(Rhino)
HIGHLY RECOMMENDEDReflective, melancholic rock & roll may have existed before the Everly Brothers. But their subdued chords and anguished cries made a case altogether new for youth-targeted pop music as a monument for not aggression or rage but benign, universal frustration, even humiliation. To hear them now is to bear witness in a stunningly direct sense to the collision of styles that essentially produced all subsequent rock recordings, but also to discover anew the Appalachian eccentricity, the ghostly permanence of folk traditions, and the integral agelessness of both youth and wisdom.
Crucially boyish, soft, sophisticated, sad, the Everlys still come off as a strange success in Elvis' decade. On an artistic level, theirs is undoubtedly one of the three most accomplished rock catalogs to find release in the 1950s (bested by Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry but no one else, not even the greats); it is no shock that it remains celebrated now, that their harmonies and emotionally unkempt tunes retain a direct line to the perptually adolescent heart (which is everyone's). What's more puzzling is how mass popularity and instant legend found music that rises up from a potpourri of the West's oldest human musical traditions, brilliantly setting wild new sounds of R&B and ruthlessly pounded acoustic guitar against them in a manner worthy of avant-garde case studies. It set aflame not merely the country & western charts but the pop and R&B as well, which is achievement enough in Elvis' calculated context but is mind-boggling for music this authentic and expressive. The Everlys today would be indie rock obscurities, reveled in by a cult but never to be heard by such an audacious cross section of Americans... but then again, it is doubtful we would still have a rock & roll without what they did, so the point is moot.
The 1950s will always remain for me the seminal decade in American popular music; the 1960s had their points, the 1970s agruably had even more, and the 2000s gave either of those a run. But the '50s stand alone in the same way that the films of the 1930s stand alone -- the form of rock & roll, like the form of sound filmmaking, is so new that everyone is an inventor, that every recording or presentation takes the form of some giddily conceived new idea and expression with an inescapable spark of the new that never wears. I will never run out of music I've never heard of from those ten years that I need to, want to, must hear. It is a bottomless well, and it's all in there: the stage set for the crazed barrier-destroying between supposedly insurmountably separate ideas of pop music acceptability, walls reinforced by foolish racial and programming and charting lines until the pressue becomes so great that all that can happen is an
explosion: Elvis, if you like, or Chuck Berry -- the single most important figure in pop for me -- or Little Richard. Wanda Jackson, even, it doesn't matter, what matters is the gleeful expression of youth, sex, energy
won in a sense that it has never won again -- not even in the day of the Beatles -- and indeed cannot possibly.
In any given account of that decade, the Everlys aren't necessarily in the first breath with the likes of Penniman, Berry, Holly, even Diddley. But for all my obsession with all of the above, I will make the case that there are two completely undeniable moments in '50s rock & roll, two that I refuse to believe anyone with more than a passing interest in pop music can deny. The first is, clearly enough, the rattling first ten seconds of "Heartbreak Hotel." But the second is not Bill Haley or "Hound Dog" (better in the Big Mama Thornton version anyway) or even "Tutti Frutti." It's that enormous, indescribably challenging guitar intro on "Bye Bye Love," and the funeral-chime vocals that follow it.
If it's been a few years since you heard "Bye Bye Love," it may surprise you to be reminded of its mechanics -- it
smirks, for one thing, and conquers heartbreak with its vengeful joy in counting the betrayals out loud. It's perfectly mannered in both writing and delivery, but it's also palpably angry, and brilliantly articulate to boot: the grand statements of being "through with romance," "through with love," "through with a-countin' the stars above" are worthy of Hank Williams in their sulking, exaggerated but masterfully honest self-defeat.
