After 17 years of professional music-reviewing, Noel Murray is taking time off from all new music, and is revisiting his record collection in alphabetical order, to take stock of what he's amassed, and consider what he still needs.
"Rock 'N' Roll Music (Medley)" by The Everly Brothers
The Everly Brothers grew up in a musical family, and at an early age began singing as a fresh-scrubbed, wholesome duo on their parents' old-time music radio show. They had their first hit single in 1956 with the light rockabilly number "Bye Bye Love," and proceeded to record a string of hits for two different record labels over the next six years before their momentum stalled, in part due to a stint in the US Marine Corps and in part due to the ascendance of two of their biggest fans: John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
I knew pretty much nothing about The Everly Brothers when I happened upon a used DVD of an old late '60s variety show called The Music Scene. Then, buried among the disc's special features, I found a standalone performance by The Everly Brothers, whipping through a medley of "Rock 'N' Roll Music" and a bunch of not-that-clearly-connected flower-power-era favorites. The medley's a little silly, but the performance is tight and fiery, and while watching it, I started thinking about how The Everly Brothers must've felt in 1969, as people they'd inspired passed them by, while they themselves were barely 30. Then I started thinking about all the middle-aged, long-haired, leisure-suited Tonight Show guests I remembered seeing when I was growing up, and thinking about how that phenomenon might apply to popular music, where the biggest stars are paid to keep up with the trends. I began to wonder if the Everlys had recorded any albums in the late '60s that tried to stay current with the likes of The Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead or Buffalo Springfield. So I hit the Internet to find out, and whole new avenue of cultural study opened up to me.
I've written some about the idea of "shadowing" before—most notably in the Popless entries on Bobby Darin and Curt Boettcher—and though I know it's not any kind of groundbreaking analytical technique, it has broadened my understanding and appreciation of popular music. Basically, the idea is that if musicians are successful for a long time, they'll inevitably record in a lot of different styles, which means you can follow not just their evolution as artists, but also changing trends in recording techniques, subject matter, genre-popularity, and so on. A duo as popular as The Everly Brothers between 1956 and '62 had access to the best songwriters and best studios, and though they didn't go through as many mercenary-minded changes as Bobby Darin, their post-'62 career is still like a mini-history of the post-Beatles music industry.
First off, listen to the Everlys' last big hit, "That's Old Fashioned (That's The Way Love Should Be):"
"That's Old Fashioned (That's The Way Love Should Be)" by The Everly Brothers
It's straight-up popcorn, from the tail-end of the era when the early vibrancy of rock 'n' roll was fading, leaving tame "Your Hit Parade" fare behind. But while the Everlys recorded songs like "That's Old Fashioned" to make their label masters happy, they still found time for something like this:
"Muskrat" by The Everly Brothers
Listening to the clattering percussion and zippy guitar on "Muskrat," you can hear what The Beatles and other still-fledgling British Invasion acts were spinning for each other in basement record shops in 1961 and '62. And after The Beatles built on their hitmaking formula, the Everlys took it right back:
"You're My Girl" by The Everly Brothers
If anything, "You're My Girl"—recorded in December of '64—is more raucous and fuzzy than anything The Beatles had recorded by that point. Still, there are echoes of "She Loves You" in the tumbling drums, twangy guitars and loosening harmonies. Two years later, the Everlys would actually record an album in London, using members of The Hollies for backup, and the result was songs like "Kiss Your Man Goodbye:"
"Kiss Your Man Goodbye" by The Everly Brothers
The amped-up, shadowy versions of C&W and R&B that The Yardbirds and The Who were exploring in the UK here collides with the sunnier jangle of contemporary California bands like The Byrds and The Mamas & The Papas. When they returned to the states, the Everlys started hanging out more on the West Coast, and recorded some experimental singles in psychedelic pop and folk-rock styles. One of my favorites of the latter is "Empty Boxes," from 1968, which sounds like the Everlys' attempt to show they could out-Simon & Garfunkel any pretenders:
"Empty Boxes" by The Everly Brothers
By this time, the brothers had begun to realize that what set them apart from their admirers and peers is that they actually had the strong roots music upbringing that The Flying Burrito Brothers and the like were starting to imitate. Inspired by this, The Everly Brothers recorded their best album, Roots, which I've written up before on this site for our on-hiatus "Permanent Records" feature. And they followed it up with some wonderful proto-country-rock singles before consigning themselves to the nostalgia act circuit, and then breaking up.
