Review: Bill Haley - Bill Haley And His Comets (1960)

Tracks: 1) Crazy Man, Crazy; 2) Kansas City; 3) Love Letters In The Sand; 4) Shake Rattle And Roll; 5) I’m In Love Again; 6) Stagger Lee; 7) Rock Around The Clock; 8) I Almost Lost My Mind; 9) Blue Suede Shoes; 10) My Special Angel; 11) Blueberry Hill; 12) Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.

REVIEW

It is quite an ironic coincidence that the first man to have placed a bona fide rock’n’roll hit on the charts and introduced his entire nation, if not the entire world, to the Devil’s latest tastes in music, would also become the first man to introduce the soon-to-be-common practice of endlessly re-recording those older hits for new labels. The practice as such was, of course, already widespread in the jazz and blues communities (I have already lost count of how many different versions of Duke Ellington’s ‘The Mooche’ I have sitting in my music library), yet, funny enough, I do not see it openly popping up in the early rockabilly circles prior to Bill Haley’s migration from Decca to Warner Bros. in early 1960. Probably just because of the short time span — most of the rockers did not yet have the time to juggle their contracts, or were simply too busy dying or marrying their cousins anyway.

Anyway, it’s clear enough, when you look at the album cover, that with his move to Warner Bros. Haley sort of intended to «reboot» himself from a clean slate. Not only is the record self-titled — drawing all the attention to the freshly re-announced man and his band, rather than one of Decca’s «concepts» — but it even has a picture of Haley on the front sleeve, something that never ever happened with Decca (for some reason, the executives there probably thought that Bill’s «over-age» mug would not find much appeal with the rock’n’roll-loving youngsters, and who knows, they might even have been right about that). Admittedly, only three out of twelve songs are straightahead re-recordings of Bill’s classic hits for Decca; however, all the others are respectable and well-remembered oldies, rather than new compositions, ranging from the straightforward rock’n’roll of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ and ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’ to softer R&B like ‘I Almost Lost My Mind’ and Lloyd Price’s version of ‘Stagger Lee’ to old standards like ‘Love Letters In The Sand’. Apparently, a complete album of nothing but hit re-recordings felt embarrassing even to Bill himself — even so, unless 1960 was the year in which you were first introduced to music as a form of entertainment, Bill Haley And His Comets must have produced a fairly morose impression on, let’s say, the somewhat more critically-minded part of Bill’s fanbase.

On the surface, it’s not that bad. As a band, the Comets escaped the label change largely intact: the line-up for the sessions is pretty much the same as it was for Strictly Instrumental, and the change of producer from Milt Gabler to George Avakian (whose reputation in the jazz community was even higher) meant that the overall quality of the recordings was not expected to suffer at all. The new versions of the oldies were not complete carbon copies, either: ‘Shake, Rattle And Roll’, for instance, was remade in a slightly more Chuck Berry-esque manner (even borrowing the classic ‘Johnny B. Goode’ bridge for the intro), ‘Rock Around The Clock’ gets collective vocal harmonies for the introduction, and ‘Crazy Man, Crazy’ is totally dominated by Ralph Jones’ percussion work, making it sound more aggressive than the original.

Play it all by itself, outside of any context, and you can still appreciate The Comets as one of the tightest, most energetic, most entertaining bands of its time. But play it next to Bill’s classic recordings from the mid-1950’s and you just might feel, like I do, that the spark is really missing. It simply doesn’t seem as if they went into the studio, inspired by the prospect of a brand new day and a glorious new future, thinking, «hey! we once set the world on fire with ‘Rock Around The Clock’, today we’ll be rekindling it even higher!». They might even have been saying something like this to each other and / or to the record executives at Warners, but were they believing in it? Listen to Bill’s voice throughout — it sounds good, but it’s a professional kind of good, not a wowsers-kind-of-good. Or to Franny Beecher taking those solos — they are tight and melodic as ever, but they don’t really fly up in the air quite the same way they used to.

All those earlier «conceptual» albums on Decca could be written off as somewhat silly, but they all had an underlying inspirational theme — «let us take the world and rewrite it as rock’n’roll!» Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, but it gave the band a reason to exist. What Bill Haley And The Comets does, in comparison, is take rock’n’roll... and rewrite it as rock’n’roll. The band isn’t trying to change its style — there’s really nothing to change it to, unless they tried recasting themselves as surf-rockers or something — and it’s pretty much run out of creative ideas. And, you know, a guy like Elvis could at least take a Fats Domino song and add a new vibe to it on the sheer power of his voice; but what is it, exactly, that a guy like Bill Haley can add to songs like ‘Blueberry Hill’ or ‘I’m In Love Again’? Charisma? Fats already gave them charisma. Virtuosity? The Comets are fine, but not that fine (actually, they don’t even try all that much on either of these songs). Country and western flavor? Ehh... you don’t really want to do that to a bunch of New Orleanian classics.

The best I can say about these 27 minutes of music is that they do not sound truly embarrassing. As long as he and his musicians are not battling alcoholism or rheumatism, you can always count on Bill Haley And The Comets to deliver a tight, professional sound; to understand the essence of the songs they’re singing (even Bill’s merry romp through the murderous lyrics of ‘Stagger Lee’ is done with the understanding that the song has to be performed merrily for maximum psychological effect); and to simply give you a good time without too many layers of the subconscious. It’s all nice and listenable — but on the symbolic side of the affair, Bill Haley And The Comets, as much as it’s been made to look like the start of a new life with new promise, is precisely the moment where Bill Haley And The Comets lost their struggle for life, success, and artistic relevance. Perhaps it deserves to be heard just because of that very reason.

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