RICKY NELSON
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1957–1985 |
Early rock’n’roll |
Be-Bop Baby (1957) |
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Album
released: November 1957 |
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Tracks: 1) Honeycomb; 2) Boppin’ The Blues; 3) Be-Bop Baby; 4)
Have I Told You Lately That I Love You; 5) Teenage Doll; 6) If You Can’t Rock
Me; 7) Whole Lot Of Shakin’ Goin’ On; 8) Baby I’m Sorry; 9) Am I Blue; 10) I’m
Confessin’; 11) Your True Love; 12) True Love. |
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REVIEW Apparently, during his early years
on the Verve and Imperial record labels Ricky actively disliked being put in
the hands of older session musicians, and kept dreaming about getting his own
backing band which would match his age and style until he was finally able to
get one. The irony of this is that the self-titled Ricky, released at the end of 1957, still ended up being his only
#1 album on the US charts — and, in a rare case of unity between public and
personal opinion, arguably his best album ever. And why? Precisely because of
the presence of those older session musicians, if you ask me.
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The answer is that the main heroes
of Ricky, rather than Ricky
himself (though his presence is certainly important), are producer Jimmie
Haskell and sound engineer Bunny Robin. Between themselves, Ricky, and the
backing musicians, they manage here to generate a clean, clear, unaggressive,
yet fairly punchy sound which somehow manages to thrill and energize you without
even trying to emulate the rockabilly wildness of Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent,
or Jerry Lee Lewis. It certainly precludes the artist from the status of a
«rock’n’roll god», yet it just as certainly EXcludes him from the cohort of laughable young imitators
churning out bland surrogate for wholesome family entertainment. Just take a quick look at ‘Boppin’
The Blues’, the first true rock’n’roll number on the album. Carl Perkins
wrote the song and originally recorded it in his own giddily sloppy style — and
the original recording is quite exciting, but you can’t even hear the bass
all too well, and isn’t a deep, bulky bass sound the perfect ingredient for rockabilly fever? Here, though,
veteran bass player Judd Denaut (who had first made his name playing with
Artie Shaw) lays it down fast and thick, while the sound engineer ensures
proper separation from both rhythm and lead guitar. Said guitars, played by Howard
Roberts and Joe Maphis (also veterans of the jazz and country scenes), ooze
professionalism without completely forgetting the idea of going it
rough-and-tough: rhythm guitar lays down a rock-steady boogie line, lead
guitar plays choppy, twangy, audacious strings of broken licks to upgrade the
«punchiness» level of the sound. On top of all that, Ricky delivers
an unnerving, almost expressionless vocal — «wooden», one might call it, but
the total and utter lack of agitation, over-emoting, aggression, passion,
etc., is oddly charming on its own; there is a special sort of quasi-mystical
coolness to his stable, quiet, and self-confident tone, enhanced by just a
tiny bit of echo / reverb which gives the voice an «aura» without making the
lyrics incomprehensible à la
Gene Vincent. It all combines to regale the young Mr. Nelson with a certain je-ne-sais-quoi; perhaps authority could be a good word. Your
average teen idol would woo you over with sweetness and tenderness, but
Ricky’s voice is not particularly «sweet» even on the ballads — and, by the
way, there are only very few ballads on the record as such: ‘Have I Told You
Lately’, ‘I’m Confessin’, ‘True Love’, and that’s about it. All three are
sung tenderly, but without a shred of cheap sentimentality, and, once again,
with Ricky’s voice perfectly gelling with the thick, deep bass patterns,
producing almost the same effect as a good Elvis ballad, but with the bass
guitar taking on the precious functions of the bass voice. If there is a real problem, it is
that the album totally lacks highlights. It has a style, deeply ingrained in
all of its tracks, but since all the tracks are covers and the style is
applied to all of them in equal doses, nothing really sticks out. The highest
charting single off the album was ‘Be-Bop Baby’, one of two songs written
specially for Ricky by Pearl Lendhurst, but in terms of composition and
atmosphere it is no more and no less of a generic, lightweight country tune
than any other similar number on the album — I actually prefer the cover of
Jimmie Rodgers’ ‘Honeycomb’ by a hair, maybe because it has sharper bass
clicks and funny stop-and-start moments, whatever. I prefer the fast and
rocking numbers even more, but I could not really say which one is my
favorite, or if anything even simply catches the eye in particular. Okay, one song catches the eye in particular, largely due to an
accident: ‘If You Can’t Rock Me’, amusingly, shares its title with a much
later Rolling Stones song of the same name — but this one is credited to
Willie Jacobs, an old Texan schoolmate of Roy Orbison who had a few
recordings with his pals in 1956 credited to «The Strikes». The original recording was
fast and energetic, but under the command of Haskell and Robin, it becomes an
unstoppable bass train with even more tough bass «zoops» added by the lead
guitarist during the solo — a fun, crunchy sound. Not fun and crunchy enough,
though, to tower and hover over any other fast number on the record. Some CD editions of Ricky extend the album’s duration
from 12 to 14 tracks, throwing on the classic single ‘Stood Up’ / ‘Waiting In
School’ (the latter song probably being mostly familiar to post-boomer
generations from Pulp Fiction):
