THE EVERLY BROTHERS
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1956–1996 |
Early rock’n’roll |
Wake Up Little Susie
(1957) |
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Album
released: December 1957 |
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Tracks: 1) This Little Girl Of Mine; 2)
Maybe Tomorrow; 3) Bye-Bye Love; 4) Brand New Heartache; 5) Keep A Knockin’;
6) Be Bop A-Lula; 7) Rip It Up; 8) I Wonder If I Care As Much; 9) Wake Up Little Susie; 10) Leave My Woman Alone; 11)
Should We Tell Him; 12) Hey Doll Baby. |
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Instead of starting out by gushing
about the beloved classics on this self-titled album — ‘Bye Bye Love’, ‘Wake
Up Little Susie’, ‘I Wonder If I Care As Much’ — I beg permission to
concentrate on something different and unexpected: namely, the cover of
Little Richard’s ‘Keep A-Knockin’. Now that song, ‘Keep A-Knockin’, had been
recorded many, many times in various jazz and jump blues versions prior to
Little Richard, but I know very few
versions that postdate Little Richard, and the only one that was any good was
by the Sonics — who were arguably the only American white garage band with a
mad vocalist and a mad enough sax player that could brew a tempest comparable
with Little Richard’s. And this song, in his interpretation, was one of his
most tempestuous ever. So the question is: what on earth
were Phil and Don Everly, two sweet, lovable, closely harmonized kids from
Shenandoah, Iowa, thinking, when they chose to cover this particular song for their debut album? Wouldn’t it have been
obvious that this is the kind of material as far removed from their comfort
zone, spiritually and technically, as an Alban Berg string quartet? Or were
they, like most kids those days, simply so entranced by the rock’n’roll virus
that they just had to give it a
go... and damn the torpedoes? |
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Whatever the
initial impulse was, though, what actually matters is not where they came
from but where they ended up at. They did not even begin to try to recreate
the song’s hystrionic, aggressive mood: there are no opening drum salvos, no
maniacal sax solos or screaming, and even the tempo is subtly slowed down.
Instead, what they do is capitalize on the melodic aspects of the song —
turning it into a fun, catchy, friendly pop-rock number whose primary
attraction now are the two brothers’ close harmonies. If it were not for the
lyrics of the song, one could easily see it played under the balcony of a
loved one... heck, just change the words to "keep a-knockin’ but I can’t come in" and that’ll be
the goddamn truth. And it absolutely works. The brothers preserve the element
of insistence, both through the professionalism of the backing band (keeping
a steady, relentless rhythm pulse) and through never dropping down the
tension in their own singing, while also purging the song of wildness — a
teenage gentlemanly take on the tune that does not sacrifice its main point. I understand
that neither this number, nor Gene Vincent’s equally gentrified
‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’, nor the seriously countrified boogie of ‘Rip It Up’ are ever
going to count as «classic Everly stuff». But believe me, it is not every day
that a decidedly non-rock’n’roll-ish outfit can take textbook rock’n’roll
numbers and make them into thoroughly enjoyable, sweet and romantic pop-rock.
For instance, Buddy Holly, great as he was in general, was probably at his
least interesting when he did covers of stuff like ‘Ready Teddy’... okay, so
maybe Phil and Don, too, are at their least interesting when they do this
stuff, but it’s still pretty interesting. And if it really is the worst stuff on the entire LP, then one
cannot even begin to imagine how great it is on the whole. Some of the
retrospective critical evaluations like to play the «formative» game here —
too many of these unnecessary rock’n’roll numbers, too many covers, too
uncertain of themselves, setting up the stage for greater things to come —
bullshit, if you pardon my Klingon. The Everlys’ debut presents them as fully
mature, fully competent, incredibly diverse and enjoying life to its fullest
in a way they would rarely enjoy it again. If we do the right thing and count
the songwriting duo of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant as an integral part of the
Everly Brothers (and we should), then the album actually boasts a solid 50/50
ratio of originals and covers; and if you throw in the fact that the Everlys
manage to everlify Ray Charles just as superbly as they do Little Richard,
well, then the LP is just a frickin’ masterpiece. One of the
brothers’ secrets is that at the heart of their work, behind all the
sweetness and sentimentality, still lies a fairly gritty bluesy foundation.
It may be a stretch, of course, but I still think that a big reason why ‘Bye
Bye Love’, their first notable single, shot up so high in the charts were
those opening choppy rhythm chords, sounding like something straight out of
John Lee Hooker’s textbook for a few seconds before they get undercut by the
tenor sharpness of "bye bye love, bye bye happiness" — which, in
contrast, sounds like nothing out of anybody else’s textbook. The verse
melody, by the way, is recognizable (it is a minor variation on ‘You Are My
Sunshine’), but that chorus could just as well be from the German cabaret
scene, for all I know. But more than any contrast between verse and chorus,
what grabs you is the intensity of the vocals — sharp and searing, yet also
cheerful and friendly despite the superficial gloom of the lyrics: think Hank
Williams with a well-meaning youthful tease rather than nasal sneer. Or, if
you want a comparison from the other side of the timeline, think of Simon
& Garfunkel’s cover which, like most of Simon & Garfunkel’s songs,
sounds compassionate, melancholic, and severely introverted. These guys, however, are no morose
intellectual Greenwich Village loners: their
point is to make your very bones tingle with the sound of their harmonies. The point is
actually delivered even stronger on the B-side, Don Everly’s melodically
plain country waltz ‘I Wonder If I Care As Much’. Plain, that is, in terms of
basic rhythmic structure, but never plain in terms of just how much the
brothers fill up the sonic space — almost every single vowel is lovingly
extended, so that you almost do not notice them catching their breath. It is
not the most intimate or thought-provoking of possible interpretations; it
could even be accused of being too overtly manneristic, making it hard to
truly believe that "my heart can’t thrive on misery, my life it has no
destiny", but then again, this is no method acting: after all, when John
Lennon sings "my tears are falling like rain from the sky", you
don’t really feel like reaching for your umbrella, either. The words do not
matter as much here as the sheer intensity of their delivery. There may have
been many duets and vocal bands before the Everlys, but no pop singer ever
dared to go all in before the Everlys. (Well, Hank Williams did, but he was
no pop singer, after all). Afterwards, there would be plenty. Before, there
was none. It is amusing
that ‘Wake Up Little Susie’, the duo’s second successful single, somewhat
followed the formula — also written by the Bryants, also based on an upbeat acoustic
pattern, and also luring the listener in a false direction with its opening
chords (which play a rock’n’roll pattern not unlike the main riff of Larry
Williams’ ‘Slow Down’, though actually it was the latter that was recorded
about a week after the Everlys’ single came out... coincidence?). But on the
other hand, it is far more melodically complex — there are at least three or
four different vocal melodies here, with a rather convoluted relationship
between chorus, verse, and bridge; and then there is the lyrical content,
formally quite innocent (the unlucky teens fall asleep while watching a
movie) but provocative enough in practice to have allegedly been banned on
Boston radio sessions. The Everlys were clean lads — they’d never allow themselves to take
advantage of poor little Susie, no sir! — but even so, it makes sense to
believe that the provocation was quite intentional. After all, they were carried along by the rock’n’roll
spirit, even if they never wished to embrace rock’n’roll’s stereotypes — if
they weren’t, they wouldn’t be what they were, and I would probably never
even begin writing about them in the first place. By the time of
the third single, the brothers felt the need for even more change, and
switched from the Bryants to Ray Charles: ‘This Little Girl Of Mine’
obediently submitted to the procedure of being turned from jumpy, chaotic
R&B to disciplined, apollonized pop — it even opens with the same
perfectly coordinated descending melodic line as Elvis’ ‘Teddy Bear’. But
unlike Elvis, the Everlys never allow themselves to become «cuddly»: there is
always something about those harmonies that has a knife-like property, as if
the very joining of their voices in two prevented the arisal of overtly sappy
sentimentality. It would truly take a very cruel or a very ideologically
zealous critic to accuse these rearrangements of «bland whiteness» or
anything of the sort. On the LP, they also do the same thing to Ray’s ‘Leave
My Woman Alone’, substituting the fast gospel chug of the original for a slower,
more even-paced pop-rock beat and country-based pop-rock lead guitar lines
that George Harrison would later master so well. In the end,
there is not a weak number anywhere in sight: original or cover, all these
songs sound every bit as lively and excited today as they did back in 1957.
If you wish to think of ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ and the Ray Charles covers as filler,
be my guest; I prefer to think of this entire collection as the Everly
Brothers putting their unique spin on every piece of music floating around
their personal space at the time, and, subsequently, filler-free. Later
records would have more original compositions and, perhaps, more significant
melodic breakthroughs, but the major impact that the brothers made on the
world merely by announcing their presence in 1957 would never be outdone.
