GENE VINCENT
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1956–1971 |
Early rock’n’roll |
Race With The Devil
(1956) |
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Album
released: Aug. 13, 1956 |
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Tracks: 1) Bluejean Bop; 2) Jezebel; 3)
Who Slapped John?; 4) Ainʼt She Sweet?; 5) I Flipped; 6) Waltz Of The Wind; 7)
Jump Back, Honey, Jump Back; 8) That Old Gang Of Mine; 9) Jumps, Giggles
& Shouts; 10) Lazy River; 11) Bop
Street; 12) Peg Oʼ
My Heart; 13*) Race With The Devil; 14*) Be-Bop-A-Lula;
15*) Woman Love; 16*) Crazy Legs; 17*) Gonna Back Up Baby; 18*) Well, I
Knocked Bim Bam. |
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REVIEW
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Although Geneʼs first two singles were not included on this LP, you can find them
attached as bonus tracks on some editions, and, of course, this is precisely
where one should start — want it or not, ʽBe-Bop-A-Lulaʼ will forever
remain his signature tune. For one thing, it brought new life and meaning to
the echo effect — although the latter had already been popularized by Elvis
at the start of the rockabilly revolution, Ken Nelsonʼs production goes completely overboard, to the point
where it is almost impossible to decipher the words (personally, Iʼve always
heard "sheʼs the queen of
all the teens" as "sheʼs the queen of
the Ovaltines", and it always made more sense to me) and the lead guitar
sounds like itʼs suffering
from a really bad hangover, yet still manages to carry the melody. For
another, it sort of urbanized the rockʼnʼroll vocal: in
the place of the cheerful hillbilly (Bill Haley, Carl Perkins) or the burly
hillbilly (Elvis, Jerry Lee) what you hear is a snarkier, higher-pitched,
generally more slap-in-yer-face slum-hoodlum tone — with far less subtlety,
perhaps, and with a singing technique that leaves much to be desired, but
also one that was much easier to imitate for young white rebels across the
other side of the ocean: little wonder that the Beatles, in their early
years, looked way more like four copies of Gene Vincent than four copies of
Carl or Elvis. Throw in the absolutely inane, caveman lyrics that will make
you re-appreciate the poetic value of Elvisʼ hit songs, and there you have it — Gene Vincent, man of the year in
mid-ʼ56. There was also the little surprise factor of Cliff
Gallup, one of the best guitarists of the decade who got almost accidentally
promoted from session man to a regular member of Geneʼs Blue Caps (though, unfortunately, not for very
long). You can hear echoes of Carl Perkinsʼ and Scotty Mooreʼs playing in
his lead parts, and he might not have always been their equal in terms of
careful phrasing and pacing, but Cliff added flash — speed, volume, rough
excitement — and, in a way, might have been the first of many rockʼnʼroll guitarists
trying to wordlessly steal the spotlight away from the frontman: one reason
why he was so revered by Jeff Beck, among others. ʽBe-Bop-A-Lulaʼ, with its relatively slow tempo, might not be the best place to
appreciate his talents (though that first solo is eminently hummable), but
the second single, ʽRace With The
Devilʼ, most
certainly is — this combination of speed, precision, cleanliness, and sheer
fun is quite unique in Fiftiesʼ rock. Not to
mention the songʼs title and
general message, of course — melodically, it may be the same formula as Chuck
Berryʼs ʽReelinʼ And Rockinʼ or Elvisʼ ʽBaby Letʼs Play Houseʼ, but lyrically, not a lot of teenage rockʼnʼroll songs
would directly refer to the devil as the protagonistʼs partner in crime. Whoever might have been shocked
by something like AC/DCʼs ʽHighway To Hellʼ twenty years later should have remembered that Gene Vincent was
playing his own subtle games with the horned one when Bon Scott was still
going to Sunshine Primary. Moving on to the album itself, the opening title
track is a classic deceptive move — starting out as a slow romantic ballad,
then, a few bars into the song, abruptly jarring to a halt and restarting as
a frenzied rocker (one can only guess how much of a show-stopper something
like this should have been at the average school prom). "Bop" was
clearly Geneʼs favorite word
— those labials just roll off your lips, donʼt they? — and The Blue Caps are all about boppinʼ them blues, making sure each beat hits the ground
only long enough to rebound back in the air, where their rhythm section,
their lead guitar, and their hiccupy vocalist all prefer to spend their time.