this is where you first get to hear Nelson’s soon-to-be regular guitar player
James Burton, though here he is still playing rhythm guitar while Joe Maphis
delivers the same «zoops» as on ‘If You Can’t Rock Me’. Written by the
Burnette Brothers (but, strange enough, not recorded by them), ‘Waiting In
School’ is like the white schoolkid’s anthemic answer to the black schoolkid’s
‘Ring Ring Goes The Bell’ — a little easier on the dissatisfaction angle, a
little heavier on the having pure, innocent fun angle — but who’s to say it isn’t pure, innocent fun? "Five,
six, come get your kicks / Down on the corner of Lincoln and Fourty-six"
clearly owes its punch to "get your kicks on Route 66", but Route
66 is, after all, a faraway and obscure reality, whereas every big city
probably has its own Lincoln and 46th intersection (people are still debating
this one: they probably meant L.A.,
where Ricky and the Burnettes were living at the time). And this, too, may have been a big
part of Nelson’s success: there is a whiff of urbanization of the country
sound in his recordings which is not often found among his contemporaries —
most of which swing either too far to one side, retaining that sweet
country-bumpkin taint (Perkins), or to the other, completely wiping it out
(Vincent). Ricky, on the other side, has this «country boy done gone
naturalized in the city» feeling to him — a fake one, perhaps, since the boy
had always been a big city dweller, but reeking of authenticity all the same
if you refrain from identity-checking. But even if this opinion sounds like
total bullshit to you, there is no denying that there is a bit of mystique to the classic Ricky Nelson sound, and that
behind all those pretty looks hides a very serious attitude to music making,
certainly uniquely serious for a
16-year old, and certainly sufficient to dispel any possible suspicions that
Nelson’s early successes were only due to the influence of his father —
unquestionably, that influence helped his career a lot, but no, it wasn’t
merely out of old loyal love for The
Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet that listeners were enthralled by ‘Be-Bop
Baby’ and ‘Waiting In School’ back in 1957. |
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Album
released: July 1958 |
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Tracks: 1) Shirley Lee; 2) Someday; 3)
There’s Good Rockin’ Tonight; 4) I’m Feeling Sorry; 5) Down The Line; 6)
Unchained Melody; 7) I’m In Love Again; 8) Don’t Leave Me This Way; 9) My
Babe; 10) I’ll Walk Alone; 11) There Goes My Baby; 12) Poor Little Fool. |
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REVIEW
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In the previous review, I tried to
point out that if you wanted to treat that record as something slightly more
than light pop entertainment, it would be possible to focus on the
near-mystical «dialog» between Ricky’s morose, echoey voice and the deep, jumpy,
slapp-happy bass of Judd Denaut — the combination had a certain unique
playfulness to it that could not be found on contemporary records by the more
rambunctious rockers. Alas, that sound is all but gone on Ricky Nelson, which goes for a
marginally louder, noisier approach on its rocking numbers, which is still
nowhere near as loud as noisy as Ricky’s true competition, yet totally loses
the subtlety of the previous album. Good case in point: opening number
‘Shirley Lee’, the cover of a recent single by Bobby Trammell, which was
probably brought to Ricky’s attention by Burton and Kirkland, who played on
the original recording. It is faster and denser than Trammell’s version, but
not as crunchy and raw, and Nelson himself sounds distant and cavernous, as
if fighting for Gene Vincent’s turf, which would be a hopeless fight under
any conditions. The fast and raucous rockabilly sound is decent, but there is
absolutely nothing outstanding about it — not even James Burton’s lead guitar
playing, fast, fluent, and precise, but more or less «texbookish rockabilly»,
as I’d call it. A couple of tracks later, the same disappointment hits with
‘Good Rockin’ Tonight’, closely based on Elvis’ version but with a smoother,
less flashy sound and a quieter, less passionate vocal delivery that does not
have much in the way of mystique to it. Still later, the same kind of
defacing awaits Roy Orbison’s ‘Down The Line’, then Fats Domino’s ‘I’m In
Love Again’ — and so on, and on, and on. At this point, it is difficult not
to admit that Ricky makes for a far more convincing teenage idol than a
rock’n’roller: the slow, romantic ballads that almost mechanically inject
themselves in between all of the rocking tracks are consistently more
memorable and enjoyable than the latter, if only for the reason that Ricky’s
crooning is becoming less predictable, while his rocking voice stays as
predictably monotonous as ever. Thus, he does a great job on the old country
song ‘Someday (You’ll Want Me To Want You)’, bringing out all those subtle
shifts in overtones, gliding from higher to lower frequencies with the
ultimate sexiness in a way that would be unreachable even for the likes of
Gene Autry. He also debuts his own composition ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’, not
much in terms of melodic originality but very nice in terms of how Ricky’s
own tenor contrasts with the Jordanaires’ backing vocals — the suave glide of
his "oh baby...", echoed by the deep bass "OH BABY" of
the backing vocals, is quite an aural delight. The album’s most successful and
best remembered recording was ‘Poor Little Fool’, a song written by 15-year
old Sharon Sheeley after her breakup with Don Everley which ended up
providing Ricky with his first #1 entry on the Billboard Top 100 charts.