Which is not that surprising, given that their harmonies were their major impact, and since it would be unimaginable to
hear them improve on the state of their harmonies here, what could they do to raise the stakes?
Invent AutoTune? |
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TAUGHT US |
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Album
released: December 1958 |
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Tracks: 1) Roving Gambler; 2) Down In The
Willow Garden; 3) Long Time Gone; 4) Lightning Express; 5) That Silver Haired
Daddy Of Mine; 6) Who’s Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet; 7) Barbara Allen;
8) Oh So Many Years; 9) I’m Here To Get My Baby Out Of Jail; 10) Rockin’
Alone In An Old Rockin’ Chair; 11) Kentucky; 12) Put My Little Shoes Away. |
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The hits just kept coming for the
Everly brothers throughout 1958 — ‘All I Have To Do Is Dream’, ‘Bird Dog’,
‘Problems’ (we shall tackle these later) — so it must have been quite a shock
for the fans to see the duo’s second LP, instead of predictably herding
together their Bryant-penned pop-rock successes, stock up on dusty old folk
ballads, none of which had anything to do with the rock’n’roll explosion or,
let’s face it, the problems most relevant to the contemporary late Fifties
teenage heart. It is hardly surprising that the LP became a commercial flop:
much like Bob Dylan’s Self-Portrait
twelve years later, this became a classic case of a beloved artist
intentionally disconnecting with their audiences. |
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Unlike Dylan,
of course, Phil and Don Everly had no particular reason to be pissed off at
their audiences, and this gesture on their part was most probably driven by
positive rather than negative emotions. They did, after all, have a fairly
long history of singing precisely this kind of music together with their
parents, Ike and Margaret, and their affection for more modern types of rock
and pop music never came at the expense of their admiration for the oldies —
or for their old folks, for that matter. So when they decided to take a
twelve-song selection of old Appalachian ballads and country waltzes and
record them just as they are — bare-bones, with just the brothers singing
harmony over acoustic guitars — this was most likely intended as a debt of
gratitude to their parents (hence the album title which is simply intended to
tell the truth, rather than act as some sort of symbolic defiance in the face
of their teen audiences). It is also quite possible that they may have
entertained some hope that maybe, just maybe
some of their new fans from the rock’n’roll generation would use this as a
chance to be introduced to some of the classic gems of the old folk tradition
without inevitably associating them with their boring old parents. If there was
any such hope, it did not work: the rock’n’roll fans of 1958 were not yet
ready to be «duped» into trading their blue suede shoes for old hiking boots.
Nor would the album really have appealed to the residents of Greenwich
Village — with a few exceptions, the songs selected by the brothers feel too
mainstreamish, the musical and lyrical relics of radio-friendly bourgeois
entertainment from the pre-war years rather than the stark naked, dark,
bleeding, socially relevant folk, blues, and gospel tunes delivered by the
likes of Odetta or Dave Van Ronk. In short, it is hard to imagine a proper
market for this stuff in 1958 — I’m sure Ike and Margaret must have been
delighted by the humble gift, but who else would be willing to spend one’s
hard-earned cash on somebody else’s loving family affair? Presumably,
according to laws of the genre, this is the point where I am expected to
state just how much the album was ahead of its time and just how much
ungratefully unrecognized genius it contains. And I would be happy to do it
(because why not?), except for the sobering realization that I have never
been able to enjoy it in its entirety.
Taken in small doses, the formula that Phil and Don offer here is indeed
sweet, touching, and even somewhat innovative for its time — clean, crisp,
confident acoustic guitar and unwavering, focused, and caring twin harmonies,
spreading love and respect all over the place. But twelve old ballads in a
row, delivered in the exact same style, exuding the exact same mood, and
generally rehashing the exact same two or three rhythmic patterns and tempos,
can easily wear out the patience of even a very patient person. You might
easily start out with the most emotional response ever to ‘Roving Gambler’
and find yourself in deep sleep — maybe even lethargic — by the time ‘Put My
Little Shoes Away’ pulls the plug on the experiment. This also makes
it extremely difficult to comment on individual selections, because you do
not really want a review of such an album to turn into actual discussions of
what it is that makes ‘Barbara Allen’ or ‘I’m Here To Get My Baby Out Of
Jail’ a great song (which they are, don’t worry about it); you are more
interested in what it is that the Everlys bring out in their interpretations,
and so far, I’ve been seriously stumped getting past words like «tenderness»
and «sentimentality». Even when they boldly dare to include a creepy murder
ballad (‘Down In The Willow Garden’, which they probably learned from Charlie
Monroe’s 1947 version), its creepiness — undetectable until you scrutinize
the lyrics — emerges only because of the stark contrast between the horrible
story and the emotional compassion shown for the "dear little girl whose
name was Rose Connolly"; Phil and Don must have been the most gallantly romantic
couple of poisoners in the history of dark folk up to that moment (and, for
what it’s worth, their rendition of ‘Willow Garden’ must have contributed somewhat to the newly found popularity of
the murder ballad genre among more contemporary folk and pop singers). Note that there
is no lack of disturbing or tragic subjects in the duo’s other selections as
well: themes of sin, desperation, loneliness, imprisonment, old age, and
death cover about 90% of the material — I think ‘That Silver Haired Daddy Of
Mine’, probably intended specifically as a gift for Ike, is the only song
centered on mostly positive emotions (and even then, its main motive is to
"atone to that silver haired
daddy of mine", implying that you’ve really been a bad boy here, too).
From a certain point of view, the album could deserve the epithet «gritty» —
but, once again, it only works if you really get into the lyrics of the
songs; otherwise, the album might as well have been called Lullabies Our Daddy Put Us To Sleep With
(not that ‘Down In The Willow Garden’ wouldn’t have made a darn fine
lullaby). Ultimately, the
album works well as a cultural statement, and a serious potential influence
on black-hearted mope-rock and terminally depressed singer-songwriters all
over the globe, but probably not so well as a genuine emotional roller
coaster that would keep you firmly in its grip from start to finish. This is
indirectly proven by the weird circumstance of Green Day’s Billie Joe
Armstrong and (not Green Day’s) Norah Jones collaboratively remaking the
entire album as Foreverly in 2013:
the very fact that they did this proves the record’s enduring cultural
significance, but they also managed to make it even more boring than it used
to be, which kinda hints that it was not all that entertaining from the beginning, either. It’s good to have
it — had they just recorded one or two songs like ‘Willow Garden’ for a
regular LP, they would almost certainly have been lost among the bouncy,
catchy, energetic pop hits — but it is also a safe bet that most people would
just rather listen to a best-of compilation of the brothers from their glory
years, and I wouldn’t have the nerve to blame these people. |
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Album
released: March 1959 |
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Tracks: 1) Bye Bye Love; 2) I Wonder If I
Care As Much; 3) Wake Up Little Susie; 4) Maybe Tomorrow; 5) Should We Tell
Him; 6) This Little Girl Of Mine; 7) All I Have To Do
Is Dream; 8) Claudette; 9) Bird Dog;
10) Devoted To You; 11) Problems; 12) Love Of My Life. |
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REVIEW
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Instead of
giving in to Bleyer’s repugnant commercial strategy which forced poor
American families to shell out extra cash for stuff they already owned (a
widespread practice for the 1960s, but not yet fully endorsed by the majority
of labels in the 1950s, because live and learn), we shall construct our own Best Of The Everly Brothers by simply
focusing on the chronology of their singles from March 1958 to the end of
their Cadence period, conflating the «new» songs of this record with the rest
of them on The Fabulous Style; in
practical terms, this hardly matters since you will probably just be
listening to them all on one of the miriads of later Everly compilations, too
numerous to mention — just be sure that they have all these tracks on them,
because the brothers were on a solid roll at the time, and pretty much all of
their Cadence era stuff is at least worth your ears, if not necessarily your
total devotion. Anyway, March
’58 does represent a significant milestone for the boys, with the release of
‘All I Have To Do Is Dream’. All of their previous singles were fairly
lightweight, guided by either comical overtones (‘Wake Up Little Susie’) or
toe-tapping bitter irony (‘Bye Bye Love’) — but here was a slow, courteous,
gorgeous, dreamy ballad with an almost royal arrangement, as Chet Atkins
himself joins the boys with an exquisite electric lead guitar part, using
tremolo chords to emphasize the «dreamy» atmosphere of this poor little
lament about the happiness lying just outside one’s reach. The historical
role of the song can hardly be overestimated: it is one of the earliest
representatives of what we can call «lush pop» or «baroque pop», and there’s
a fairly straight connection from here to everything from the Beach Boys to
the Left Banke and beyond. Yet it is also quite markedly a «teenage symphony»
— the Bryants, who wrote the song as usual, couldn’t help marking this on the
bridge section with the unforgettable lines of "only trouble is — gee whiz", as if they meant it
for the soundtrack of Leave It To Beaver
or something. In any case,
this is the song that forever sealed the fate of the Everly Brothers, much
like ‘My Generation’ did it for the Who or ‘Satisfaction’ did it for the
Stones. Next to it, the B-side, a cover of Roy Orbison’s ‘Claudette’, despite
being far superior to Roy’s own early version on Sun Records, already looks