That ingenious composition is the work of the legendary couple Boudleaux and Felice Bryant. Boudleaux was a classically trained violinist with what can only be declared an awe-inspiring ear for scrappy youth music; the words and music he put together with his wife comprised a large part of the Everlys' initial success. But less concrete, more unmistakable elements gave them their legend. The blending of Phil and Don Everly's voices is hardly any great technical shakes; unlike, for instance, the Beach Boys, they don't rely on conventional harmonizing but a simple derivative thereof, each singing a parallel melody in a manner basic in execution but otherworldly in its final effect, suggestive of a Gothic church influence otherwise absent from rock & roll. The magic of these close harmonies lends the Everlys a sound that is, to this day, nearly unique.
It may be that the combination of factors is that simple to pin down: they were great because their guitar playing, ramming down on those steel strings, was primitive but grand. They were great because their vocals were the best duetting pop music has seen. They were great because they had a repository of wonderful songs. But spend enough time listening to them and it's the songs that finally become the reason to return. Not everything on this compilation -- which only covers the first three years of Everlydom -- is great, nor does it encompass everything that's essential. But it gets points for going deeper than most collections in its examination of not just how well the group could interpret material, but how much higher they soared when given exceptional songs to play.
Even some of the album-track obscurities here qualify, and stand apart with adventure and impressive genre oddity: you'll never hear "I Wonder If I Care as Much" on the radio, maybe because it is unabashedly backwoods, like a lost Carter Family track, bracing in its purity but written by the Brothers themselves. "Brand New Heartache" is straight ahead country from the Bryants with more spitting venom from a jilted lover (this poor girl was three hours late for their date!). You'll even find a dead ringer for Christy Minstrel folk pre-Dylan on "Hey Doll Baby."
But people come to this disc to hear the songs that lit up the country in the late '50s, for the now exceedingly odd visions of teen hops and dances grooving to what amounts to slightly drummed-up mountain music. Whatever decade reared you, I defy you to not recognize tracks 7-11 here as some kind of glorious rock & roll peak, five songs as good, fresh, irresistible as anything off any given platter in the decades hence. You get "All I Have to Do Is Dream" with its deep-layered unrequited yearning from the quiet kid; "Claudette" (the best of the b-sides here), a driving, yelping love song with still-potent rhythm and faintly Middle Eastern guitar hooks; the humorous, juvenile, lively "Bird Dog," a song about the obnoxious brat attempting to make moves on the protagonist's girlfriend through such vile trickery as "ma[king] the teacher let him sit next to my baby," interjected by (I think) Phil's bass vocals, a bit of tomfoolery to which Mike Love owes his livelihood; "Devoted to You," the ultimate expression of teenage love, unstoppably real and eloquent, both convincingly defensive, as young love must be, and unabashedly sweet without descending into easy sentimentality; and best of all, the anthemic "Problems," an all-time classic Ramones-predicting statement of purpose about the endless suckage and drudgery of everyday life at any damn age. I still drive to work listening to it some days and I still feel every line.
These records are not antiques; they may not have the vitality of the most energetic products of those feverish first five rock & roll years, but they still cook. You don't listen to them for a history lesson. However, if you must, it's in "Devoted to You" that the past comes alive most strongly -- the sound of a million last dances at a million proms, juke joints, too-young honeymoons, and too-public parking lots springs forward like a torrent of glitter and dust. People don't record songs like this anymore; nakedly emotional balladry from a man outside the realm of soul music was only otherwise the domain of a far less sexually ambiguous Gene Vincent. It's not that such expression is out of style, just that the gut reaction it generates is still primal enough that maybe no one necessarily needs to try to improve on it. With that said, as lovely as "Devoted to You" still is, I'm beginning to think -- despite its sugary string arrangement-- that even it is no match for "Let It Be Me," a non-Bryant composition that is likely the best-crafted Everly ballad, and certainly the one with the greatest emotional payoff in the form of a Don solo (always the most moving moment of a given cut) that somehow injects a bit of swagger in with all the vulnerability. But even disregarding that, how anyone can hear "Let It Be Me" and not want to grab their sweetie or find a sweetie they can grab is a mystery I don't want to contemplate.