Melodically, it is a nice hybrid of classic country with girl-group
stylistics, i.e. the quintessential «country-pop» track, and I have to wonder
whether Sheeley’s specific decision to donate the song to Ricky, as opposed
to any other rocker out there, had anything to do with his decidedly
«anti-masculine» looks, as in, «the likeliest male performer to perform this
song about being dumped from a female perspective». Regardless of the
circumstances, this is indeed the kind of material much better suited to
Nelson’s voice and persona than ‘Shirley Lee’ or ‘Down The Line’, and while I
am not sure that its melody or vocal hooks automatically qualify it for a
potential #1 over most of the other ballads that Ricky performs here, it at
least sort of makes sense that it ended up charting much higher than, for instance,
‘Waitin’ In School’. Just for the record, the other two
Ricky Nelson singles from that same period (early to mid-’58) were ‘Believe
What You Say’, another fine little pop-rocker co-written by the Dorsette
brothers (it would later end up on Ricky
Sings Again), and a rockabillified version of Hank Williams’ ‘My Bucket’s
Got A Hole In It’ because every respectable rocker has to make an old Hank
Williams song into a rock’n’roll tune or suffer the consequences. It wasn’t a
particularly memorable tune from Hank, and it certainly is nothing special as
a Ricky Nelson rocker. But, like just about anything on this expressly
mediocre record, it is totally listenable and danceable if you’re in the mood
for a very bland Fifties-theme party. |
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Album
released: January 1959 |
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Tracks: 1) It’s Late; 2) One Of These
Mornings; 3) Believe What You Say; 4) Lonesome Town;
5) Trying To Get To You; 6) Be True To Me; 7) Old Enough To Love; 8) Never Be
Anyone Else But You; 9) I Can’t Help It; 10) You Tear Me Up; 11) It’s All In
The Game; 12) Restless Kid; 13*) I Got A Feeling; 14*) Gloomy Sunday; 15*) Brand New Girl; 16*) Cindy;
17*) My Rifle, My Pony, And Me. |
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REVIEW
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Consistent with that idea, there
is a slightly higher percentage of fast rockabilly numbers — the first three
tracks in a row are, in effect, credited to Dorsey Burnette, and each of the
three could have been an adrenaline smash for the Rock’n’Roll Trio in their
prime. As recorded by Ricky, they are, of course, comparatively more tepid,
but still sound fun after all these years. ‘It’s Late’ explores the same vibe
as the Everlys’ ‘Wake Up Little Susie’, though melodically it owes far more
to Hank Williams — and, honestly, Ricky Nelson just doesn’t look like the
kind of kid who’d ever dare to bring his date back home one minute later than
allowed, but at least he can do a good job of sounding scared shitless
("I hate to face your Dad, I know he’s gonna be mad" and all that,
although the best lines of the song are probably "look up, is that the
moon we see? can’t be, looks like the sun to me" — there’s something
genuinely biblical about that stuff). ‘One Of These Mornings’ is more or less
a rewrite of ‘Down The Line’, but it still rocks, and James Burton’s
minimalistic «wobbly» solo oozes class. And ‘Believe What You Say’, which I
already mentioned in the last review, joins a standard rock’n’roll melody
with a catchy pop chorus that reinforces the status of Ricky Nelson as that
one rock’n’roller who is always particularly gallant with his ladies ("I
believe, pretty baby, believe you’re goin’ steady with nobody else but
me" — yeah, you just keep on believin’ that, Mr. Nelson). And then, wham!, after three fun, but stereotypical soft-rockers in a row,
comes something completely different. We can all poke fun at poor Ricky for
being the poor man’s Elvis from dusk till dawn, but once the dust clouds of
cynical neurotoxin have dissipated, there is still no getting away from the fact that his stripped-down, moody
performance of Baker Knight’s ‘Lonesome Town’, subtly echoed by the
ghostly-shaped backing vocals of the Jordanaires, is one of the defining
moments of the 1950s. I mean, hey, if it was good enough for Quentin, it’s
good enough for us, right? The song is always compared with Elvis’
‘Heartbreak Hotel’, but while they do explore the same topic, the vibes are
seriously different — ‘Hotel’ is crunchy, bluesy, and depicts a hysterically
depressed protagonist on the brink of suicide; ‘Lonesome Town’ is quiet,
doo-woppy, and shows a melancholically depressed protagonist adjusting to a
new plane of existence. For ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, the key word is
"die", for ‘Lonesome Town’ it is "forget", and it is safe
to say that I can no more imagine Nelson doing a convincing rendition of the
former than I could imagine Elvis singing "maybe down in Lonesome Town,
I can learn to forget" with the same pang of emotional resonance. I think that the secret to the
magic of ‘Lonesome Town’ is really quite straightforward — it is simply the
song that Ricky was born to sing. In fact, he’d always been singing it, even on ‘Be-Bop Baby’ he was already
singing it, which is part of the reason why his rockabilly vibe is so
idiosyncratic. Ever the shy, introspective, asthmatic little kid who would
probably never even get roped into show business if not for Ozzie and
Harriet, he and ‘Lonesome Town’ were made for each other. And since shy,
introspective, asthmatic (or alergic, or just generally depressed) kids keep
on surging higher and higher with each new generation, it is hardly
surprising just how many amateur covers of young people with guitars singing
‘Lonesome Town’ you can find on YouTube — far more than there are of
‘Heartbreak Hotel’, as it seems to me. Few can match the courteous beauty of
these dark overtones, though, not to mention how hard it is to pack an entire
group of Jordanaires into your bedroom (you could certainly synthesize them
digitally, but there’s a big difference between the erotica of «me and my
acoustic guitar» and the pornography of «me, my acoustic guitar, and my
laptop»). For the record, ‘Lonesome Town’ is
not even the epitome of Nelson’s moodiness: if you have the extended CD
edition of the album, one of the bonus tracks is Ricky’s own solo recording
(«me and my guitar» again) of the infamous ‘Gloomy Sunday’, a.k.a. the
‘Hungarian Suicide Song’, whose composer would later take his own life and
whose defining English-language version, recorded by Billie Holiday in 1941,
was famously banned by the BBC as being «detrimental to the war morale».