almost anachronistic — fast, bouncy, funny, totally in the style of ‘Wake Up
Little Susie’ or ‘This Little Girl Of Mine’, two minutes of simple,
unsophisticated joy best summarized in the frantic acoustic strum on the
breaks between verses. But the contrast is fun when you just think of it in
terms of a flipped-over 7-inch record — one side for the spirit, one for the
body. Oddly enough,
the duo’s next single reversed the principle: the danceable joke song (‘Bird
Dog’) was the A-side, while the gorgeous ballad (‘Devoted To You’) was the
B-side — although this might have been made by mistake, since subsequent
releases would swap the sides, and both songs ultimately made the charts on
their own. From a comparative perspective, ‘Devoted To You’, while still
beautifully sung and melodically memorable, is a little less impressive than
‘All I Have To Do Is Dream’ — a bit less sophisticated chord-wise, a bit more
folksy, and that same tremolo guitar only appears at the beginning and end of
the song for some reason, as if it were just an obligatory stylistic nod to
the previous hit. ‘Bird Dog’, on
the other hand, is a far more attractive musical and lyrical journey than
‘Claudette’ if you’re looking for more joke material — essentially, it is
Boudleaux Bryant’s attempt to write something in the style of the Coasters,
as the call-and-response vocals all but beg
for the vocal treatment of the greatest jokers in R&B history, though,
admittedly, the Everlys do an okay job themselves with the high pitch on the
"he’s a bird" and the low pitch on the "he’s a dog"
lines. (All that’s lacking is some yakety sax from King Curtis to complete
the picture). Apparently (judging by some comments I encountered), 21st
century sensitivity has made the song feel somewhat ostracized (songs about
two guys fighting about a girl’s attention don’t really cut it anymore), but
if we are obliged to relegate all the "Leave-My-Woman-Alone" type
songs to the dustbin of history, that’ll leave the shelves pretty bare, I
guess. I do admire the "Johnny kissed the teacher / He tiptoed up to
reach her" bit, anyway — that’s yet another bit of provocative daring on
Bryant’s part, even if he cleverly indemnifies himself and Johnny in the next lines ("well he’s the teacher’s pet
now, what he wants he’s been gettin’ now, he even made the teacher let him
sit next to my baby"). And that was almost twenty years before ABBA! Pressing on, we
reach ‘Problems’ (October ’58), which is largely like a thematic follow-up to
‘Bird Dog’ — with «Johnny» out of the picture, the teenage protagonist
switches the psychological focus back on himself, complaining that "my
love life just ain’t swingin’ like it should", whatever that would specifically mean at the
time. This ain’t exactly a Chuck Berry level of psychological manipulation, but
then Chuck never focused all that much on the negative aspect of things — to
him, everything could be quickly cured by "dropping the coin right into
the slot" of the nearest juke joint, which probably makes ‘Problems’ a bit more relevant for Gen Z
("worries, worries pile up on my head"). Musically, though, the
single greatest thing about the song is the gracefully nagging little country
guitar line that somebody (possibly Chet Atkins again) plays at the end of
each verse line. It’s like a little musical joke and a bit of musical teasing
at the same time. Good for all those who have "problems, problems all
day long" — the song will cheer you up and empathize with you. The B-side was
‘Love Of My Life’, repeating the «one joke song, one serious song» pattern; again,
like ‘Devoted To You’, not quite up to the standard of ‘All I Have To Do Is
Dream’, but I appreciate the jumpy acoustic rhythm (with a little Mexican
twang to it, right?), though the overall chord structure seems to be largely
re-writing Buddy Holly’s ‘Listen To Me’ from earlier in the year — on the
other hand, listen closely and you will hear those "I love you-oo-oo,
oo-oo" harmonies directly
reproduced in the Beatles’ ‘Hold Me Tight’ (heh, and now at last I have objective proof that there was
something distinctly dilettantish about my least favorite song on With The Beatles). This is as far
as The Everly Brothers’ Best,
released in March 1959, takes us, but let us continue our little walk in the
Everly park for the rest of 1959, shall we? From the very same month, we have
‘Take A Message To Mary’, another Bryant original which may have actually
been inspired by Songs Our Daddy
Taught Us, since it is uncharacteristically written in the similar style
of an old jailhouse ballad. Now you may laugh at me if you wish, but I
actually like the original a lot less than Bob Dylan’s cover from the
infamous Self-Portrait — not only
does Bob correct the obvious melodic incongruency of the verbal stress by
turning "take a message to MA-ry" into the rhythmically more
adequate "take a message to Ma-RIE" (and why couldn’t our poor
hero’s sweetheart be French, after all?), but his rougher, more electrified
version would actually give the song a bit of the required «frontier feel».
When the Everlys sing the song, it feels like they are doing it from some
lush boudoir rather than a jail cell — and I have always felt more sympathy
for the plight of Dylan’s protagonist rather than Phil and Don’s. Still, this is where it all began, and it is
nice to know that the Bryants could adapt their songwriting quite
professionally and comfortably to suit the current artistic inclinations of
their principal clients. The B-side was
also a jailhouse song, but quite a different one — the «joke» side of the
single was ‘Poor Jenny’, another little provocative number, in which the
protagonist’s sweetheart gets accidentally mistaken for the "leader of a
teenage gang" after being knocked out in a drunken brawl, and locked up
as a result. It’s one of their catchiest and silliest numbers, unless you
want to read a misogynistic streak into it, in which case it’s also one of
their most offensive, but hey, accidents happen. Sometimes it’s a stagecoach
and a shot from a careless gun, sometimes it’s a party last night when some
joker goes and calls the cops on the phone. If the Everly Brothers ever
wanted to release an album called Songs
About Stupid People, both parts of the single could easily be chosen as
side openers. In July 1959,
the Bryant-dominated streak was finally interrupted with one of Don Everly’s
own compositions: ‘(’Til) I Kissed You’, a song that would, for some reason,
later become a staple for various reggae artists (go figure just how they
sniffed out its reggae potential). Musically and lyrically, you can sort of
see why they preferred to rely on the far more sophisticated Bryant material
in that period — but even with its simple chords and trivial lyrics, the song
gets the job done if all you want to express is that one particular feeling.
The nicest touch is arguably the pompous tom-tom roll after each of the
"I kissed you" bits, as executed by Jerry Allison, drummer of the
Crickets (who, after Buddy’s death, would occasionally back the Everlys in
the studio and on tour). The same tom-toms sound less exciting on the B-side,
though: ‘Oh, What A Feeling’, also written by Don, is a slow, stiff, and
somewhat dreary waltz which lacks the finesse of the Bryants’ ballads and
seems to be rarely remembered for a good reason. Finally, we
close out 1959 with a sappy, string-drenched version of the French chanson
‘Je T’Appartiens’, translated into English as ‘Let It Be Me’ and popularized
by the Everlys for the Christmas season. Now you may laugh at me again if you wish, but I actually like
this version a lot less than... right, you guessed it, Bob Dylan’s cover from
the infamous Self-Portrait, which
kinda sorta works around the song’s sentimental corniness and the ruffled
shirtsleeves of the Everlys’ delivery. Maybe if it weren’t for the
Mantovani-style strings, I could have taken this easier, but as it is, ‘Let
It Be Me’ is the first grossly overproduced item in the brothers’ catalog —
probably not coincidental with the fact that it was also their first song to
be recorded in New York rather than Nashville. I am much more partial to the
B-side, ‘Since You Broke My Heart’, another of Don’s «originals» (actually a
minor variation, I think, on one of the old Hank Williams melodies), which
cleverly combines Buddy Holly’s rhythm guitar style with a moody bluesy lead
line (which goes along well with the "they say the blues went out of
style" line) and even more of those tom-toms. Since we shall
probably not be returning to the band’s Cadence years, I suppose at least a
quick mention should be also made of their last singles for the label, issued
already after the Everlys’ defection to Warner Bros. ‘When Will I Be Loved’
is a Phil composition, very deceptively beginning with the same defiant
blues-rock chords that open Bo Diddley’s ‘I’m A Man’: the opening eight
seconds, featuring that aggressive riff followed by a harmonica blast, will
make it seem like the Everlys decided to move to Chicago for a bit, but once
the vocal harmonies come in, things get back to more comfy territory — this
is your everyday male insecurity they are singing about after all, not your
everyday male self-confidence. And at least this version is much better than
the later hit cover by Linda Ronstadt (because early Sixties’ country-rock
musical clichés just happen to be less annoying than mid-Seventies’
country-rock ones). Finally, we
return back into the caring arms of the Bryants with ‘Like Strangers’ and
‘Brand New Heartache’, but I feel like this last single for Cadence was a bit
of a dud — unlike most of the previous ones, it did not even manage to crack
the Top 20, and this is because the A-side is very much just a pretty lullaby
with a poorly defined hook. The duet between the acoustic guitar and the
softly muffled electric slide chords is aesthetically pleasing, but «yawny», and
the brothers’ harmonies just flow smoothly across the valley without scaling
any interesting peaks. Meanwhile, ‘Brand New Heartache’ is just a generic
country throwaway (essentially the same song as Carl Perkins’ ‘Sure To Fall
In Love With You’, only without the latter’s humorous twist) — and
furthermore, with its presence the single finally commits the unforgivable
crime of not following the «gorgeous ballad / joke song» pattern of all those
previous Bryant-penned singles. Well, that’s what you get for releasing
singles for your artists when they are no longer with you. And with this,
we conclude our evaluation of the Everlys’ years at Cadence — years during
which, as you can see, they had far more triumphs than duds, a situation that
would not be continued quite as smoothly with their years on Warner Bros.