Of the other slow ones about girls on this particular disc, one's a surprisingly unknown gem, the Orbisonian "Love of My Life," and one, "Like Strangers," is a maudlin slow-dance amusingly delicate about the bitterness it describes. It's almost as though even the group itself didn't think it was worth giving it their all again after "Devoted to You" and "Let It Be Me," so there's nothing else like them here. Indeed, the Everly Brothers are good when they fast, good when they're morbidly depressing, but at their absolute best when they're both.
The turns of decades seem to have a knack for ushering out the once new and now suddenly irrelevant, and stagnations seem curiously timed with the start of a new one (think of how many bands either broke up or lost their hunger and urgency in 1970). But it can't be claimed that the Everlys had any intention of resting on their laurels. On the contrary, the songs recorded on the eve of their departure from modest Cadence to the massive Warner Bros. document a band with restless ambition: "('Til) I Kissed You" is the most directly influential of their Cadence singles. You can hear about six Beatles songs in it, at least one ("I Should Have Known Better") explicitly. There's a lot going on here, not just with the more elaborate instrumentation and rhythmic games backing up the unmitigated joy of the lyric and singing. Phil's solo is more passionate and confident than ever, sure, but comparing this song to the material they were making just a year earlier shows a quatum leap: the guitar playing is trickier, minimalistic, more dedicated to its place in the song, the transition from verse to chorus to bridge is more rapid, stranger yet more oblquely logical than before, the entire song feels tighter, louder, more nuanced and more vital than anything they've done before. And the Everlys wrote it themselves, no outside contribution required.
Similar inventions come to less blissful -- but no less noble -- fates elsewhere, as on the Byrdsian "Since You Broke My Heart." On its radically offbeat guitar lines and sprawling melody, you can hear a new kind of aching taking hold in these men -- the need for new ways to create. Such a germ, felt not long before by Buddy Holly and undoubtedly preparing to take hold in Chuck Berry and Little Richard if not for their respective detours, is what created the notion of the practiced, artistically intense rock band, perfected in years to come by the Beatles; the Everlys couldn't maintain the audience share long enough to put across whatever it was they were getting at, unfortunately, but they would always have the edge over the Beatles in at least the sense that they embodied that spontaneous glory of the first few years and knew firsthand how to extract all manner of life from it. Sure, they soon discovered their professionalism would keep them from milking their most basic ideas, but what ideas they were and still are. Meanwhile, you can see in their faces, in most any candid photograph of them from the time, the steady, unsmiling seriousness toward their craft as they practice and explore. They saved all the energy and emoting for the stage, where it was put to its very best imaginable use.
If the years to come would prove the Everlys victims of a fickle public, they find themselves today the victims of a curious squeaky-clean revisionism. Moving backward to near the beginning of this disc, the classic followup to "Bye Bye Love," "Wake Up Little Susie," is nearly its match in clunky churning rhythm and dramatic desperation. Find any given article about the Everly Brothers today and you're likely to see a lot of talk about "innocence," the attitude being that a song about sleeping with your girlfriend in the car until 4:00am is somehow a quaint malt-shop memory reflective of "less complicated" times. By extension, the point likely being made is either that the music kids listen to now is vile and eeeeevil, or that the Everly Brothers' songs have no relevance in an era when the barriers of frankness have been broken. Both options are maddeningly unsophisticated; neither has a shred of truth. To begin with, even if Phil and Don Everly (and the late Bryants) would deny it given the opportunity now, if they were young folks today, or if general censorship had been more relaxed in 1957, I have trouble believing they wouldn't talk about sexing it up or at least getting to second base in the car at the drive-in, were the option then available. The song makes the same point anyway, in less potent phrasing. Our concern here, as anytime we talk about rock & roll, is teenage problems and how they inevitably reach across our lives, and in that sense nothing's
really changed since 1957. Either the Everlys are smut like everyone else and we need to gain some perspective, or we need to stop bitching our brains out about what our kids are listening to. But that point, that we're all essentially the same people we were in 1957, says a lot about the sheer mechanics of why this music still works so well, damn the ignorant press.
