Review: Bill Haley - Strictly Instrumental (1959)
Tracks: 1) Joey’s Song; 2) (Put Another Nickel In) Music! Music! Music!; 3) Mack The Knife; 4) In A Little Spanish Town; 5) Two Shadows; 6) Shaky; 7) Strictly Instrumental; 8) Skokiaan (South African Song); 9) Puerto Rican Peddler; 10) Drowsy Waters; 11) Chiquita Linda (Un Poquite De Tu Amor); 12) The Catwalk.
REVIEW
Amusingly, Bill’s last LP for Decca Records did not break the established «conceptual» paradigm — this time, the concept being for Bill to stay away from the microphone and let the Comets do all the work (there was actually some suspicion that Bill was not involved in these recordings at all, but research on sessionography shows that this is apparently not true — although who really cares?). The album was actually assembled from recordings made at various sessions throughout 1958 and 1959, and I think that most of them would have remained officially unreleased unless it weren’t for ‘Joey’s Song’, which, when issued as a single in August of 1959, gave Bill his biggest chart results since ‘Skinny Minnie’ — and would go on to become his very last charting single within the Top 50, even if he himself had no idea at the time of how grim the coming future would be for him and his band.
‘Joey’s Song’, of course, is terrific. Written by Patti Page’s bandleader and record producer Joe Reisman (hence the title), it’s not very rock’n’roll — more like a bit of old-fashioned ragtime-slash-vaudeville sped up to rock’n’roll tempo — but it features the Comets at their absolute best. The chugging rhythm section, the flying brass section, the combination of joyful energy and tight musical discipline — I don’t know how it could be possible to keep that grin off your face with the band in such full swing. It’s, like, the perfect marriage of the new rhythmic foundations of the rock’n’roll era with the gay (not that gay), innocent vibe of the pre-war jazz-pop aesthetics. It’s Rockin’ The Oldies all over again, yes, but with extra energy and creativity — this is, after all, a fully original composition — and it falls squarely into the category of ‘Mack The Knife’ style tunes: little musical reminders of how to pick yourself up and brush yourself off after life hits you in the face. Even despite the main theme being so hopelessly outdated in 1959, its catchiness was seemingly so impossible to resist that the chart success was completely understandable.
It must have been this unexpected last blaze of success that prompted Decca to commission a Bill Haley album «without» Bill Haley — which, by itself, does not seem like such a bad proposition, given the tightness, experience, and creativity of the Comets throughout the decade. The problem, as it always happens, was with carrying out the theoretical angle into practice. With such a project, there would simply not be enough original contributions from outside songwriters or band members themselves, so they’d inevitably end up falling upon classics, and then it would all be down to their choice of material... and when it came to choice of material, Bill and his boys weren’t too picky, and did not always display great taste.
Thus, my association with ‘Mack The Knife’ was not triggered randomly, but was actually aided by the fact that they did cover ‘Mack The Knife’ on this very same album, and while the arrangement is not entirely free of creative touches — for one thing, I really admire those space rocket-style whooshes and zoops that Billy Williamson lets fly off his guitar to counter the main brass theme — by 1959, ‘Mack The Knife’ was such a well-established jazz standard that the Comets could hardly hope to match the likes of Ella Fitzgerald here. Then there’s their version of ‘Music! Music! Music!’, so carefully arranged as ‘Joey’s Song, Pt. 2’ that an inattentive listener might not even realize that the previous track has ended — except that it’s ever so slightly less infectious and energetic, and there’s a piano lead instead of a guitar lead. It all sounds good because it’s classic Comets... but ever so slightly underwhelming.