With this levity and excitement, it is easy to forget that ʽBluejean Bopʼ, ʽWho Slapped
John?ʼ, ʽJump Back, Honey, Jump Backʼ and whatever else are all pretty much
interchangeable — the bandʼs minimalistic
arrangements and limited musical vocabulary allow them about as much moving
space as the Ramones twenty years later, at least when it comes to upbeat
style. Upbeat, of course, is not all they can do: not so deep down at heart, Gene Vincent was also
an honest romantic, and he was certainly not above serenading the lovely
ladies with slow-paced sentimental balladry. Among his idols we see not only
Hank Williams (ʽWaltz Of The
Windʼ), but also the
doo-woppers (ʽWedding Bellsʼ) and even Hoagy Carmichael (ʽUp A Lazy Riverʼ) — all of this stuff is faithfully converted to the Blue Capsʼ echoey style, but performed without the slightest
hint at a tongue-in-cheek attitude. And itʼs not at all bad: Cliff Gallup excels at slow soloing as well (check
out his «Eastern» chords on the exotica-tinged pop standard ʽJezebelʼ), while Geneʼs crooning voice on ʽLazy Riverʼ, in this
humble reviewerʼs thoroughly
unworthy opinion, is more seductive and emotionally resonant than Hoagyʼs own. And since there is no true contradiction
between Gene the raunchy be-bopping biker and Gene the sentimental
doo-wopping troubadour, it would make just as little sense to dismiss these
disarmingly charming minimalistic interpretations of the old classics as it
would be for, say, Elvis doing ʽBlue Moonʼ in his Sun days. The
worst that could be said about Bluejean
Bop is that the album basically knows only two formulas — the sweet and
the explosive — and just keeps swinging from one to the other. This is the
same worst that can also be said about 99% of LPs released in the Fifties;
the important thing that makes Bluejean
Bop one of the classics is the feeling of fresh, raw excitement. Like
with most of Geneʼs
contemporaries, it could easily be predicted that he would never be able to
top this initial batch, but donʼt let the
leather jacket and greased hair image fool you: Gene Vincent and the Blue
Caps were the real deal, capturing millions of teenage hearts with their
sounds first and foremost, and their visual image always coming second. The
best of these songs represent some of the wildest rockʼnʼroll ever put
on tape. |
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AND THE BLUE CAPS |
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Album
released: March 4, 1957 |
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Tracks: 1) Red
Blue Jeans And A Pony Tail; 2) Hold Me, Hug Me, Rock Me; 3) Unchained
Melody; 4) You Told A Fib; 5) Cat Man; 6)
You Better Believe; 7) Cruisin’; 8) Double Talkin’ Baby; 9) Blues Stay Away
From Me; 10) Pink Thunderbird; 11) I Sure Miss You; 12) Pretty, Pretty Baby;
13*) Important Words; 14*) B-I-Bickey-Bi, Bo-Bo-Go; 15*) Five Days, Five
Days; 16*) Teenage Partner; 17*) Five Feet Of Lovin’. |
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As
we now know, the second and last genuinely important album released in Gene
Vincentʼs heyday was recorded in bitter conditions — lead
guitarist Cliff Gallup, Gene’s chief instrumental selling point, had actually
left the Blue Caps a few months before the sessions (held in late ’56) and
had to be convinced to briefly rejoin the band in order to save the day.
Apparently, this was not because his replacement Russell Williford was found
lacking, but because Williford himself had resigned from the band right
before they had to go back to the studio. And given that, according to some sources,
Cliff may have resigned from the band precisely because he himself had grown
dissatisfied with the «Gallup Sound» and wanted to go for a more conventional
Nashville type of sound, it would be easy to suspect that the overall spirit
must have suffered as a result. |
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Yet this is not the main problem with the album — in
fact, on the surface at least the level of primal energy necessary to keep
the Gene Vincent motor running seems just as high, if not higher, than during
the early days of ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’. Indeed, the record is full to the brim
with speedy, thrashy rockers, only very rarely interrupted by a sentimental
ballad or a slow blues burner. Most of the tunes are originals, too, written
by Gene himself or by other members of the Blue Caps or by his personal
songwriters — at least one, ‘You Better Believe’, is even credited to Gallup
himself, meaning there was more dedication behind his brief return than the
one of a mere session player. Whoever says that the album «drags» can easily
be sued for libel with no hopes of winning. In a way, though, the
album might be trying a bit too
hard. A good example of a song that ends up overdoing it is ‘Cat Man’, on
which Gene is sucked into the emploi of Dangerous Ladies’ Man so much that
the «wildness» gets all hyperbolic and almost ridiculous. The song uses the
same trick of slow creeping build-up as Elvis’ ‘King Creole’: the verse is
all about quietly creeping up on the unsuspecting victim, and then the chorus
is all about springing out and going for a quick kill — "CAT
MA-A-A-A-N!" But there is really no menace felt within the song, though
its combination of a «relaxed Bo Diddley beat» with Gallup’s hard-to-define
style of playing (something in between the Wild West and Mexico, I’d say)
makes it melodically interesting, if not downright challenging. And this is
typical of the album: Gene keeps pushing forward his Wild Man agenda, but the