(and is, in fact, somewhat reminiscent of the correlation between Elvis’
years at Sun and at RCA). While, perhaps, not 100% consistent (but what is?),
this might have been one of the most important consecutive runs of singles in
the history of «lush pop», «art pop», «folk pop», «baroque pop», or whatever
else you might want to call commercially-oriented pop music with
retro-oriented artistic inclinations. In those years, probably only Buddy
Holly could have been a worthy competitor to the unstoppable combination of
the Bryants’ songwriting talents and the Everlys’ performing skills — and
after «the day the music died», he’d have a bit of a hard time making the
general public aware of his latest progress. |
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Tracks: 1) So Sad;
2) Just In Case; 3) Memories Are Made Of This; 4) That’s What You Do To Me;
5) Sleepless Nights; 6) What Kind Of Girl Are You; 7) Oh, True Love; 8) Carol
Jane; 9) Some Sweet Day; 10) Nashville Blues; 11) You Thrill Me; 12) I Want
You To Know. |
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A new decade, a new (and much
bigger) record label with (probably) a far more lucrative record contract,
and, perhaps most importantly for the purposes of this retrospective, a new
approach to the idea of a long-playing record. All their LPs on Cadence were
just compilations of singles, with the notable exception of Songs Our Daddy Taught Us which must
have been envisioned as sort of a «side project» anyway, a «special side» of
the Everlys that would only appeal to the devoted fan with a special bank
account for buying up everything Phil-and-Don-related. But the times they
were a-changin’, and you didn’t even need to have Bob Dylan and the Beatles
around you to let you know that as of 1960, LPs were finally supposed to mean
so much more than they used to. |
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This certainly
does not imply that the Everly Brothers, or anybody else for that matter,
turned into an «album-oriented» artistic persona overnight. On the contrary,
their very first release for Warner Bros. was a single — and a single none
other than the famous ‘Cathy’s Clown’, to let the whole world know that the
transition from a smaller to a larger record label has not impacted the
brothers’ ear for melody and harmony one single bit. We shall come back to
this song later (since it would be included on their second LP for Warner);
for now, it just makes sense to note that this smash hit — alas, also the
last ever #1 they would put on the US charts — was not followed up by another
single, but by a full LP of new material, not a single song on which was a
previously released single. It’s
Everly Time indeed, baby! Not that I
could or would argue that It’s Everly
Time! marks the brothers’ transformation into «album-oriented artists»,
or that each and every song on here deserves your full and undivided
attention in the same way that their best singles do. Few, if any, titles
from here seem to be generally remembered and cherished as individual
highlights, and, indeed, the hooks and tugs tend to be subtle throughout —
nothing on the level of "DON’T
WANT YOUR LO-O-O-OVE..." to kick you right out of bed and make you
want to climb Mount Everest, or at least do your homework properly. But each
and every song, even including the seemingly superfluous Ray Charles and Fats
Domino covers, has something to say; each one has a little bit of heart and a
little bit of brain to at least tempt you to come back and re-assess it once
the album’s over — and since the album’s over in a flash (barely running over
25 minutes), you can easily fit two listens in the same time you’ll have to
allocate for, say, a Highway 61
Revisited, allowing you to develop an understanding of the Everly
Brothers that runs twice as deep as your understanding of Bob Dylan — so
there! Only one song
on the album was written by Don Everly in person: ‘So Sad (To Watch Good Love
Bad)’ — and it’s probably the one most people are familiar with, since it
would be released as a single post-factum and frequently played in concert. Country
artists like to cover it since it is one of their most Nashville-sounding
tear-jerkers, starting off slow and plaintively like a Hank Williams number
would do, but, naturally, that third line on which the brothers come together
and make their pole jump high up in the air ("it makes me cry... to see love die") would be way outside
Hank’s reach. The song never seriously advances beyond the punch of that
third line, but it’s a solid enough punch to last you for two and a half
minutes. More importantly, it’s probably the brothers’ most «mature-sounding»
breakup song recorded up to date — this is not necessarily a good sign,
because all too often «maturity» is embraced as a value onto itself, but
there’s enough dynamics here to make your journey through the bottom of the
ocean bumpy enough, so it works; and now we know that the Everlys can truly
be the Twin Kings of Melancholy if they want to, rather than merely the Kings
of Sweet Romanticism. It’s
interesting to compare the song with the ever-reliable Bryant duo’s take on
the same vibe: ‘Sleepless Nights’ is a tender, whiny, almost «sissy» ballad
which merely has the protagonist crying into his pillow (we never really get
to know why his girl left him in the first place — penis size problems?),
whereas ‘So Sad’ is a subtle attempt at tackling the serious problem of
feelings that simply fizzle out with time. That’s not meant to diminish the
compositional skill of ‘Sleepless Nights’, whose oddly woven structure,
without a very clear demarcating line between the verses, brings on
associations with the Beatles’ ‘If I Fell’ — and some of whose chords bring
on to mind Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Sounds Of Silence’. But in terms of
emotional depth, this is a good example of how the brothers’ own songwriting
was slowly gaining the upper hand on their loyal songwriting courtiers. Some of the
songs the Bryants contribute here continue to be (at least lyrically)
oriented at the horny teenage market, which is not really such a bad thing
for 1960, the year when music industry would really try to push its cash cows in the direction of the
middle-aged housewife market. ‘Just In Case’ sounds like something fresh out
of 1957, a nice little pop-rock riff set to a groovy tempo, as if «nudging»
the girl to accept that "baby
now’s the time to give your heart, just in case we have to part"
(the "heart", of course,
being a valiant metaphor for quite a different part of the female anatomy).
Its placement right next to ‘So Sad’ is almost comical, given that the
emotional distance between the two is comparable to the emotional distance
between the Beatles circa 1964 and 1969; but if you re-arrange the track list
so that the album opens with ‘Just
In Case’ and closes with ‘So Sad’ —
hey, you got yourself a David
Copperfield of a rock opera! The rest of the
Bryants’ work here is generally not as attention-grabbing, but the
(moderately) fresh hooks still emerge upon a couple of listens — for
instance, the grumbly shuffling tempo of ‘Oh, True Love’ might feel a little
boring, but just wait until the vocal ascension in the bridge section ("baby you’re great, baby you’re keen, baby
all of my friends are just about green"), giving the song quite an
epic feel. Ballads like ‘Some Sweet Day’ and ‘You Thrill Me’ are merely
catchy, without that much to say; and the odd one out really is ‘Nashville
Blues’, a song that is actually
bluesy — at least the intro, with that stinging guitar that’s almost more
Chicago than Nashville, prepares you for a blues number, before the song
crosses over into country-pop. It’s a fairly weird creation, a mix of styles
and moods that absolutely nobody remembers from the Everlys but which is
definitely a stand-out track on this album, even if one might hesitate to
call it a «highlight». The non-Bryant
cover material on the record is nothing to particularly revere, but
everything sounds nice. A couple of Crickets’ members contribute the pleasant
Buddy Holly tribute ‘That’s What You Do To Me’, just to show the world what a
Buddy Holly-type song sounds like in the hands of the Everlys (pretty good,
but I do miss Buddy’s hiccups). Ray Charles’ ‘What Kind Of Girl Are You’ is
just the kind of Ray Charles song that Phil and Don can convert to their own
purposes (perhaps because in Ray’s own version it was actually called ‘What
Kind Of Man Are You’ and sung by Mary Ann Fisher, rather than Ray himself).