"I'm On My Way Home Again" by The Everly Brothers
What can be gleaned from listening to a bunch of old Everly Brothers songs? Well, given that this was an era that wasn't exactly teeming with people writing about popular music, in some ways the only way for an interested rock scholar to follow the threads of influence and trends is to examine the evidence firsthand. It's also a good way to get past the over-familiarity factor that can make listening to older music difficult sometimes. By the time I bought The Everly Brothers compilation Walk Right Back (which spreads a good survey of their '60s output across two discs), I'd heard plenty of The Beatles, The Who, The Yardbirds, and such. But I hadn't heard a lot of the Everlys songs that dwelled in those other bands' shadows. And The Everly Brothers songs were often so exciting that they re-ignited my interest in the era they came from.
But there's something else I find rewarding about shadowing. I believe it was Jean-Luc Godard who said that the best way to criticize a movie is to make another movie, and sometimes with the lesser-known pop songs from any given era, the artists who recorded them offer a kind of critique of the sound of their times. Not a refutation, but a true critique, examining what's good and bad about their industry by trying to mimic it. Unlike actual rock critics, The Everly Brothers had an insider's perspective, and what they might've found noteworthy about a band like The Byrds might not be what I'd pick. The Everlys might'be been interested in the use of a certain guitar pedal, or a call-back to an old folk song that I'm not familiar with, or something else entirely. With every note, they (or their producer, or both) told what they thought was important about the music already on the charts, either in terms of what was marketable about it, or what they thought was good.
So in some ways, The Everly Brothers are the best rock critics I know.
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Pieces Of The Puzzle
Emerson, Lake & Palmer
Years Of Operation 1970-78, 1992-98
Fits Between Rush and Manheim Steamroller
Personal Correspondence I can't really get into the big prog-rock discussion this week, even though ELP would be the ideal vehicle for an exploration of the marvels and frustrations of prog. They're one of the few bands that my father and brother liked that I rarely paid much attention to when I was growing up, although I did listen to Pictures At An Exhibition a few times by choice, and I've always had a fondness Greg Lake's acoustic ballads. Last year, when the double-disc The Essential Emerson, Lake & Palmer came out, I decided it was time to re-approach the band, albeit cautiously. My logic was: I like arena-filling rock, I like ambition, and I don't mind jamming (sometimes), so I should be able to hang with Emerson, Lake & Palmer. But I'd forgotten that there's one particular prog-trick—the tuneless, chugging break where organ, drums and bass all collapse into a big mess—that always pulls me up short. A lot of ELP songs start great, and then suddenly it's like I've been dropped into the middle of an interstellar battle. Still, the countless spins of Brain Salad Surgery and Works in my household—coupled with my dad's amusing anecdotes about the band's disastrous orchestral tour in the mid-'70s—has made Emerson, Lake & Palmer a fixture in my psyche.
Enduring presence? I'm still waiting for the breakthrough that'll help me "get" ELP, and I haven't given up trying. I'll listen to "Take A Pebble" or "Tarkus" occasionally, though I'm always happier when my ELP playlist jumps back to "Lucky Man" or "From The Beginning" or one of the reverent Aaron Copland covers.
"Karn Evil 9: First Impression (Part 2)" by Emerson, Lake & Palmer
Eric Clapton
Years Of Operation 1963-present
Fits Between Stevie Ray Vaughan and Richard Thompson
Personal Correspondence No Eric Clapton anthology will ever improve on the "best of Crossroads tape I made back in high school—a tape long-lost, I'm sorry to say. It was a 100-minute cassette, and on side one I arranged a bunch of Clapton's biggest hits (on his own and with Cream, The Yardbirds, etc.) into a non-chronological set with a really strong flow, while on side two I ran through Clapton's best lesser-known singles and album cuts chronologically. That tape really captured the essence of Clapton as a wannabe blues master forced by circumstances (and his own gifts) into working in a variety of pop forms. Clapton's always been a little too in love with genre exercises and guitar solos to record start-to-finish great albums, but nearly every one of his records from the '70s and '80s contains at least one likable single: "Hello Old Friend," "Promises," "Forever Man," and so on. He's great at off-hand and catchy; harder to take when he's being heavy or schmaltzy or traditionalist.
Enduring presence? My father was such a major fan that it's all but impossible for me to dislike Clapton, even when he records the kind of overly burnished urban electric blues that keeps beer companies and Chicago tourist spots in business. There are Clapton songs I'd be fine with never hearing again: "Wonderful Tonight," "Tears In Heaven" and "Change The World" all leap to mind. But between The Yardbirds, Cream, Derek & The Dominoes, Blind Faith and Clapton's solo albums, there's about 100 minutes of really amazing music. Now if I could just remember what order to put it in….
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