friendly rockabilly music does not properly back up that claim. When each
second verse on every second tune is capped off with a primal
"RO-O-OCK!" before launching into the guitar solo, the gag gets old
pretty darn fast: gee wiz, Mr. Vincent, do you have to necessarily end each of these on a fast-rising pitch? That said, what saves the record and makes it worth
revisiting every now and then is the songwriting: as evident as the formula
is, you gotta give the boys credit for actually working on each song and
trying out various small ideas to capture your attention in various small
ways in which it has not been captured before. At the very start, ‘Red Blue
Jeans And A Ponytail’ begins in a fairly traditional ‘Drinkin’ Wine
Spo-Dee-O-Dee’ type of way, but a fresh hook is thrown in on the fourth line
— instead of letting it be the regular end of the verse, Gene makes a «false
stop» with a lecherous oooh-weee, and
then mutates the ending ("...red blue jeans and a ponytail!") into
becoming the song’s chorus and memorable point. That’s all there is,
honestly, but how much else is needed for a two minute long rockabilly song? Likewise, ‘You Better
Believe’ sounds as if it has been welded together from bits and pieces of
‘Hard Headed Woman’ and ‘Got A Lot O’ Livin’ To Do’ (not sure if the latter
song came out earlier or later, but it does not really matter), yet what
gives it its tiny bit of special edge is the echoey call-and-answer ritual
between Gene and the boys as they keep hurling "believe, believe,
believe, believe" at each other before the obligatory
"RO-O-OCK!" sweeps the moody haze away and opens the gates for another
maniacal solo. Or take ‘Pink Thunderbird’, whose opening rockabilly line
("I got a pink Thunderbird, with a red fur seat...") is suddenly
broken up by a spoken interlude — "well baby, it’s mine", Gene
warns in a very clearly transmitted keep-your-paws-off-it intonation — and
then the same shit happens with the next two lines, meaning that the verse
never gets a chance to be properly resolved, and it is not until the chorus
that a «normal» melody is introduced. It is a classic case of teasing and
confusing the listener before delivering the punchline, and at the height of
the rock’n’roll era, Gene Vincent could be the mightiest teaser of them all. He could also get mighty
serious: I am not sold on his interpretation of ‘Unchained Melody’ (though I
would never call him unfit to take on its epic sentimentality), but the slow
and moody ‘Blues Stay Away From Me’ is done really well, with Gene working
across several registers and eventually settling upon a ghostly, echoey vocal
tone which is neither flat and generic nor overdramatic. He then applies the
same ghostly breathiness to the slow-rolling country shuffle ‘I Sure Miss
You’, a number you’d rather expect from the likes of Carl Perkins — but Carl
would most likely have sung it in his earthy, porch-sitting tone, whereas
Vincent always sings as if he were hovering a few inches above ground. In the end, though, the
record comes across as significantly less diverse than Bluejean Bop!,
even if in sheer numbers of classic Gene Vincent numbers they are more or
less equal. But compared to the subpar quality of the post-Gallup era, it is
still essential listening, and it can also teach us quite a few valuable
lessons on how to make things fresh, playful, and catchy within the framework
of a highly limited melodic and instrumental formula. |
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AND THE BLUE CAPS ROLL |
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Album
released: March 18, 1958 |
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Tracks: 1) Brand New Beat; 2) By The Light Of The Silvery Moon; 3) You’ll
Never Walk Alone; 4) Frankie And Johnnie; 5) In My Dreams; 6) Flea Brain; 7)
Rollin’ Danny; 8) You Belong To Me; 9) Your Cheatin’ Heart; 10) Time Will
Bring You Everything; 11) Should I Ever Love Again; 12) It’s No Lie. |
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The
golden era for Gene Vincent lasted approximately one year and 3–4 months: the
time it takes to get from ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ to ‘Dance To The Bop’, his first
and last entries on the US charts and a proverbial demonstration of how,
sometimes, one artist’s artistic and
commercial peaks may totally coincide. What exactly happened after that
summer of 1957 is not entirely clear: the only thing that is obvious is that
it had little to do with the departure of Cliff Gallup and his eventual
replacement by Johnny Meeks, or with any other change in the lineup of the
Blue Caps. It is far more likely that the drastic change in style was Gene’s
own initiative — an initiative that put his career on the downward track a
solid couple of years before his
unfortunate accident with Eddie Cochran, which would be the final nail in
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It is hardly a coincidence that the first song on
the Blue Caps’ third LP is called ‘Brand New Beat’: perhaps the beat as such
is not new in general, but it definitely is a new kind of beat for Gene
Vincent, a beat that he might have thought to be more mature and palatable to
a wider audience, but which in reality simply came across as much more tame
and conventional. Never even mind the
fact that the song was formally credited to Joe Allison (and his wife
Audrey), a professional songwriter for country and doo-wop artists: what
matters most is that it rides atop a strict, smooth and jangly electric guitar