‘Carol Jane’, contributed by a little known Kentucky-born singer called Dave
Rich, is a sweet little boppy tune where the playful bass riff matters almost
as much as all the harmonizing; once again, the brothers totally wash away
the border between «country» and «pop», not to mention how they are always
coming up with new ideas on where to direct their harmonies even on trifles
such as these. Listen to how the opening "Carol, Carol, Carol Jane...", chanted in unison, then splits
apart into a supportive vibrating vocalize from one voice and the main vocal
melody from the other one; just a small extra touch, for sure, but also a
perfect illustration of how the brothers were never content with merely
double-tracking their harmonies — an impatient, experimental mindset that
would be inherited by all the great harmonizers of the pop world to come,
from the Beatles to the Beach Boys to Simon and Garfunkel and others. Even such
obvious filler as a cover of Fats Domino’s ‘I Want You To Know’, when you
give the recording a true chance, eventually begins to make sense. Why should
the Everly Brothers be covering Fats Domino? But then I gave the original a spin
and yes, it’s a fine Fats groove but... doesn’t that vocal sound just a tad
too thin for this kind of song?
Doesn’t it sound like the kind of groove that could profit from a tougher,
tighter, more melodic vocal arrangement? Okay, maybe you think that it
doesn’t; but even so, it is perfectly legitimate to ask that question and try
out that approach. And for the Everlys, it actually makes more sense than
covering ‘Ready Teddy’, because ‘Ready Teddy’ is a kick-ass rock’n’roll
number which has little use for a different, softer vibe — but ‘I Want You To
Know’ is a tender love song at heart, and they do it just as much justice, in
their own brotherly way, as Fats does. Yes, a trifle, but a working trifle at
that. In short, even
if absolutely nothing off this record ever ends up on best-of collections,
with the possible exception of ‘So Sad’, this is still no excuse to avoid it.
The brothers were at the peak of their creative powers in that era, and one
of the very few American acts who could put out an entire (if still
drastically short) LP of material that could be relatively unassuming and
still perfectly tasteful and enjoyable from top to bottom. And indeed, one
might think that with most of the classic rock and roll heroes of the 1950s
either dead or «invalidated» by 1960, it was truly Everly Time! — no swooping strings, no crooning, no faking, just
a healthy mix of rock, pop, country, and folk influences with some of the
most inventive vocal harmonies to go around. Too bad it didn’t last all that long. |
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A DATE
WITH THE EVERLY BROTHERS |
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Album
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Tracks: 1) Made To Love; 2) That’s Just
Too Much; 3) Stick With Me Baby; 4) Baby What You
Want Me To Do; 5) Sigh, Cry, Almost Die; 6) Always It’s You; 7) Love Hurts; 8) Lucille; 9) So How Come (No One Loves
Me); 10) Donna, Donna; 11) A Change Of Heart; 12) Cathy’s
Clown. |
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It is a bit odd that Warner Bros.
decided to hold off re-releasing their latest acquisition’s hottest single
until their second LP for the label
— in fact, what with its humble position at the very end of the record, it’s
almost as if ‘Cathy’s Clown’ were included on it at the last minute to fill
up space and round the number of songs to the typical 12 tracks on a US LP.
But better late than never, and it’s not as if the song felt completely out
of place when taken out on A Date With
The Everly Brothers. It does have its unique properties, but they would
only have made it feel special on any
Everly Brothers LP ever released. |
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The funny thing
is, when thinking about the commonly stated influence of ‘Cathy’s Clown’ on
the Beatles — most notably by way of
its loud, up-and-down-the-scale double vocal harmonies that were appropriated
for ‘Please Please Me’ and then prominently featured in most of the Beatles’
early hit singles — I cannot get rid of the idea of one of those «accidental
breakthroughs», like Dave Davies’ bad amp or Tony Iommi’s cut-off fingertips,
that sometimes result in new pathways opening up for the development of
musical ideas. This is probably because those harmonies as used by the
Beatles are typically used to express the most natural kind of emotion — a
sort of triumphant exuberance, which becomes totally associated with the song
even if the lyrics might suggest a different reading (after all, isn’t
‘Please Please Me’ really about a guy expressing acute concern over his girl
hesitating to give him a blowjob?). But in ‘Cathy’s
Clown’, there seems to be a genuine dissonance between intent and result. The
song intentionally starts out like a resolute, powerful military march, with
the appropriate drum fills and all — the protagonist is determined to make a
stand — and then in come the vocals that were probably meant to sound defiant, if not downright menacing, but
instead... somehow end up giving out a totally positive, if not downright
loving, vibe in the end. Looking at the lyrics, you’d think the song should
have been sung in a Lennon-tone à
la ‘You Can’t Do That’ ("I’m gonna let you down and leave you flat, BITCH!"), yet Phil and Don,
natural-born sissies as they are, simply cannot adress a girl with lead or
venom on their minds, so the «stand» against being cheated upon and
humiliated in public quickly becomes a submissive plea. In the process, a new
style of singing is born — the «rock-anger-turned-pop-exuberance» style. Of
course, it’s just one of many different possible takes on what makes the song
special, but special it is — as was clearly felt by trans-Atlantic audiences
at the time, who sent it to the top of the charts both in the US and in the
UK, only the second time the Everlys achieved this after ‘All I Have To Do Is
Dream’... and the very last one. What feels
strange to me is that the brothers clearly must have known they were onto
something different here. Look at the song’s construction — it’s got a
32-second verse-cum-chorus repeated thrice
in the exact same manner, with absolutely no variations or distractions, and
only a tiny 16-second long bridge repeated twice in between the choruses. This means they were so thrilled
with that harmonic style that they were absolutely sure the public would be
just as thrilled with them hammering it down their throats, take after take,
and that’s exactly what happened. However, as their recordings both in 1960
and over the following years show, they were quite reluctant to expand with
that «triumphant harmony» style — as if patiently waiting for the Beatles to
come and take it over, with ‘Please Please Me’ followed by ‘From Me To You’,
‘She Loves You’, ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, etc. etc. Meanwhile, they
themselves would decide to hold back and hone the «softer» side of their
craft with songs like ‘So Sad’, ‘Walk Right Back’, etc. How often does one
break one’s way inside a hidden gold mine, only to pick up a single nugget
and walk away, mumbling "oh, I’m
no good at gold-digging anyway, I’d rather some younger whippersnapper came
along and finished this for me?" With a little extra push, Phil and
Don might have been the Beatles... instead, they ended up sort of becoming
Cathy’s clowns, as insensitive as that sounds. Not that this
is reason for emotional devastation or anything, because on the whole, A Date With The Everly Brothers is no
more or less consistent than their first LP for Warners, and because it is
always best to let artists wallow in the groove they feel is naturally best
for them. (It is, in fact, quite possible that the brothers intentionally
followed ‘Cathy’s Clown’ up with the much more soft and subdued ‘So Sad’
because they were afraid of this new style initiating some sort of «Everlymania»
which they could never have handled as well as the Fab Four). Despite the
changing times, the brothers still persist in trying to put their own stamp
on blues-rock and rock’n’roll, as seen from their covers of Jimmy Reed’s
‘Baby What You Want Me To Do’ and Little Richard’s ‘Lucille’ — the former
being very much a waste of tape (really, the song only works with Jimmy’s own
minimalistic vibe, trying to put a classy Nashville touch on it only spoils
the effect), and the latter actually sounding a little weird, as the brothers draw out Little Richard’s short vocal
outbursts to near-baroque lengths, attempting to stress the song’s
romantically wistful potential. There’s even an almost psychedelic little
pause before the instrumental sections, marked only by a desperate "ohhhhhh..." and a
distant-thunder-on-the-mountain drum fill, which, for a tiny bit, makes it
feel like the song is melting down right before our eyes, though it quickly
patches itself up again. It is still a failure on the whole, because
‘Lucille’ is one of those songs that really does not gain anything from any
attempts at innovative terraforming, and generally, I suppose, the Everlys
just needed to throw a clearly marked bone to their old fans from the rock’n’roll
era, but hey, at least it actually gives you something to write about. (I
mean, most people don’t even notice
that meaningful pause!). The rest of the
tracks are more or less equally divided into those self-penned by Phil and
Don and those contributed by the Bryants (only one other track, ‘Stick With
Me Baby’, was contributed by Mel Tillis, at that time more of a songwriter
for country artists than a hitmaker for himself — and there’s really nothing
special about it, either). Not surprisingly, the Bryants still win: other
than the lucky fluke of ‘Cathy’s Clown’ (for which Don eventually took all
the credit after a series of legal battles in the 2010s), the Everly
originals on Side A of the LP are stylistically pleasant rather than hooky —
the only exception is the opening number, ‘Made To Love’, which you might
remember — or take my advice and memorize — for the proto-Mötley
Crüe chorus of "Girls! Girls!