Ricky’s version was apparently recorded at about the same time as ‘Lonesome
Town’, but it is not even clear if it was ever intended for release, or if it
was made merely for his own «amusement» — it would only resurface in 2000,
when Ricky’s children made a clean sweep of the archives and put it out on
the Legacy box set. Obviously,
there could be no question of a song like that officially published under
Ricky’s name in 1958 — especially since he did not bother to include the
fakey-fakey Hollywoodish «happy ending» that was tacked on in Billie’s
version ("Dreaming, I was only dreaming / I wake and find you
asleep"), instead rounding it up with the truly uplifting "with the
last breath of my soul I’ll be blessing you" and what might have been
the single creepiest use of a baritone twist in 1950s popular music on the
final "gloomy Sundaa-yyy". If there ever is one song that can
completely and utterly change your perspective on an artist, ‘Gloomy Sunday’
should at least be in the top ten runners or so. Meanwhile, on another plane of
existence Ricky Sings Again in his
quest to banish memories of Sergeant Presley from the young people’s hearts —
for instance, attempting to directly re-appropriate Elvis’ own classic
‘Trying To Get To You’ (nice, but no banana), or successfully adopting his
doo-wop waltzing mode only to fall into an embarrassing lyrical trap: if your
verse begins with "higher than the mountains, taller than the
trees" and ends with "...yeah, I’m old enough to love", this
alone should be enough to raise serious suspicions about the veracity of the
latter line (Elvis could definitely start out with the former, but could you
imagine him ever needing to prove to anybody that he’s ‘Old Enough To
Love’?). I mean, come on, Ricky, you proved well enough with ‘Lonesome Town’
that you’re old enough to get over
love; why the hell do you still need to show your fans that you have reached
the age of consent? There is also a so-so cover of
Hank Williams (no matter how many millions of covers ‘I Can’t Help It’
endures, you still cannot beat the original), yet another song donated by
Baker Knight (‘Never Be Anyone Else But You’, a bit of sweet sappy
country-pop which is hardly even believable as coming from the same guy who
wrote ‘Lonesome Town’), and an interesting case in which Johnny Cash apparently
wrote a song specially for Ricky — ‘Restless Kid’, with its reference to Rio
Bravo, is clearly a gift related to Ricky’s concurrent starring in Howard
Hawks’ movie. You can almost hear echoes of Cash singing the vocals himself
(in fact, there is a demo version of him doing exactly that), and the song is
clearly better suited for Johnny than for Ricky, but then there’s always a
place for grizzled old cowboys like Johnny and perky young cowhands like
Ricky, right? (and that was pretty much the part he played in the movie
anyway). At least that’s one way to finish the LP on a starkly
non-Elvis-related note, as compared to at least half of the songs on here all
giving out an I-wanna-be-Elvis (or,
maybe, I-don’t-really-wanna-be-Elvis-but-what-choice-do-I-have?)
vibe. Actually, Ricky’s acting turn in Rio Bravo is honored in more detail on
the extended CD edition, which throws in alternate (studio and movie)
versions of the several tracks he performs on screen, such as ‘Cindy’ and ‘My
Rifle, My Pony, And Me’. The very fact of his starring (albeit in a
relatively minor role) in his first movie was quite symbolic — if you want to
be the substitute Elvis, do what Elvis does — but, although he did good, one
must give credit to both Rick and his management that they never pushed him
the same way Colonel Parker did with his client (he would only reprise his
acting career every once in a long while, always placing the music first). Although,
overall, it could probably be argued that Ricky, by his very nature, could never
rise to the highest of Elvis’ highs — nor sink to the lowest of Elvis’ lows;
so a busy acting career would probably not be able to blow up his reputation.
Yet for all his young cowboy charm, they’d never make a Clint Eastwood out of
him, either. |
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Album
released: September 1959 |
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Tracks: 1) You’ll Never Know What You’re
Missin’; 2) That’s All; 3) Just A Little Too Much; 4) One Minute To One; 5)
Half Breed; 6) You’re So Fine; 7) Don’t Leave Me; 8) Sweeter Than You; 9) A
Long Vacation; 10) So Long; 11) Blood From A Stone; 12) I’ve Been Thinkin’. |
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As far as I can tell, nothing
particularly exciting or out of the ordinary happened to Ricky or his career
in the second half of 1959. He had another big hit with ‘Just A Little Too
Much’, written for him by Johnny Burnette, who had by now joined his brother
Dorsey as a breadwinner for the family in this department — it’s a fun,
catchy, solid little pop-rocker, never straying too far away from the
middle-of-the-road pop-rock formula, not even when James Burton tries to
enliven it with a relatively aggressive (for Ricky’s standards, that is)
guitar solo. If you are looking for something just a little more special and
exclusive to Nelson’s personality, I’d rather have to recommend the B-side,
‘Sweeter Than You’ — a sugary, tender-as-heaven ballad from the pen of
‘Lonesome Town’s Baker Knight; much as I generally prefer energetic pop-rock
to sentimental balladry, there is no denying that Ricky’s deep overtones are
way better suited for under-the-balcony serenades than dance proms, so there
is nothing surprising about the fact that the B-side eventually caught up to
the A-side in terms of popularity. |
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(For the sake of those who really
care, the CD version of the album includes early takes on both sides of the
single that are actually better
than the final versions — ‘Just A Little Too Much’, in particular, is rawer,
faster, with crunchier, more rock’n’rollish guitar tones. It must have been a
rehearsal take, but then, of course, they had to «polish» and «smoothen out»
the raw angles because it would probably be «unprofessional» to release the
song without giving it a proper crew cut. Listen to these two takes back to
back — the official
single and the alternate
take — and that’s the difference between domesticated and untamed
rock’n’roll circa 1959 for you right there). The rest of the album, coming upon
the heels of the hit single about two months later, feels like it diligently
takes its cues from either of its two sides — there are the catchy
pop-rockers, typically supplied by the Burnette brothers, and the chivalrous
ballads, usually provided by Baker Knight or dusted off the vault shelves.