line (and a piano part, for the first time ever on a Gene Vincent rocker),
features doo-woppy back-up vocals from a new addition called «the Clapper
Boys», and has Gene sing more in Buddy Holly fashion than in his own wild man
style. It is still mildly catchy (though the melody feels seriously
influenced by Buddy’s ‘Rock Me My Baby’), but it has no personality. Truth be told, the problem
was already evident on the last of Gene’s hit singles, such as ‘Lotta Lovin’
and ‘Dance To The Bop’: the wild man of yesteryear was slowly giving way to a
more polished and civilized singer of rock’n’roll for people who wouldn’t
mind to see rebellion mutate into entertainment. But on Gene Vincent
Rocks!, contrary to the self-assured nature of that exclamation mark, there
is very little rock’n’roll as such. There is some pop, some country, some
crooning balladry, and, at best, two or three songs that would even formally
qualify as the Devil’s music — one of these, ‘Flea Brain’, being little more
than a rehash of several of Gene’s rockabilly classics, except for maybe
featuring what could qualify as the most misogynistic lyrics of his entire
career ("stacked just right from her head to her shoe, she acts like
somethin’ that escaped from the zoo"... "if she wasn’t good lookin’
she’d be better off dead"). Some people actually swear
by the ballads on this album, finding exquisite quality in Vincent’s soulful
deliveries of such classics as ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ and such new titles
as Bernice Bedwell’s ‘In My Dreams’. I would say this is very much a matter of taste, and that while I can certainly see
how Gene’s rough, unpolished approach to crooning could stimulate one’s
emotional centers, it still feels to me that he was largely trying to emulate
the styles and techniques of Elvis, and inevitably failing as a result. Want
it or not, there is a reason why Gene Vincent is hardly ever remembered for
his romantic side — probably the same reason why we tend to remember the
Troggs more for ‘Wild Thing’ and less for ‘Love Is All Around’ (at least, I
do surmise that most people who actually remember ‘Love Is All Around’ will
have a hard time remembering that it was actually done by the same dudes who
did ‘Wild Thing’). Arguably the single most
interesting thing going on here is the rough and rowdy way with which Gene
attacks golden country standards — his delivery of ‘Frankie And Johnnie’ is
downright hysterical, replete with hiccups, heavy breathing, and drawled-out
syllables that occupy 90% of sonic space, so much so that it makes you wonder
why he didn’t want to put the finishing touch on it by speeding up the song
and turning it into an equally frantic rocker. On the other hand, Hank
Williams’ ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’ is ever so slightly poppified and made to
look like an Elvis number — the deep bass loop of "...will tell on
you" is 100% pure Elvis in nature. On the third hand, ‘By The Light Of The Silvery Moon’, which Gene most
likely copped from the then-recent Jimmy Bowen hit version rather than the
pre-war original, has always been an awfully corny song and gets an equally
corny delivery (for some reason, the mesmerizing effect of the song was so
huge in the Fifties that even Little Richard tried to remake it in his own
style a year later — it’s just that the innate stupidity of the tune always
had the upper hand on everybody who tried to defeat it in a fair fight). In short, the only way to
defend the album is by saying that very little on it, with the possible
exception of ‘By The Light’, is explicitly bad — at the very least, there are
certainly no signs of Gene Vincent trying to remodel himself as a teenage
idol, à la Johnny Burnette
or any other rockabilly heroes of his generation. But if the first two LPs,
and the non-LP singles surrounding them, were and still remain an integral
part of the early rock’n’roll canon, this
album will only be of special interest to those who are, for some reason or
other, fascinated with the character evolution of Gene Vincent — or those who
would like to know what exactly it takes to go from Top Artist to Average
Artist without embracing a whole new sound or a whole new artistic persona. |
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Album
released: November 1958 |
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Tracks: 1) Five Feet Of Lovin’; 2) The
Wayward Wind; 3) Somebody Help Me; 4) Keep It A Secret; 5) Hey, Good Lookin’;
6) Git It; 7) Teen Age Partner; 8) Peace Of Mind; 9) Look What You Gone And
Done To Me; 10) Summertime; 11) I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still In Love With
You); 12) I Love You; 13*) Lotta Lovin’; 14*) I Got It. |
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REVIEW
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Anyway, one thing is for sure: despite the lack of
commercial success, Capitol executives continued to be more than willing to
accommodate their artist when it came to recording. In 1958 alone, Vincent pulled off not one, but two LPs — and neither
of the two was just a collection of A- and B-sides. This second one, recorded
with more or less the same personnel as Gene Vincent Rocks!, also
reflects the results of a single recording session held sometime in the fall
of ’58 and released in November — and the only song here to have been
featured as a single is ‘Git It’, the rest are LP-only tracks. Of course, it would be odd
to expect something radically different from Gene Vincent Rocks! If