If hearing them rock out on "This Little Girl of Mine' isn't enough, if the biting anti-authority satire "Poor Jenny" isn't, then consider "When Will I Be Loved," because this is the summary of everything. It's the last single the Everly Brothers released on Cadence, and it's perhaps their most perfect. By now the old crunch of the first hits has given way to joyous pop expression, with sophisticated song structures and gradually soaring vocal melodies. But forget all that and just hear the simplicity, the beautiful recognition of truth, in what the boys are singing. "I've been cheated / Been mistreated / When will I be loved?" You can say they're still whining, but aren't we all. If you're really letting yourself go, you're probably feeling something glorious in the way those words are flying upward in those voices, and when Don takes over with the rising, open-armed lament "When I meet a new girl... that I want for mine... she always breaks my heart in two..." and here comes Phil: "... it HAPPENS EVERY TIME." And suddenly you know what they're feeling and they know what you're feeling and isn't music a
motherfucker, you know?
As you've surely deduced, the Everly Brothers are near the top of the heap for me and have been since I rediscovered them (a former background childhood fixture) on a break from work seven years ago. The song that hooked me isn't here, but no matter; I was soon drawn fully and permanently into the world not only of this group but of '50s rock & roll in general, and I've been in love ever since. But I cannot give this compilation a perfect grade, which may seem odd, because probably no one disc more succinctly defines the group at their acknowledged peak. The problem for me is that the Warner Bros. singles are, at least for the first few years, just as important as those on Cadence. They include the Everlys' biggest hit, "Cathy's Clown" (the inspiration for "Please Please Me") and many sweet detours in dark and light. Thus, I can't declare this a perfect introduction -- luckily, there is a shorter single-disc compilation covering all the important hits for both labels,
All-Time Original Hits -- but I can still declare it indispensable.
Cadence Classics is still the best way to get the full grasp on the first three years of Everly output, and I'm sure we'll talk about where next to visit in the near future.
If the Everlys could be argued as a folk-indie archetype (and we'll get to that when we talk about their album
Songs Our Daddy Taught Us), so it must be said that they may have originated the "sellout" accusation in a rock & roll context. Elvis wasn't celebrated enough upon his move to RCA for his abandonment of Sun to make waves, but when the Everly Brothers signed to Warner Bros. in 1960 and continued to produce music of a startlingly high standard for much of the next decade, the public never seemed to truly forgive them, and aside from one monster hit ("Cathy's Clown") their signature work remained tied up forever at Cadence. It's indeed become such an obvious quirk as to be too easy to bring up, as if rock writers think they can sleep through writing about the Everlys provided they make the tired and inaccurate point that it was all over at the end of their independent run.
There's some wisdom, though, in those polemics. Nothing so direct and concise as these twenty soul-stirring sides would henceforth be sung or played by the Everly Brothers. That's as much a consequence of growing up as of selling out, and the chronology is unfriendly to the Cadence partisans; the group had already moved to a more sophisticated, stark folk sound by their
second Cadence album, represented here only by the tearjerker "I'm Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail." By the same token, the strange melodrama "Take a Message to Mary" points away from both the richly textured, freshfaced ballads and the pained rockers elsewhere here. But for the rest of this forty-five minute period, the world is theirs, serving up an endless series of pains major and minor, never strictly adult but always familiar, to wail and bang and clatter about. It's agony and ecstasy, and it is the sweetest of rock & roll laments. More than a decade later, when Leonard Cohen (channelling Janis Joplin) would counter for the misfits "oppressed by the figures of beauty" that "we are ugly but we have the music," it is the Everly Brothers' shy, standoffish, richly emotional early music that seems to come calling. Progeny from the Beach Boys to Weezer would face years of geek-rock condescension, but the secret is that few things are more powerful than the loser who uses what he has to express what he must.