Girls!", except that the action does not take place in a strip bar,
but rather in a plain old-fashioned household where the Everlys’ father is
taking them aside for a little birds-and-bees talk. It’s really just a funny
trifle, with a Buddy Holly-style chorus married to a more surf-like verse
style, possibly more suited to the likes of Jan & Dean than a «mature»
duo like the Everlys, but it’s kinda funny how the album begins with ‘Made To
Love’, introducing the protagonist to his upcoming struggles with the
opposite sex, and ends with ‘Cathy’s Clown’, showing how easy it is to fuck
things up with "that special girl
who’ll sweep you off your feet". Perhaps the «trifle» is
strategically placed, after all — A
Date With The Everly Brothers is hardly what we’d call a concept album,
but it does run the full gamut of all conceivable emotional states that have
to do with male-female relationships, at least up until the age of 20 or so. The songs that
people will recognize more easily, or at least identify with more easily,
are, I think, mostly on the second side of the album. This is where you will
find the catchy pop nugget ‘So How Come (No One Loves Me)’, which the Beatles
would later take with them to their BBC sessions,
although their harmonies did not really stand a chance against the cleaner,
more delicate and expressive Phil-and-Don duo — definitely not in a
spontaneous live environment, at least. My only problem with the song is that
its depressive lyrics, with which I’m quite liable to identify at times
("if you wonder who the loneliest
creatures in the world can be / they’re the ugly duckling, the little black
sheep and me" is pure Bryant Brilliance!), do not form a perfect
match with the sprightly tempo; without the lyrics, this is just a quirky,
catchy little pop-rock number, childlishly seductive in atmosphere rather
than properly melancholic. Another song
that may have subconsciously influenced the Beatles is ‘Always It’s You’, the
B-side to ‘Cathy’s Clown’; I think it is possible to directly trace Paul’s
"it’s you... you, you you" chorus in ‘Hold Me Tight’ to the
"it’s you, always it’s you" chorus here, although, much to the
Beatles’ honor, their melodic connections to the Everlys, like most of their
other influences as well, were in terms of chord-borrowing rather than
outright melody-stealing. Of course, the main difference is that the Everlys
lay down their vocal melodies subtly, with thin, delicate brush strokes,
compared to the Beatles’ broad, pushier approach (I think it wasn’t until
‘Here, There And Everywhere’ that Paul finally mastered that gentle-sensitive
touch) — which, for the good of us all, places them in what we could call
complementary emotional distribution. Sometimes,
though, «thin and delicate» definitely works better for me than any kind of
embellishment, and I am, of course, speaking of ‘Love Hurts’, the ballad that
the Everlys, for technical reasons, could not release as a single and had to
tolerate their (anti-)thunder stolen first by Roy Orbison, and then, more
than a decade later, by Nazareth. With all due love and respect for Roy’s
golden timbre, and only slightly less so for the recently departed Dan
McCafferty, I think that it is the quiet, minimalistic delivery of the
Everlys that shall forever remain the «default» version of the song for me.
The reason is that both Roy and Dan want to show me explicitly just how much "love hurts" — Roy gallantly
putting his heart on his sleeve like a medieval court minstrel and Dan
ripping it out like a hyper-emotional Italian opera singer. Meanwhile, the
Everlys hit all the right notes without overstating their case. That thin,
wavery vibrato running through their voices during the verses is really all
it takes for me to get the tragic message of the song. (And I don’t much care
for the cheesy strings on the Roy Orbison version — although, admittedly, I
wouldn’t mind an exquisite guitar solo like Manny Charlton’s on top of Phil
and Don’s vocal delivery; I think that it captured the true spirit of the
song better in the Nazareth version than McCafferty’s overblown vocals). Overall, now
that I look back at the track listing, ‘Cathy’s Clown’ and ‘Love Hurts’ are
the only clear stand-outs, but of the remaining selection, it is only the
Jimmy Reed cover that I find impossible to enjoy. Even those tracks which
completely conform to the definition of «filler» — ‘A Change Of Heart’, for
instance, a 100% generic Hank Williams imitation if there ever was one — have
their atmospheric charm, with tasteful guitars, colorful pianos, and
beautiful harmonies. It would have been the simplest of things to spoil the
classic Everly Brothers sound in 1960, turning their art into orchestrated
pap for easy listening, but, fortunately, nobody had the bad taste to spoil a
good formula... not yet, at least. |
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Tracks: 1) My Mammy; 2) Muskrat; 3) My Gal Sal; 4) Grandfather’s Clock; 5)
Bully Of The Town; 6) Chlo-E; 7) Mention My Name In Sheboygan; 8) Hi-Lili,
Hi-Lo; 9) Wayward Wind; 10) Don’t Blame Me; 11) Now Is The Hour; 12) Little
Old Lady; 13) When I Grow Too Old To Dream; 14) Love Is Where You Find It. |
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How
Music Row & Acuff-Rose Killed The Everly Brothers, goes the
title of a Web publication retelling the story of how Phil and Don Everly
parted ways with their publisher, Wesley Rose, and how this rift almost
instantaneously turned their diamond carriage back into a pumpkin. Details
might be found over at that source, or a couple thousand other biographical
write-ups; all that matters to us is that, due to a clash of personalities
and the inherent imperfection of certain capitalist practices, by 1961 The
Everly Brothers were cut off not only from the services of their most loyal and
reliable court songwriters (the Bryants), but even from their own services, deprived of the right to
publish and record songs they wrote themselves. |
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Would things
have been significantly different, had their relationship with Acuff-Rose
Music been somehow salvaged? I would hesitate to offer an opinion — on one
hand, it is true that the Bryants and the Everlys wrote some of the best pop
songs on the market during that short late Fifties / early Sixties interval
when rock’n’roll was in decline, and that the strong influence of that
brilliant stretch on the soon-to-follow British Invasion bands is undeniable;
with the brothers effectively shot down in mid-air (or, if you want to take
the industry’s side in this quarrel, effectively shooting themselves in the
foot), they might have missed a real chance to «graduate» as the duo that led
America’s pop music to some of its greatest artistic heights. On the other
hand, we also have quite a few cases of talented American pop artists from
the same time period who, despite not having experienced the same problems,
were still unable to properly hold their ground against the tidal wave of the
new generation — from Roy Orbison to Del Shannon and the like, they either
faded away or had to remain satisfied with some sort of «secondary» status in
terms of fame and fortune. In the end, it
was probably more of a deep personal tragedy than a global impact kind of
event: what would you feel if you
were an aspiring songwriter, content, perhaps, to work within the relatively
permissive framework of a specific genre such as «country-tinged pop», but
still interested in expanding the limits of its musical language — and then
found yourself unable to pursue that dream through some absurd legal
decision? In a way, it’s a wonder that The Everly Brothers still remained in
the musical profession at all, let alone continued to make their own records
and still try to find new ways in which to express and develop themselves.
Lots of other people would just screw it all and go into real estate instead,
or start selling fine leather jackets. Not Phil and Don, for whom music meant
everything. Well, music and
amphetamines, to be more accurate — but that’s, like, two sides of the same
coin anyway. Anyway, nothing
predicted a thunderstorm on the horizon as 1961 swept away 1960 and brought
the brothers yet another success with ‘Ebony Eyes’ and ‘Walk Right Back’, two
equally popular sides of the same single that briefly pushed them back into
the Top 10 after the (relative) letdown of ‘Like Strangers’. Frankly
speaking, John D. Loudermilk’s ‘Ebony Eyes’ is fairly maudlin — a pretty, but
somewhat artificial tear-jerker, one of those unlucky ballads that,
musically, sound like a gentle sentimental under-the-balcony serenade but
spoil it all with Terribly Tragic Lyrics (this time, the protagonist’s love
interest dies in a plane crash), and that’s not even mentioning the corny
spoken-word interlude in the middle. It doesn’t help matters much, either,
that the chords and harmonies in the intro are taken almost directly from the
intro to Elvis’ ‘It’s Now Or Never’ — a song that, whether you like it or
not, was at least a perfectly adequate representative of the «romantic-candlelight-prelude-to-a-night-of-passion»
genre. Here, though, it’s like quenching animal passion with a brutally cold
shower. ‘Walk Right
Back’, on the other hand, is a terrific little pop song that the Everlys took
off the hands of Sonny Curtis, who was at his songwriting peak at the time
(‘I Fought The Law’, ‘More Than I Can Say’, etc.). The simple, shuffling
acoustic riff is one of those atmospheric
nonchalant-walk-in-the-park-on-a-sunny-day creations, yet its embedded minor
chords leave some space for melancholy, which makes the lyrics — once again,
about separation, loneliness, and yearning — feel much more at home with the
melody than they do on ‘Ebony Eyes’. The song’s main hook is when the gentle
country-pop shuffle briefly gives way to a near-military march on the "bring your love to me this minute!"