anything, this record feels a tad more
mellow than its predecessor, reflecting even more softness and quiet than
before. In fact, on several of the tracks Vincent ends up sounding exactly
like Buddy Holly — ‘I Love You’, closing out the album, has Holly-style
jangly pop guitar, Holly-style romantic chimes, Holly-style nerdy-hiccupy
vocals, and Holly-style simplistic-romantic lyrics; play this tune to anybody
with less than subtle ear-hearing and see if the mistake is not made (at the
very least, nobody will be able to identify this as Gene Vincent if all one
knows are the classic hits). Likewise, the bonus track ‘I Got It’ (the
original B-side to ‘Dance To The Bop’) appropriates the Crickets’ percussive
style and Buddy’s vocal melody contours, with the Clapper Boys providing
Picks-style harmonies as well. Elsewhere, Gene is
continuing his love affair with old-fashioned country, borrowing two Hank
Williams tunes and slightly rockifying them — ‘Hey, Good Lookin’ is seriously
sped up, set to the piano boogie riff of ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On’,
graced with a wild piano solo, and touched up with a bit of barking as Gene
reaches out for his wildman throaty delivery at the end of the bridge
section; meanwhile, ‘I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still In Love With You)’ has
barrelhouse piano and sharp, bluesy lead guitar phrasing all over it,
ditching the romantic melancholy of the original and transforming into
something more upbeat and aggressive. Unfortunately, the rearrangements do
not really work: ‘Hey, Good Lookin’ loses its perfectly paced subtle
salaciousness with the new tempo, and ‘I Can’t Help It’ is devoid of magic
with Gene’s lackluster, uninspired, largely expressionless vocal performance
(at least that’s the way it feels if you remember Hank). It’s not really a matter
of running out of ideas — it’s more a matter of being unable to find ideas
that mean something. We can
certainly give credit to Gene, for instance, for not wanting to record just
another cover of ‘Summertime’, but instead reimagining it as an exotic,
mambo-influenced danceable number with fussy guitar and piano solos. But does
it work? It’s a frickin’ lullaby,
for Christ’s sake. Your mummy and daddy aren’t supposed to be rockin’ it out
in front of the cradle. If you scratch out all the sadness and depth and
internalised pain from the tune, what exactly are you intending to replace it
with? A Les Baxter-style arrangement? Even Gene’s own
compositions are not spared from humiliation: for some reason, we have to
endure a «proto-soft rock» re-recording of ‘Teen Age Partner’, with the
Clapper Boys and Gene competing over who can inject more tenderness into a
rockabilly classic which was never intended to be tender in the first place.
The only point in this new version’s existence is that, by comparing the 1956
Cliff Gallup-era recording with the 1958 Johnny Meeks-era one, you can get a
much more transparent and obvious picture of the «temporary death of
rock’n’roll in the US» than you would from reading a hundred books or
watching a hundred documentaries on the subject. It is one thing when your
wild and rebellious rock’n’roll heroes are being squeezed out of the public
eye by teen idols; it is quite another one when they begin reducing
themselves to the level of teen idols to fit in with the times. This does not mean that A
Gene Vincent Record Date does not at all rock, or is somehow unlistenable
— by the average standard of 1958, the album does OK, and the new Blue Caps
continue to be more slick, tight, and professional than the old ones. For
fairness’ sake, Gene sounds sincere and beautiful on the gospel-style love
ballad ‘Peace Of Mind’ (still would rather hear this from Elvis), and further
matures as a singer on slow country tunes such as ‘The Wayward Wind’ and
‘Keep It A Secret’. And yet, it is not difficult to understand why none of these songs ever became classics, and
why all the young British lads would rather prefer to cover ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’
for the millionth time than give a damn about whatever Mr. Vincent was up to
in the fall of 1958. |
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Album
released: June 1959 |
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Tracks: 1) My Baby Don’t Low; 2) I Can’t
Believe You Want To Leave; 3) I Might Have Known; 4) In Love Again; 5) You
Are The One For Me; 6) Reddy Teddy; 7) I Got To Get To You Yet; 8) Vincent’s
Blues; 9) Maybe; 10) Now Is The Hour; 11) My Heart; 12) Maybellene. |
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By
early 1959, having had no luck whatsoever with the charts for more than a
year, Gene was desperate enough to try out whatever came his way — even if it
was a cover of ‘Over The Rainbow’, which Capitol put out as his first single
in 1959 and promoted fairly heavily (you can actually see Vincent singing it
live at the Town Hall
Party show in mid-’59). This did not help; rock’n’rollers would most
likely tear down their posters of Gene upon hearing him turn into Judy
Garland, while grannies would find this version too rough and crude for
consumption. If anything, it just served as further proof that Gene Vincent,
once the amazing wildcat to rule over all the less-than-amazing wildcats, had
lost his spark and was helplessly groping around in the dark, scrounging for
survival without much luck. |
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Even the title of his next
LP for Capitol feels pathetic: any record by Mr. X titled Sounds Like Mr.