Not that Baker Knight couldn’t pen a catchy pop-rocker all by himself, as is
quickly proven by the lead-in track, ‘You’ll Never Know What You’re Missing’,
which straightahead borrows its «baiting» chorus line from Elvis’ ‘Treat Me
Nice’ ("well I’m sorry for you but I really don’t know why..." =
"if you want my loving, take my advice..."), but then resolves it
in a much less interesting manner, mostly just repeating the same phrase
("...cause you’ll never know what you’re missin’ till you try") instead
of the mysterious stop-and-start ellipsis that Leiber & Stoller came up
with for Elvis. Still sounds fun, though — but now that I think about it,
Baker Knight then also stole the main melodic hook from ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ to
screw it inside ‘One Minute To One’, whose main line is like a hybrid of...
well, let’s say Carl Perkins’ ‘Glad All Over’ (first four measures) with
‘Don’t Be Cruel’ (next four measures). Damn those mediocre songwriting
mechanics! Not that the Burnettes fare that
much better — ‘A Long Vacation’, for instance, is different from Buddy
Holly’s ‘Not Fade Away’ only because of the obligatory (and a little
annoying) pauses between each repetition of the Bo Diddley beat. ‘You’re So
Fine’ also feels like it’s composed out of bits and sratches of Buddy Holly
chords (there’s definitely a bit of ‘(You’re So Square) Baby I Don’t Care’ in
there, and others as well), and ‘Don’t Leave Me’ begins by quoting the
Burnettes’ own ‘All By Myself’ (itself a Fats Domino cover)... all in all, I
understand that this is the kind of situation where a good knowledge of 1950s
rock’n’roll can seriously hinder one’s ability to just relax and enjoy the
music — but the fact remains that most of this music is quite half-assed in
all respects. Lazily written, lazily recorded, with just enough professionalism
and feeling to let me be content with it as tasteful enough background
accompaniment; but also good proof that by mid-1959, the «1950s pop-rock»
formula had really run dry, if
songwriters were already dismantling hits from the past three years and using
their singular elements as building blocks for potential new hits. Therefore, if my opinion matters
at all, I’d like to single out an absolute non-hit, the song ‘So Long’
(written by Ricky’s uncle Don Nelson), as my favorite on the album — two minutes
of simple jazzy melancholy in the one and only musical and emotional style of
which Ricky Nelson might be called
the unpeered master. Nowhere near as memorable as ‘Lonely Town’ or as eerily
depressive as ‘Gloomy Sunday’, it still belongs in the same category, and I
especially appreciate the deep, dark bass tone laid down by James Kirkland; when
Ricky’s and James’ notes merge together at the end of each first line of each
verse, there is a haunting, ghostly effect there which, for just a couple
seconds, takes this out of the sphere of regular entertainment and into the
Twilight Zone. If you ask me real hard, I’d say that it is for tiny moments
like these, and only for tiny
moments like these, that it still makes good sense to remember Ricky Nelson
as a unique planetary treasure. Alas, it does not work quite as
well on Ricky’s last hit single from 1959, which came out too late to be
included on this album (November 1959), but too early to be included on any
of the following ones, either, so it makes sense to mention it here: ‘I Wanna
Be Loved’, another Baker Knight contribution on which the out-of-ideas
songwriter plunders ‘Fever’. It’s slow, bluesy, with a sensual and
melancholic Burton lead and all, but it simply does not have the magic of ‘So
Long’; Ricky Nelson as master of the «voodoo-flavored seduction» technique is
no Elvis, let alone Muddy Waters. The B-side, ‘Mighty Good’, works better,
but it is merely one more of those middle-of-the-road pop-rockers on which,
furthermore, he makes the mistake of trying to sound just a tad more cheerful
than necessary. Truth of the matter is, a happy Ricky Nelson is almost as
hard to believe as a smooth-operating Ricky Nelson. Give me a sad, brooding
Ricky Nelson any time of day over all those other attitudes, and I’ll be glad
to brood along with him for as long as needed. |
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Album
released: July 1960 |
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Tracks: 1) I’m Not Afraid; 2) Baby Won’t
You Please Come Home; 3) Here I Go Again; 4) I’d Climb The Highest Mountain;
5) Make Believe; 6) Ain’t Nothin’ But Love; 7) When Your Lover Has Gone; 8)
Proving My Love; 9) Hey Pretty Baby; 10) Time After Time; 11) I’m All Through
With You; 12) Again. |
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REVIEW
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However, I do not seriously
believe that such an impression could arise from simply listening to the
music, rather than consciously placing it within the overall context of 1960
in a mental framework like «Well, Elvis, Chuck Berry, Gene Vincent, Bill
Haley, and pretty much all the other survivors had lukewarm records that
year, so it makes sense that Ricky would have a lukewarm record, too». The
thing that makes Ricky different from all these guys is that Ricky had always had lukewarm records —
«Lukewarm» was pretty much his middle name from birth — and thus, was lucky