For the second single off the album (well, formally the first, since ‘Joey’s Song’ was released several months earlier than the LP), Decca chose the band’s version of ‘Skokiaan’, a song with tremendous historical importance for South Africa, since it was one of the first tunes to put the country on the map as a serious presence in jazz and pop, but hardly with any historical importance for the Comets — once again, when you have people like Louis Armstrong to compete against, you’re inevitably bound to lose. This does not mean that we need to dismiss it: there is a beautiful battle of talent between Pompilli’s sax and Beecher’s guitar raging all over the track, with the two sometimes weaving rings around each other and sometimes joining in perfect unison while celebrating the joys of afterwork intoxication (‘Skokiaan’ apparently means moonshine in Afrikaans, although the roots of the word probably lie in some unclear Bantu idiom). It is simply not a composition to which the Comets could lay a «native» claim, unlike ‘Joey’s Song’.
Of the three compositions actually credited to members of the Comets, Beecher and Williamson’s ‘Cat Walk’ feels like a rather monotonous instrumental variation on ‘ABC Boogie’, heavy on trills and little else; and Williamson’s and pianist Johnny Grande’s ‘Two Shadows’ sounds, oddly enough, like a proto-Shadows ballad, with the exact same muffled-ringing guitar tone that Hank Marvin would soon favor for his work on the sentimental side of the band — nice, clean, and generally forgettable. Slightly better is ‘Shaky’, another Beecher-Williamson collaboration so called because of the «wobbly» effect on the guitar that they probably get from running it through some early version of the Leslie speaker or another gadget; but it hardly goes anywhere interesting after piquing our interest with that audio effect on the main riff.
The rest of the album is given over to even less exciting renditions of various Latin-tinged numbers (‘Puerto Rican Peddler’; ‘In A Little Spanish Town’), one of which (‘Chiquita Linda’) features the only vocals on the entire album — thus making it a tad less strictly than instrumental — but this hardly makes it interesting. (I do like the desperately-drastic effect when Beecher cuts in with a high-pitched, rough-wailing, rocking guitar lead midway through, adding grit to smoothness, but it’s really not enough to save the tune for a best-of compilation or anything). In short, strange as it is, ‘Joey’s Song’ still remains an obvious highlight on a collection of tunes most of which strive to be ‘Joey’s Song’ as well, but all fail like Penelope’s suitors next to brave Ulysses, to use a metaphor of comparable antiquity with this record’s aesthetics.
For the sake of thoroughness, let us mention that the second half of 1959 was not spent by Bill in completely silent mood: he still put out several vocal singles, most notably his take on Louis Jordan’s classic ‘Caldonia’, as well as a (rather belated) interpretation of Ray Charles’ ‘I Got A Woman’ and producer Milt Gabler’s own novelty pop-rock number ‘Where Did You Go Last Night?’. All of these songs feature the classic Comets sound and are thoroughly enjoyable — but, just like most of this album, totally expendable if you are not simply rooting for «more Comets, for God’s sake more of that Comets sound!» None of them charted, either — even in such a supposedly «backward» year for rock’n’roll as 1959, people were still looking for new types of sounds (even if they were to be supplied by Chubby Checker), and the Comets, even with all their joviality, friendliness, catchiness, and professionalism, were perceived as something hopelessly stuck in 1955. In a way, it was a miracle that ‘Joey’s Song’ still managed to break through to the public — well, it was probably just that good.
It is probably not coincidental that Bill’s breakup with Decca Records took place soon afterwards — formally, it took place over a financial dispute, but in reality I think that Decca was more than happy to let him go for no longer being a serious cash-cow; and, on the other hand, Bill may have suspected himself that the label bore some responsibility for his failing status. Unfortunately, by losing Decca he also lost Milt Gabler, the best producer and arranger he ever had; and as his subsequent career on other labels would clearly prove, the root of the problem lay not within his record label, but within his inability to adapt to changing times — an inability that was pretty common for most of the early rock’n’rollers, but which may have hit Haley even more than the others, given how much older he was than the others; after all, his musical foundation was constructed in the mid-1940s, whereas for most people of the Elvis breed it happened in the early 1950s, and that’s like an entire world of difference for that particular age.