bit, a subtle and clever mood swing that grabs your attention if it had been
previously lost due to the softness of the song — then, for the ultimate
resolution, cuts off the violence once again and drops back into purring
summer day melancholy. Not a bad match at all, Sonny Curtis with The Everly
Brothers. Then came the
crash — and, strangest of all, over what? A recording of ‘Temptation’, a
rusty oldie from the golden days of Bing Crosby that, ironically, had
originally been produced (way back in 1933) by Wesley Rose, but whose
publishing rights did not belong to him. It was old-fashioned, a little
cheesy, a bit difficult to properly modernize, yet, for some reason, Phil and
Don liked it so much (allegedly, a vision of Don rearranging Bing Crosby’s
version came to him in a frickin’ dream)
that they sacrificed their relations with their own publishing firm to get it
out on the market. It did go on to top the UK charts, but was far less
successful in the US, and, frankly, it’s not the kind of song over which I’d
personally go to battle with the system. Maybe it was just a pretext, though,
for the brothers to fight their own little war of independence — which, for
the moment, resulted in being cut off from recording any songs by their own
major songwriters, including themselves... and meanwhile, their new record
label was impatiently awaiting loads of material for their next LP. This is an
important angle from which to approach Both
Sides Of An Evening. The fact that no songs on it are credited to either
the Bryants or the Everlys is immediately obvious, but it takes a bit more
effort to realize that no songs on it are credited to any contemporary
songwriters, period — it’s all
folk, country, and Tin Pan Alley oldies from the last three or four decades.
Yet unlike something like Songs Our
Daddy Taught Us, the record somehow manages to avoid feeling like a
nostalgia trip: having lost all their songwriters, the brothers still retain
their loyal Nashville sidemen, and all the songs feature the usual polish,
snappiness, and elegance of America’s finest pop music team at the time. Much
to their credit, if you forget to look up the relevant song information
before turning up the volume, the only vibe you’ll be getting from this stuff
is an early Sixties vibe. The title of
the record refers to its thematic separation, with livelier and more
danceable songs mostly placed on Side A and slower, moodier ballads occupying
most of Side B — a strategy that seems to have been en vogue around the time (notably, the Elvis team did exactly the
same with Something For Everybody
the same year), but, in my opinion, never manages to stand the test of time:
too many ballads in a row, no matter how pretty or well-polished, are a
serious burden on one’s attention span, and it is hardly surprising that most
of the people commenting on the LP seem to prefer Side A, myself included.
After all, a good landscape is one that frequently alternates between peaks
and valleys, rather than putting the Alps on your left and the Great Plains
on your right. But maybe they thought, at the time, that a structural trick
like this might at least detract some listeners from noticing the overall
«antiquity» of the material. On which point
they really shouldn’t have worried. The first seven seconds of the album open
with a mighty punch that would soon be directly copied by The Beatles for
their own arrangement of ‘Twist And Shout’, and a racing guitar riff that was
never a part of the original ‘My Mammy’ as sung by, say, Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer. Fortunately for the
Everlys, they don’t have to put on no blackface, but they do have to
rearrange the song so that it now sounds like a contemporary pop number, and
it’s a beautiful synthesis of vocal harmonies, thunderous rhythm section,
complex guitar interplay, and immaculate mix, all of it taking up the space
of just two minutes. Honestly, it could have been a hit, but the brothers
opted for something even more adventurous as the lead single off the album
(and paid the price for it). That particular
something was ‘Muskrat’, a cover of an old humorous country ditty by Merle
Travis, completely remade as a dark-tinged, almost proto-psychedelic dance
number, with one of the weirdest arrangements in Everly history. Opening with
a «rusty-spring» bass line where each note feels as if bouncing off a rubber
ball, a reverberated swamp-style guitar riff, and a percussion track sounding
like a pack of rattlesnakes, it adds a whole other dimension to Travis’
original set of animalistic metaphors on the «life sure ain’t no rose garden»
idea — the guitars and drums add a nervous, paranoid, and even slightly
shamanistic tweak to the song. For the first time in their lives, it is as if
The Everly Brothers engage in a bit of black magic right before our eyes: I
picture them actually brewing some potent witches’ brew, chanting "muskrat, muskrat, what makes your head so
slick?" and "groundhog,
groundhog, why is your back so brown?" as they calmly disembowel the
poor dumb animals, spilling their guts inside the ugly-smelling black
cauldron or something. Possibly their audiences pictured something similar in
horror, seeing as how the song barely cracked the Top 100 when it was
released in the US (it still reached #20 on the UK charts, though, what with
the Everlys’ overall overseas popularity still at a much higher level than in
their native country — or maybe those Macbeth-reared Englishmen were just
more tolerant of witchcraft). Anyway, while
‘Muskrat’ is an obvious stand-out track on the album and an odd highlight of
the brothers’ career as a whole, I really dig most of the content of Side A.
The old vaudeville number ‘My Gal Sal’ is remade as a new vaudeville number — slow, sleazy, filled with cool slappy
bass licks from Floyd Lightnin’ Chance and a shrill, piercing, unusually
aggressive electric guitar solo (probably from Hank Garland). ‘Grandfather’s
Clock’ becomes a fast and lively country-pop romp with a Chet Atkins melody
crossing it from top to bottom with the usual combination of speed,
smoothness, and style. Even a hicky throwaway track like ‘Mention My Name In
Sheboygan’ is hard to resist, with Marvin Hughes’ barrelhouse piano dusting
off some long-forgotten Fats Waller vibe and sharpening it up for 1961. And
all through the set, the Everlys’ twin harmonies remain tight, uplifting, and
in no way indicative of any potential troubles clouding the brothers’
attitude. Even if «beneath this mask they are wearing a frown», you couldn’t
really see it. The «slow side»
is consistently graceful as well but, as I already said, a bit hard to fully
concentrate on. The funny thing is that they actually did two different versions of ‘Hi-Lili,
Hi-Lo’ — a super-slow balladeering take and a fast, upbeat, jazzy take,
driven by a lilting and fluent, Wes Montgomery-style jazz guitar; a few
available versions of the album (such as the digital copy I have, in which
most of the songs are introduced by short spoken introductions by the
brothers) accidentally include the fast rather than slow version, and while I
realize it is a bit banal to always prefer fast over slow, in this case the
exceptional guitar work is a great extra argument (no idea who actually is
playing, though, as the recording sessions for May 31, 1961 show no fewer
than five session guitarists). Yet the concept had to take precedence over
individual song quality, and so the generic version of the record only has
the slow ballad take, alas. Unfortunately,
the rest of the songs just sound nice;
even if they are all dutifully changed into country-pop clothes, the
potential for transformation is nowhere near as grand here as it is in the
case of ‘My Mammy’ or ‘Muskrat’, and with the exception of the steady bass
clip-clop of the cowboy’s horse on ‘Wayward Wind’, the rest of the ballroom
arrangements get glued to each other and offer few moments of individuality
to anybody but the most persistent listener, which in this case sort of
excludes yours truly. It’s just decent, solidly performed Everly Brothers
balladry, giving you more of those angelic harmonies and first-rate Nashville
arrangements that we already know pretty much everything about. Of course, you
just might be a sucker for old mushy Tin Pan Alley ballads like ‘Don’t Blame
Me’ re-recorded with a strong, toe-tappy rhythmic foundation and steel
guitars rather than symphonic orchestras — so I’m not exactly saying it’s all
pointless or anything. But if Side A of the album does properly convey an
adventurous spirit — take several different slices of Americana and update
them for the new decade — then Side B comes out as much more perfunctory,
bringing back to mind the simple truth that, one way or another, the Everlys
had to cope with a dearth of new material. For the moment, they did a pretty
good job of masking their troubles; but clearly, this ruse could not go on
indeterminately. |
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Tracks: 1) Step It Up And Go; 2) Theme
From "Carnival" (Love Makes The World Go ’Round); 3) Jezebel; 4)
True Love; 5) Bye Bye Blackbird; 6) When It’s Night-Time In Italy It’s
Wednesday Over Here; 7) Oh! My Papa (O Mein Papa); 8) Trouble In Mind; 9)
Autumn Leaves; 10) Long Lost John; 11) The Party’s Over; 12) Ground Hawg. |
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REVIEW As a parting gift from the
powers-on-high to the Everly Brothers and, through them, to humanity, in
December ’61 we got ‘Crying In The Rain’ — the last of the Everlys’ grand old
Top 10 hits, still cherished by the older generations just as strongly as its
cover by A-Ha would be revered by the younger ones. (Technically, ‘That’s Old
Fashioned’ would be the brothers’ last Top 10 hit, but I am not sure anybody