enough to have far less distance to fall than the «fully authentic» heroes of
rockabilly. Listen to Gene Vincent in 1956 and then to Gene Vincent in 1960
and the difference hits you like a ton of marshmallows hits the feeding
trough of a fighting dog. Listen to the stylistic and emotional distance
traveled in the same period by Ricky Nelson, and you have a much more
difficult case on your hands trying to prove that the boy had «sold out» to
the record industry. Paradoxically, having been designed from the start as a
softer, more polite antidote to the rock’n’roll craze, Ricky Nelson in 1960
almost sounds like a reliable little island of stability in a rapidly
deteriorating landscape. It is true that 1960 opened on a
single particularly sickly-sweet note for Ricky, with the release of ‘Young
Emotions’, a maudlin string-saturated ballad from the pen of Disney
songwriter Jerry Livingston; the B-side, Baker Knight’s ‘Right By My Side’,
was a much more acceptable piece of upbeat pop-rock that would be far more
typical of the ensuing LP — along with its loud arrangement, prominently
emphasizing Plas Johnson’s saxophone and the backing vocals: in addition to
The Jordanaires, who had already been shadowing Ricky since 1958, 1960 marked
a prominent use of female backup vocals, provided by Darlene Love & The
Blossoms — which, perhaps, made the recordings a little cornier than usual,
but also a bit more fun, even humorous at times. On ‘Young Emotions’, sappy
sentimentality washes all over Ricky’s melancholic nuances that can
occasionally ennoble his ballads, so I don’t really feel the song; ‘Right By
My Side’, however, is a fun little romp with little pretense, and if you,
too, happen to think that the B-side trumps the A-side here, I’m happy to say
that More Songs By Ricky might be
right up our alleys after all. There are only two more of those
sappy ballads on the album — although, like two faithful guard dogs, they
bookmark it as the first and last track, so you’d have a completely skewed
picture of the record if you were to simply taste it from the front and from
the back. They do illustrate pretty well the contrast between manneristic
cliché and emotional freshness: ‘Again’, a Tommy Dorsey oldie from the
1940s, feels like a dusty, lifeless formula — but ‘I’m Not Afraid’, newly
contributed by Felice Bryant of the Boudleaux and Felice Bryant fame, sounds
genuinely touching. Elvis would certainly have sung it with more depth, but
Elvis would have a harder time with lyrics such as "People tell me I’m too young / But I disagree / Love can come to
anyone / And love has come to me" than Ricky (who was, after all,
not 21 yet — and Elvis, for that matter, already sounded like he was way over
21 when he was still 19). The relative dearth of
contemporary outside songwriters does push Nelson this time into falling back
on oldies, including, surprisingly enough, a whole two songs from the crown
repertoire of the legendary blues queens — ‘Baby Won’t You Please Come Home’
and ‘When Your Lover Has Gone’. Both of these are delivered in mild-lounge
jazz style, sort of a «Sinatra-meets-Nashville» arrangement, and saving them
from total oblivion is (a) the inspired interplay between Plas Johnson on sax
and his brother Ray Johnson on piano (nothing ground-shaking, but quite
tasteful) and (b) the fact that Ricky’s «emotionally frozen» vocal delivery
always works better with melancholic-depressive material than it does with
sweet romantic serenading. One problem I have with, for instance, Sinatra’s
acclaimed «depressive» classics such as In
The Wee Small Hours is that Frank is not really a natural when it comes
to creating a light suicidal mood; Ricky, despite all of his popularity and
teen idol status, always feels like the protagonist of the Beach Boys’ ‘In My
Room’, and this helps him put his own little spin on those old time
melancholy urban blues. He’s certainly not trying to steal the crown of
Bessie Smith or Billie Holiday, but he gets
this material. It’s more than just «a little something for the old folks». As for the outside songwriters, at
least our good old friend Baker Knight could still be relied upon. He’s in
exceptionally high spirits this time around, providing three rhythmic,
energetic numbers, of which ‘Ain’t Nothin’ But Love’ is probably the
catchiest, totally in line with Elvis’ contemporary pop-rock stuff, and the
slower ‘I’m All Through With You’ is probably the funniest, mainly due to The
Blossoms’ ridiculous backing vocals (whatever they’re chirping there in the
background, it sounds like shut up shut
up shut up to me, which feels like a pretty adequate response to Ricky’s
unfounded accusations of infidelity). Don Covay’s ‘Here I Go Again’ and one
last gift from Dorsey Burnette, ‘Hey Pretty Baby’, are a bit too happy for
Ricky to pull them off as convincingly, but their respectively New Orleanian,
Fats Domino-style and Texan, Buddy Holly-like atmospheres are still fun. Ultimately, the worst that can be
said about More Songs By Ricky is
not that there’s too much saxophone, or too few Burnette brothers, or too
little rock’n’roll excitement, but largely that there are no obvious
standouts — except for too many strings on ‘Again’, it’s a pretty even,
tasteful, pleasant listening experience that does not disappoint, unlike
quite a few records released by former rockabilly heroes in the same year.