X subtly implies that it most likely doesn’t (which is why there actually
aren’t a lot of them — the nearest example I know is 1965’s Sounds Like
Searchers, released right after the Searchers had lost a key member and
not really sounding that much like
the classic Searchers from 1964). But even more ironic, Sounds Like Gene
Vincent turns out to be a pathetically laughable title precisely because
this is the first ever Gene Vincent record on which at least two-thirds of
the tracks clearly give us Gene Vincent trying to sound like somebody else. Sounds like... Little
Richard on ‘I Can’t Believe You Want To Leave’, a slow doo-wop ballad on
which Mr. Penniman gave us his more sentimental and vulnerable, uh, I mean,
paranoid side, with a monumentally hystrionic performance. Next to that,
Gene’s delivery is pure milquetoast, though he does formally succeed in
conveying a state of emotional derangement. The accompanying lead guitar and
sax solos are purely perfunctory. Further on down the line, another tribute
to Little Richard is ‘Ready Teddy’ (misspelled as ‘Reddy Teddy’!), although
Johnny Meeks’ guitar solo is more reminiscent of Scotty Moore’s work on
Elvis’ records. The recording is every bit as exciting as any randomly chosen
Little Richard tribute by a bunch of randomly chosen rockabilly enthusiasts
performed at any time from 1960 to 2020. Sounds like... Bo Diddley
on ‘In Love Again’, a song formally credited to Gene himself but based
primarily and almost exclusively on appropriating the Bo Diddley beat. A
decent enough appropriation, and it is curious to watch the electric guitar
weave all those extra chords into the rhythm pattern, making it less
syncopated and more melodic, but also stripping it clean of that primal
animal energy. It’s like an attempt to take Bo Diddley’s rock’n’roll and
convert it into a pop song, but it does not go far enough to become
melodically interesting, while going far enough to make it slothful. Sounds like... Buddy Holly
on ‘Maybe’, written for Gene by a couple of amateur rockabilly songwriters
who had mastered the formula well enough for the sound to be pleasant and
recognizable, but not well enough to be able to do anything with it that
Buddy hadn’t already done. Worse, the exact same ‘Words Of Love’ chord
progression is then used again on
‘My Heart’, written by none other than Johnny Burnette. To Gene’s credit, he
does capture the sweetness and charm of Buddy’s vocal style almost to the
extent that you could mistake any of these two tunes for a real Buddy outtake
— but even if you persisted in your mistake, neither of the two would be
outstanding Buddy outtakes. (Particularly since Buddy did have his share of
non-outstanding and self-repetitive outtakes). Sounds like... Elvis on
‘Now Is The Hour’ (originally Clement Scott’s ‘Swiss Cradle Song’, later
gaining a secondary association with New Zealand after being oddly mistaken
for a traditional Maori song). Although I don’t think Elvis ever did that
one, Gene here adopts his vocal stylistics and makes his backing band sound
like the Jordanaires — quite likely, this could fool some beginner fans,
though not seasoned ones. Nice, but cheap. Sounds like... Chuck Berry
on ‘Maybellene’; this, at least, is a straight cover rather than a tricky
imitation. The tempo is solid, but the sax replacement for Chuck’s guitar is
limp, and so is Gene’s vocal performance. As usual, it can be clearly felt
that he is simply not giving it his all — almost as if he does not really
believe in the material, and that’s precisely what is ruining the effect.
Utterly pointless. Throw in an equally
middle-of-the-road performance of Little Walter’s ‘My Babe’ (for some reason,
spelled as ‘My Baby Don’t Low’ —
sic! — on the original album cover; Capitol really messed up with
proofreading on this one) and a ridiculous attempt to turn Big Joe Turner’s
‘Flip Flop And Fly’ into a slow, feeble, piano-led 12-bar blues (‘Vincent’s
Blues’, cheekily credited to Gene again), and the result is, on the whole,
the single most pathetic assembly of meaningless performances from Gene
to-date. While it is true that 1959 was, on the whole, a fairly devastating
and depressing year for the first wave of rock’n’rollers all through the USA,
you could at least find plenty of excuses for most of them — from marrying
their underage cousins to finding God to joining the army to being dead. For
Vincent, there is really no such excuse: Sounds Like Gene Vincent (Lost
His Way) is the album of a man whose short-term pact with the Devil had
run out and who suddenly found himself utterly bereft of his special gift. Admittedly, he could still
sing his heart out, and his band could still play; like before, there is nothing
here that would be way too unlistenable or too corny. Yet it is still a small
step further down from the quality of the previous two records — which had at
least a few occasional attempts at trying to retain or reinvent his own
personality. Here, it’s like he just threw his hands up and said, «take me
and do what you want with me». A pretty sad denouement. |
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Album
released: March 1960 |
