Townshend at
the beginning of Tommy’s ‘Overture’!)
while Jerry Allison weaves his ringing electric ‘Words Of Love’-like lead in
and out of it. It’s not particularly complicated or original, but the idea of
using a very Holly-style guitar melody with decidedly non-Holly-style vocals
is interesting (even if the vocal melody itself feels a bit old-fashioned and
croony, not to mention the lyrics which, this time around, read more like a
parental lecture to the young offspring rather than the young offspring’s
personal take on life — "step one,
you find a girl you love, step two, she falls in love with you..." —
scratch that, that’s not even a parental lecture, it’s a ChatGPT
recommendation!). In any case, ‘Three Steps To Heaven’ came out in March
1960, and the very next month some stupid idiot in God’s personal bureaucratic
chancellery took the title too literally and arranged for Eddie to take the
third step — "you kiss and hold
her tightly" — as it’s been reported that he actually threw himself
over Sharon Sheeley during the car crash to protect her, saving her life at
the cost of his own, a very simple formula for Heaven indeed. Of course, the
song itself implies nothing of the kind, and today, only those who know their
rock’n’roll history well enough shall be intrigued by the eerie coincidences;
back in April 1960, though, I dare say this was quite an event in people’s
minds, directly confirmed by the already mentioned huge popularity of the
single in the UK. Was ‘Three Steps To Heaven’ indicative of any major
changes / breakthroughs in style, though, and did Eddie’s untimely death
deprive us of a major songwriting career? This question is even more
difficult to answer than the identical one about Buddy Holly himself —
because Buddy had a very definite personality and an immediately recognizable
songwriting style, whereas Eddie was less distinctive and more diffuse. Clearly,
those last few months of his life show that he wanted to expand and grow
beyond the «teenage troubadour» status; whether he would have been truly
capable of that is something we shall never know for sure. The remaining, not yet mentioned «lesser» A- and B-sides
sitting on this record are of widely varying quality; they show that Eddie
was quite a Renaissance rocker indeed and wanted to be a little of everything
— and, as it often happens in such situations, ended up somewhat mediocre in
most of these initiatives. Sometimes, for instance, he wanted to be a bit of
a folk-bluesman, recording his own version of the classic ‘Bo Weevil Song’
reinvented as a Coasters-like pop ditty with supporting doo-wop vocals. It
wasn’t very good, but Eddie did not despair and later made a similar, a bit more
convincing attempt with ‘Cut Across Shorty’, another whimsical tale of
country life whose ridiculous pointlessness, for some reason, brings on
associations with ‘Rocky Raccoon’ (another long-winded tale that ultimately
amounts to nothing), except ‘Rocky Raccoon’ is a flat-out goof, whereas ‘Cut Across
Shorty’ is kind of sung with conviction. (Rod Stewart later made an entire
epic out of it on Gasoline Alley —
but the overall message more or less remained similarly bizarre). Sometimes, on the other hand, Eddie wanted to be a
suave, honey-drippin’ crooner, as he was on ‘Teresa’, his only single from
1958 that did not chart at all. The gimmick of ‘Teresa’ is that almost each
bit of Eddie’s corny serenade is picked up by a sex-kitten-purr-mode choir of
girly backing vocals — the idea, I suppose, being that of a lady swooning
over her seducer’s every compliment (because how can a girl truly withstand
lines like "you’re a honey, worth
more to me than money"?). I can only presume that even the average
horny teenager of 1958 was embarrassed to play something like this for his
sweetheart — although, in retrospect, ‘Teresa’ comes across as quite a
hilarious experience. And sometimes Eddie wanted to be Elvis — not only on
the ballads, but on the pop-rockers as well: ‘Pretty Girl’, the B-side to ‘Teresa’,
is Cochran in full-on rockabilly Presley mode, lowering his voice, hiccuping,
putting the bass hooklines on the «stop» moment of the stop-and-start
structure, the works. Given that Elvis had temporarily left the building and
all, I can certainly see the commercial sense in this (although it didn’t
work — nobody really ever bought into the idea of Eddie becoming the new Elvis),
but in the long run, this chameleonesque nature of Eddie’s, when he would be Buddy
Holly on one day, Carl Perkins the next one, and Elvis the day after that, did
him a serious disservice. In the end, despite all the diversity of approaches
and the somewhat fascinating story of self-searching that emerges from this general
retrospective of Eddie’s brief career, we still inevitably come back to his «teenage
quadrilogy», from ‘Summertime Blues’ to ‘Somethin’ Else’, as the sweet short stretch that gives Eddie
Cochran his own unique imprint — the simple, but sharp and «superficially
deep» vocalization of the dreams and insecurities of the late Fifties’ American
teen, sung and played with enough wit and feeling to remain relevant for the American
— heck, I’d say the worldwide, or at least the «first world» — teen even
today. Who knows, perhaps the fact that Eddie was taken away from this world
so early was just meant to signify that he should not have even tried to overstep those boundaries?.. |
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