truly remembers that one). The song was unusual in that it was a
collaboration between Carole King and lyricist Howard Greenfield, rather than
her usual partner Gerry Goffin — and also the only instance of a Carole King
song taken on by the Everly Brothers (at least, the only original one). Which
is quite a pity: the only thing that could have saved the brothers’ career at
the time would have been a tight, long-term collaboration with a prominent
songwriter, and a match between Phil, Don, and Carole would seem heavenly —
but I guess she had way too many obligations on her back already, being one
of the hottest songwriting propositions of 1961–62, and writing songs for
fresh newcomers like Bobby Vee paid off better than it did for a couple of
old geezers from the Fifties. |
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Anyway, ‘Crying
In The Rain’ is more than fit to be a symbolic «swan song» for the
significant part of the Everlys’ career — a tale of personal tragedy, strength
of character, and hope for a better future which, although it is technically
a love song, must have resonated quite deeply with the brothers in their
then-current situation. "I’ll
never let you see the way my broken heart is hurting me" — unlike
Morten Harket, the brothers actually keep that promise, never falling into
the temptation of over-emoting the song’s message. There’s not that much to
the tune’s instrumental melody or arrangement, other than the little
«weaving» Spanish-style acoustic flourish at the start, but the vocal
performance is hard to forget, with the a cappella delivery of the hookline
as one of the defining moments of the brothers’ career. The grip of something
like "You’ll never see me complain
— I’ll do my crying in the rain" comes from the clever inversion of
the emotional punch of both lines: first,
the harmonies go triumphantly up, and then
they get resolved with a harsh downward turn, on the comparatively cold and
quiet final promise. This, by the way, is something that would get completely
lost in A-Ha’s version, which feels so massive and operatic next to the
original, yet somehow ends up turning most of the drama into mush. Amusingly, the
B-side of the single explored pretty much the same topic, but from a
completely different side: ‘I’m Not Angry’, which the brothers wrote
themselves and masked with the pseudonym "Jimmy Howard" to throw
Acuff-Rose off the scent, starts out with a burly guitar riff that
immediately inverts the song’s title, and puts a half-punkish, half-comic spin
on the same story of betrayal and abandonment. There’s a bit of Little
Richard, a trifle of the Coasters, and a chunk of pop smartness in the song,
and although it is obviously way too light to become a classic, at the time
it was probably comforting to have it compensate for the emotional heaviness
of the A-side — at least it clearly showed the world that the Everly Brothers
weren’t really suicidal or anything. The bad news is
that the frivolousness of ‘I’m Not Angry’ turned out to be a foreshadowing of
the relatively disastrous LP that was yet to come. First of all, what sort of
a title is Instant Party! when the
people behind it are Phil and Don Everly? These guys look about as fit to
throw us an «instant party» as The Beach Boys would look fit to paint their
faces and stroll out on stage singing get
up and get your grandma outta here. If the idea was to show the world
that everything was right and jolly-ho in the Everlys’ camp, they could have
at least focused on the brothers’ real nature — even a picture of them
sitting and smiling on the porch of a nice country house would be a superior
proposition. Oh well, at the very least we are free from Do The Twist With The Everly Brothers, with a couple obligatory
Chubby Checker covers and a bunch of rewrites like ‘Twist On, Little Suzie’,
‘All I Have To Do Is Twist’, and ‘Cathy’s Twist’ — a general rule for all the
rock’n’rollin’ has-beens of the Fifties from which The Everly Brothers were
happily exempt. They did try to
kick up a «party spirit», though, which is immediately obvious on the opening
track — a dynamic, pop-rockin’ arrangement of the traditional dance-blues
number ‘Step It Up And Go’ (also known as ‘Bottle Up And Go’ and recorded in
a million different variations in the pre-war era). On the surface, it seems
like a decent enough update of the old sound, but deep down inside, there is
a bit of an empty feeling — almost as if the singers and players alike are
attempting to force that sound out of themselves, rather than enjoy it. Above
all, if you’re singing comic verses like "two old maids, sittin’ in the sand, each one wishin’ that the other
was a man", you have to somehow make the humor come through, but the
brothers aren’t laughing — it’s more like they are struggling to remember all
the lyrics so as to deliver them at the proper breakneck speed. Whoever is
responsible for electric guitar keeps trying to raise up a ruckus with sharp,
speedy blues-rock licks, but they do not mesh well with the harmonies,
either. All in all, a pretty inauspicious start to the «party»: by choosing
such a blatant oldie from the 1930s, the brothers come across as
novelty-oriented revivalists. Technically,
it’s not much of a departure from the opening double-punch of ‘My Mammy’ and
‘Muskrat’ on the previous album, but there is a serious difference — those
two songs carried an aura of either instrumental heaviness (‘Mammy’) or
swampy danger (‘Muskrat’), recorded as truly
modern-day numbers constructed around old chords and words. ‘Step It Up And
Go’, in comparison, feels devoid of any vocal or instrumental emotion, even
including humor, which is truly a killing blow for such a lightweight number.
And things hardly improve with the fact that it is immediately followed by
‘Love Makes The World Go Round’ (‘Theme From Carnival’), a Broadway number
from a poorly remembered musical that just happened to be making the rounds
in 1961. A symbolic enough juxtaposition of the old and the new, for sure;
but when the old is handled so clumsily and the new selected in such poor
taste (it is a very generic
look-at-me-je-suis-si-Parisien
carnival waltz), the symbolism ends up wasted. Alas, it simply
does not get better, mainly because the track list is so generally terrible:
about 80% showtunes and 20% of old country/folk standards, with «professionalism»
as more or less the only redeemable quality about the recordings — meaning
that if you are in desperate love with the brothers’ harmonies, you will
forgive them anyway. My love does not go quite that far; I think that the
Everlys lacked the kind of artistic freedom and quirky inventiveness that
sometimes allows a great artist to make even the proverbial phonebook come to
life — and when they do try to embellish an old blues tune like ‘Trouble In
Mind’ with melismatic harmonies at the end of each verse, the emotional
meaning of this gesture escapes me. The closest analogy is probably something
like Jimmie Rodgers’ yodeling, but that
trick had an easily decodable and instantly effective emotional message —
adding a light and optimistic joie-de-vivre
to all of Jimmie’s recordings, even including the most depressed and tragic
ones. The Everlys’ reading of ‘Trouble In Mind’, on the other hand, feels
stiff and unbelievable, and the acrobatic harmonies signing off those verses
are just empty ornaments. It’s all the more strange considering that the
brothers may have very easily identified with the message of ‘Trouble In
Mind’ at the time — but this dreary arrangement just does not seem to have
the strength to carry that message across. Nor do they
succeed in taming the world of showtunes; for some reason, their idea of
interpreting ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’ and ‘Autumn Leaves’ is to transform both
into slow, draggy, tender ballads — well, okay, ‘Autumn Leaves’ is a slow, draggy, tender ballad by
definition, and ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’ was also done as one by Peggy Lee and
others, but the Everlys’ slowness and dragginess feels very mechanic and
predictable. This is where their harmonies become more of an impediment than
an advantage: they spend more effort on singing on key and in unison than on
finding some particular moving way to intone particular musical phrases. The
songs just roll on quietly, with hardly any serious impact. Curiously, the
album ends much the same way it began, with another humorous old folk tune which,
despite similarity of the title (‘Ground Hawg’), has none of the bite that ‘Muskrat’
had on the previous album. You can dance to it, it’s got a lively Depression-era
campfire fiddle solo and everything, but in the end it’s all so perfunctory that I still cannot for the life of me think
of Instant Party! as anything more
than a contractual obligation. I certainly do not envy any artist locked in
the jaws of Warner Bros. right at the very moment when their publishing
agency ties their hands behind their back. With a little
more effort — if they’d only managed to procure one or two masterful
songwriters on the level of Carole King on a more permanent basis — the Everlys
might have survived. But apparently they had no strength left to do that, and
chose the easy way out, which was also the most dispassionate one, even if
their overall spirit was by no means spent, as proven by the relative genius
of ‘Crying In The Rain’, or even by the single that bookmarks Instant Party! on the other side: ‘That’s
Old Fashioned’, submitted by the Baum/Giant/Kaye songwriting team of Elvis,
is a refreshingly fun pop song, while Gerry Goffin’s B-side ‘How Can I Meet Her?’
is almost a throwback to the exuberance of the Everlys’ «teenage drama hits»
from the earliest days. Why couldn’t there be more of such songs on Instant Party? |
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