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Tracks: 1) Crazy Times; 2) She She Little
Sheila; 3) Darlene; 4) Everybody’s Got A Date But Me; 5) Why Don’t You People
Learn How To Drive; 6) Green Back Dollar; 7) Big Fat Saturday Night; 8) Mitchiko
From Tokyo; 9) Hot Dollar; 10) Accentuate The Positive; 11) Blue Eyes Crying
In The Rain; 12) Pretty Pearly. |
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REVIEW Although
all of the recordings for this album date from an early August 1959 recording
session in Hollywood, by the time it actually came out Gene was a tax exile
in Europe — having run into some unexpected trouble with the mighty IRS, he
decided that now, perhaps, was the
time to conquer Europe in person, rather than through hearsay, and left for
the UK, where he was briefly pampered by Jack Good, the notorious early TV
promoter of various rock and roll stars, and then for the Netherlands and
Germany, where, I believe, he was particularly well received in Hamburg,
paving the road for you-know-who-from-Liverpool half a year later. |
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Formally, this might have
been the right thing to do: British kids likely flocked to their TV screens
to watch the leather-clad rock god on Jack Good’s Boy Meets Girl, and rewarded Gene for his effort by putting his
latest record, ‘Wild Cat’, on the UK charts — #21 may not seem like such a
big deal, but for Gene, it was his first chart entry anywhere since late 1957. The only problem, of course, is that
‘Wild Cat’ is thoroughly mislabeled — only those particular British kids
who’d never heard any of Gene’s classic early records could have been fooled
into thinking that this is what real rock’n’roll sounds like. In reality, the
song, recorded already after Johnny Meeks had left the band (with a couple of
totally unknown rhythm and lead guitarists replacing him), is a mid-tempo
sax-led R&B shuffle, a slightly upbeat take on a common bluesy pattern
(see, e.g., Ivory Joe Hunter’s ‘I Almost Lost My Mind’) over which Gene keeps
trying to convince his lady friend to "don’t ever try to tame a wild
cat" — the bitter irony of this, of course, being that the song represents a former wild cat being
completely tamed and docile. The «wildest» part of the song is arguably Jimmy
Pruett’s energetic hammering break on the piano, but even that one sounds
like a feeble shadow of the classic Jerry Lee Lewis country-rock vibe. I
can’t help wondering if Gene himself felt that irony, or if he really thought that on numbers like
these, he was still exorcising his demons with the same verve as he did with
the Blue Caps in his prime, without ever pausing to reflect on how
drastically his sound had changed... Anyway, the UK kids bought
it (perhaps the black leather outfit proudly displayed on British TV helped
more than the music itself), and this led to a small string of similar hits.
First, the Buddy Holly pastiche ‘My Heart’, taken from the previous album,
went all the way to #15; then came the turn of ‘Pistol Packin’ Mama’,
actually recorded in England, so we’ll return to this a little bit later;
finally, as late as 1961 one of the tracks from this album, ‘She She Little
Sheila’, also nearly made the UK Top 20, showing the world that if the
blasted Yankees were no longer keen on paying their dues to one of their own,
the Brits were still more than willing to take him off those colonial hands.
Even that little patch of hits, however, dried up well before the age of
Beatlemania, so it is useless to accuse the Fab Four and their retinue of
shooting down Gene Vincent’s trans-Atlantic star. Returning to the album,
I’d say it represents a slight improvement over Sounds Like Gene Vincent
— the songwriting is a little less «obvious» this time around, in that the
various rip-offs of superior composers are at least better masked, and there
are no in-yer-face inferior covers of stuff like ‘Maybellene’ or ‘Ready
Teddy’ whose only purpose is to show how it is possible to play an energetic
rock’n’roll song by leaving exactly 75% of the energy sweatin’ it out outside
the studio door. Also, by this time Gene has gotten a little better with his
completely new type of charisma — that of a smooth, pleasant, occasionally
sharp-tongued young lad who’ll graciously "open doors for little old
ladies" as he sends them off with an ironic witticism or two — and at
the very least, this image is still way preferable to all the Pat Boones and
Frankie Avalons of the new age of teenage entertainment. By the standards of
early 1960, Crazy Times! won’t have you growing mush out of your ears,
and that’s already an achievement. Still, it is hard to believe Gene when he
declares that "I promise crazy times will happen for you and me" on
the opening title track — co-written by Burt Bacharach and Paul Hampton (of
‘Sea Of Heartbreak’ fame), and it may be suspected that the notion of «crazy
times» for Burt Bacharach is not quite the same as it would be, say, for
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. The «craziest» thing about the track is its fast
tempo, and I keep noticing these really tasty piano breaks from Jimmy Pruett,
who seems to have been the best musician in the band on this particular session.