And since very few Ricky Nelson albums can actually be said to have any
standout tracks at all, there’s no reason whatsoever to panick. For the
standards of 1960, this music is perfectly adequate and self-sufficient. |
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Album
released: May 1961 |
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Tracks: 1) My One Desire; 2) That Warm
Summer Night; 3) Break My Chain; 4) Do You Know What It Means To Miss New
Orleans; 5) I’ll Make Believe; 6) Travelin’ Man;
7) Oh Yeah, I’m In Love; 8) Everybody But Me; 9) Lucky Star; 10) Sure Fire
Bet; 11) Stars Fell On Alabama; 12) Hello Mary Lou; 13*) You Are The Only
One; 14*) Milk Cow Blues; 15*) Everlovin’; 16*) A Wonder Like You. |
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With an album title like that, I
sort of expected the opening track on the record to be a spirited cover of
‘Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee’ — or, if you insist on Father Ozzie choosing your selections from the pre-war
era, at the least, ‘Gimme A Pigfoot And A Bottle Of Beer’. After all, age
ain’t nothing but a threshold past which you need no longer bother about fake
IDs, and given that the adult Ricky would be no stranger to the temptations
of karma-altering substances, you might
hypothetically have suggested that there’d be some stylistic border between
an LP called Rick Is 21 and all
those other LPs like Ricky Is 17, Ricky Nelson’s 18th Birthday Party, The 19-Year Old Ricky Sings Again,
and More Songs By Ricky Who’s Just
Turned 20 But Betcha Didn’t Even Notice. |
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You’d be dead wrong, though. Just
as there is hardly any difference between Ricky’s, uh, sorry, Rick’s good looks on the front cover
and all his previous photos, so is there hardly any musical sign on here that
the boy is no longer a boy, but a man, spelled M-A-N, no B-O-Y child. «Wait a
minute», you’ll say, «but there’s ‘Travelin’ Man’ on here! Surely a song like
‘Travelin’ Man’ is all toxic macho testosterone material, the kind of tune
he’d be too shy to sing even a couple of years earlier?» Indeed, these days,
in our age of heightened sensitivity, no positive account of ‘Travelin’ Man’
that you encounter anywhere in cyberspace can pass without at least a little
bit of apology for the «cringey» lyrics. Yet
there are nuances. ‘Travelin’
Man’, written by the as yet largely unknown Texan songwriter Jerry Fuller,
was originally offered to Sam Cooke — and, for some reason, downvoted, even
though I can easily imagine Sam singing
the song, which would have fit neatly into the concept of some of his
glitzier albums like Cooke’s Tour.
Instead, it was passed down to Ricky, almost by accident, and although he
allegedly loved Fuller’s demo, I can hardly believe that he didn’t have a bit
of a hard time putting himself into the shoes of a jaded polyamorous sailor
who has, in every port, owned the heart of at least (at
least!!!) one lovely girl.
Actually, I don’t know what I’m talking about, because Ricky Nelson does not
really put himself into the shoes of anyone: he is, and has always been,
Ricky Nelson. And that, by the way, is the saving grace
of ‘Travelin’ Man’ as performed by Ricky Nelson. Yes, Fuller’s lyrics are
tacky — not so much for the concept, really, which is in itself a time-honored
sailor’s trope, but rather for the sheer amount of tired «exotic
clichés» (‘pretty Señorita waiting for me’, ‘my sweet
Fraulein’, ‘my China doll’, etc.) that would make Tin Pan Alley stalwarts
like Cole Porter throw up in disgust at the rapid decline of poetic craft in
popular music. And if the song were sung by, say, the likes of Tom Jones, or
even Elvis — «real men» with lotsa
hair on their chests and everything — that tackiness would be multiplied to
scary dimensions. Nelson, however, delivers the words in his usual style:
soft, tender, melancholic, and without a shred of annoying braggadocio. In
his performance, the protagonist is no modern day Casanova — this here is
more of an ‘Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby’ vibe, except that the Perkins
song portrayed a flamboyant rock star, besieged by obsessed girl admirers:
the Nelson-sung ‘Travelin’ Man’ would have ladies all over the world flinging
themselves at «travelin’ man Ricky» for his shyness, politeness, and
courteousness instead. None of that is in the lyrics, of course; it is all in
the voice, which oozes respect and admiration for every one of his
«conquests». What
really makes the song into a mini-pop masterpiece, though, and is quite
likely responsible for a good number of additional sales, is its musical
arrangement — and, above everything else, that mesmerizing bassline played by
Joe Osborn (who, by the way, was the one to bring the song to Ricky’s
attention). The little rise-and-fall, fall-and-rise melody here is roughly
the same as on Arthur Alexander’s ‘Anna (Go With Him)’, which we usually know
from the Beatles’ Please Please Me
cover, evoking a world-weary feel from someone who’s accepted that life shall
never again be the way it was meant to be in one’s naïve, idealistic
past — and thus, the bass foundation helps reinforce the tragic feeling of all those ladies waiting for Ricky back in
Mexico and Hong Kong, a tragedy both for them and the protagonist, whose fatal wanderlust prevents him from
ever settling down with one of them. Thus it is a thematic prequel for the
Allmans’ "when it’s time for
leavin’, I hope you’ll understand that I was born a ramblin’ man",
but in between Dickey and Ricky, Dickey is the one here who sounds more like
a dick (duh), and Ricky the one who sounds like... well, like somebody whom
I’d be more likely willing to want to «understand» rather than simply condemn
off the bat. A funny,
but sharp assessment of the ‘Travelin’ Man’ / ‘Hello Mary Lou’ single on
RateYourMusic notes that the B-side is "I’m not one that gets
around", while the A-side is "Sex tourist anthem". Ironically,
though, it is the fast tempo and slightly comical country jerkiness of ‘Hello
Mary Lou’ that make it feel more
like an improvised passion fling on the part of the protagonist, while ‘Travelin’
Man’ actually ends up feeling more sincere and «gentlemanly» in spirit. The
bottomline here is that ‘Hello Mary Lou’ is just a feel-good piece of
country-pop: the
original version by Johnny Duncan, released less than a year prior to
Ricky’s, or later versions (for instance, the CCR cover on Mardi Gras), though formally
different in terms of arrangements, all share more or less the same merry