Vincent, however, sings the main melody in such a smooth and caring tone as
if the girl to whom he was making the promise in question was only just
discharged from the hospital — carefully fixing her in place behind him on
the bike and making absolutely sure not to drive it faster than 20 mph, not
even in the countryside. It’s rock’n’roll, for sure... for kiddies. This driving association
may actually have been triggered by listening to one of the most symbolic
numbers on the album — ‘Why Don’t You People Learn How To Drive’, credited to
a certain James A. Noble but fully compatible with Vincent’s new vision: a
song that, contrary to just about everything we have learned from the
foundations of rock’n’roll, encourages the listener to take it easy and drive
slow rather than fast: "Well, the wreck on the highway, the traffic’s pilin’ up / I gotta see
my baby and I can’t go fast enough / Why don’t you people learn to drive,
huh? / You know you just might stay alive / Oh, ain’t it a shame, the smoke
an’ the flames / I think you people is nuts". Leaving aside the dark
irony of how this message connects with what would happen to Gene himself on
April 16, 1960, the idea of a rock’n’roll song admonishing people to drive
slow feels somewhere right in the ballpark of Christian rock. I mean, next
thing you know, those damn rockers will start teaching us not to use drugs,
refrain from smoking, and always use protection during intercourse.
Ridiculous!!! Elsewhere, Gene is
engaging in bouts of self-pity: ‘Everybody’s Got A Date But Me’ is pretty
much defined by its title, and while it would be a stretch to regard the
entire song as a metaphor for the artist’s shriveling career ("Well I’ll find a brand new baby / I don’t
know how right now / They’re all booked up, I’m out of luck / I don’t care
anyhow"), playing it back to back with ‘Be Bop-A-Lula’ or ‘Crazy Legs’
shall certainly hint at a crisis of confidence. It’s still a nice, fast rock’n’roll
number with decent guitar and sax solos, but it’s not even supposed to have a spark of life in
it. It’s more of a "too old to rock’n’roll, too young to die" kind
of thing, and that’s kinda sad for somebody who was just 25 years old at the
time. That said, at least there’s
a touch of melancholic / ironic humor about most of these tracks, which saves
them from being complete embarrassments. Only two out of twelve songs are
those I’d never ever want to hear again — ‘Darlene’, a slow, stuttery mix of
blues and doo-wop for which Vincent has absolutely no voice, feel, or sense
of phrasing; and ‘Mitchiko From Tokyo’, a corny pop ditty that must have been
inspired by the Crown Princess, but has little to offer as redemption for its
silly stereotypes (and, for that matter, I think that Aneka’s ‘Japanese Boy’
is a great pop song, regardless of
any «cultural appropriation»; it’s only when the song’s primary purpose is to titillate and exploit when it becomes
offensive). On the other hand, he puts
in a surprisingly uplifting take on ‘Accentuate The Positive’ (the song works
real good with a steady pop beat), sounds tender and sweet without extra
syrup on ‘Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain’, and produces at least one minor
classic in ‘She She Little Sheila’, which, as I already said above, gave him
one more UK hit. The song’s main vocal hook makes it more of a «comic rock»
tune, of course, something in the vein of Larry Williams, but that’s not
necessarily a bad thing. If you can no longer provide a steady adrenaline
punch, might as well put a smile on their faces, right? Which brings us up to the
paradoxical conclusion: Crazy Times! tries to solidify Gene Vincent’s
new image as that of a «jovial» entertainer, stressing the light-headed fun
and humor in rock’n’roll, while at the same time concealing a subtle internal
bitterness, probably stemming from the artist’s own realization of his fall —
once a true King of all the wild cats, now more of a meek, friendly little
rock’n’roll clown. Ironically, in real life the meek and friendly clown seems
to have still been upholding a threatening image — constantly getting into
fights and gun-totin’ like crazy; at least he had nothing to do himself with
the terrible tragedy of April 16, 1960, in which Eddie Cochran lost his life
and Gene suffered severe injuries — another severe setback to his European
career. I do believe that Gene’s
last UK hit for 1960, a cover of the old Bing Crosby / Andrews Sisters hillbilly
hit ‘Pistol Packin’ Mama’ which he recorded at Abbey Road in May, right after
his recovery, was intended as a bit of tribute for Eddie — since it borrows
its drum-and-bass intro directly from Eddie’s ‘Somethin’ Else’. It does not
change Gene’s overall comic vibe all that much — the lyrics are delivered in
a joking manner, the sax break is hilarious, the piano line (played by a very
young, pre-fame Georgie Fame) is breezy — but the subject matter seems to be
right up Vincent’s alley, as he was pretty pistol-packin’ himself and sang
the thing with complete dedication. Still, this is pretty toothless
hooliganry; I dare say the song was far more cutting edge back in good old 1943. To add one final insult to
one final injury, the album was released in several countries (France and Sweden,
among others) under the odd title of Twist Crazy Times! — as if to
suggest that Gene was now influenced by the likes of Hank Ballard or Chubby Checker,
which he was anything but. This would be the equivalent of some subsidiary record
label releasing Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 album as Disco Rumours, just
because anything with the word ‘disco’ on it sells 20% more copies
automatically. Did they even ask Vincent’s permission?.. I seriously doubt
that. |
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