spirit, and you can’t do much of anything about it. Rick’s performance is
okay, I guess, but he tries to invoke the feeling of ecstasy, and it comes
nowhere near as naturally to him as the feeling of world-weariness and
melancholy. Even a
quick check on the SecondHandSongs resource shows that there have been more
than 150 different covers of ‘Hello Mary Lou’, including some pretty big
names — yet less than 50 for ‘Travelin’ Man’, mostly by various obscure (at
least for non-country fans like myself) country artists. Perhaps it was the
lyrics that drove people away, but in the end it is no simple coincidence
that ‘Travelin’ Man’ seems as if it could only
work if sung by the likes of Nelson (maybe Nick Drake or Elliott Smith could
have given it a go?), while ‘Hello Mary Lou’ could have been belted out by anybody
from Robert Plant to Freddie Mercury, had they ever wanted to. Actually, both
of them did. It’s a
little odd, though, that two of Ricky’s best-remembered hits ended up on two
sides of the same single, in light of the fact that the chronologically adjacent
singles on both sides aren’t too hot. ‘You Are The Only One’, from the hands
of the trustworthy Baker Knight, was released in November 1960 and only made
it to #25 — a rather tepid rhythmic ballad exploiting Ricky’s «paranoid
lover» image (the hookline throughout is what’ll
I do if you leave me?, to which all of us insecure men desperately
needing their partners as anchors can relate), but without any strong musical
ideas to back it up. Curiously, the B-side was a cover of Elvis’ rendition of
‘Milk Cow Blues’ — I don’t know why, maybe James Burton wanted to play some
tough rock’n’roll for a change, but this is not Nelson-ready material,
really. Then,
several months after ‘Travelin’ Man’, the Nelson team decided to make
lightning strike twice and commissionned yet another «travelog» from Jerry
Fuller — ‘A Wonder Like You’. With the momentum still going strong, the
record shot up the charts but still ended up stalling at #11 — and, once
again, I can hardly blame the instincts of the people. Formally, it seems to
follow the same formula: a similar tempo, the exact same tinkling piano
rolls, and lyrics that exploit the same subject yet are far more wholesome
and family-friendly. This time, our hero is no longer falling for the charms
of all the places he is visiting or
all the different types of girls he is encountering: "I’ve seen the pretty dancing girls of Siam
/ The happy Polynesian people, too / But they’re not as happy as I am /
’Cause they haven’t got a wonder like you" (and note the beauty of
the rhyming — "Siam" and "as I am"! Finally, Cole Porter
would be proud). The
problem is, ‘A Wonder Like You’ is a bland, diet version of ‘Travelin’ Man’.
Do spare a few minutes of your time and play them back to back, just to
imprint in your mind the difference between «musical depth» and «musical
shallowness». The follow-up single is a bundle of simplistic sentimentality,
delivering its trivial message with no subtext whatsoever; ‘Travelin’ Man’,
in comparison, feels like a Shakesperian tragedy. Even if you dislike the
song, you cannot deny that it lends itself to all sorts of different
interpretations, and that your feelings for its protagonist can range from
sympathy and devotion to pity and hatred, depending on where your mind takes
you. The protagonist — and the emotional content of — ‘A Wonder Like You’ —
is just a puddle of warm milk. Even the B-side, ‘Everlovin’, a Buddy
Holly-esque pop rocker originally recorded by The Crescents, an Australian
vocal trio that supported Ricky on his tour of the continent, is preferable,
due to the lack of any artificial sentimentality. Neither of
these two singles made it onto Ricky
21 (well, ‘A Wonder Like You’ was recorded already after the album), but
both ‘Travelin’ Man’ and ‘Hello Mary Lou’ did, and, naturally, they overshadow
most of the other selections — even if the team did manage to get both Jerry
Fuller, the author of the former, and Gene Pitney, of the latter, to
contribute several other numbers to complete the LP. Of Fuller’s two
additional numbers, ‘Break My Chain’ is the faster, more energetic and more
memorable one, but what strikes me most about the song is that Bob Dylan
actually took it as the basis for his own ‘On A Night Like This’ fourteen
years later — although the general pop structure of the verse doesn’t look
terribly original, for some reason, it is the Dylan song that springs to my
mind most immediately. ‘That Warm Summer Night’ is a rather non-descript
romantic ballad, though it still has more soul to it than ‘A Wonder Like
You’. Meanwhile, Pitney’s ‘Sure Fire Bet’ is ‘Hello Mary Lou’ all over again,
only with a little less verve. The future of these little pop ditties often
depends on the subtlest detail. "Hello
Mary Lou, goodbye heart" delivered the goods; "you’re a sure fire bet to win my lips" sorta didn’t. The other
lightweight pop-rock contributions made by big names such as Dorsey Burnette
(‘My One Desire’), Johnny Rivers (‘I’ll Make Believe’) and Dave Burgess
(‘Everybody But Me’) are all nice, but, well, lightweight — nothing in
particular tickles the ear in any unusual manner. To round out the record,
Ricky falls back on old standards: ‘Do You Know What It Means To Miss New
Orleans’ is a waste of time because I’m not at all sure that Ricky really knows what it means to miss New
Orleans, but for ‘Stars Fell On Alabama’, he is somehow able to put on his
‘Lonesome Town’ «cloak of intangibility» and remind us all once again of that
mystical aura of icy emotion he could so effortlessly exude on his earliest
recordings. I’m not a fan of this style at all, but I’m pretty sure ‘Alabama’
is his best vocal performance here after ‘Travelin’ Man’. Even so,
there is no question that Rick Is 21
is only going to live on in history as a repository for the biggest single of
Nelson’s entire career. Perhaps therein
lies the symbolism — look at how the world is ready to greet an adult Rick
Nelson with open arms, sending him back to the top of the charts and
everything. If so, the irony is cruel in retrospect, seeing as how the poor
guy only had, at best, a couple years of limited fame and fortune in front of
him before the British Invasion and new musical standards would forever brand
him as a has-been teen idol... but let us not jump too far ahead: for now, we
are still in 1961, and as of now, Rick Nelson, Travelin’ Man Number One, is
on top of the world. |
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