Review: Brenda Lee - This Is... Brenda (1960)
Tracks: 1) When My Dreamboat Comes Home; 2) I Want To Be Wanted; 3) Just A Little; 4) Pretend; 5) Love And Learn; 6) Teach Me Tonight; 7) Hallelujah I Love Him So; 8) Walkin’ To New Orleans; 9) Blueberry Hill; 10) We Three (My Echo, My Shadow, And Me); 11) Build A Big Fence; 12) If I Didn’t Care.
REVIEW
In contrast with Brenda Lee, Brenda’s second LP for Decca from 1960, released just two months after the first one, was a much tighter affair, with all of its songs taken from but two multi-day sessions — one in the spring of 1960 and one in the fall. One might just as well have called the album This Is Brenda Now, as opposed to the more «career-retrospective» mixed-bag nature of the self-titled LP; unfortunately, «now» was 1960, and this meant that the 16-year old Brenda Lee had to act all grown up and serious, moving even farther away from the hot rockabilly spirit of her early years. No more ‘Bigelow’ for this lady; nearly half of the songs are sentimental ballads, and the rest walk the line between politely danceable Brill Building pop and friendly Southern R&B with a professionally crafted ball and chain always attached to the groove; surely what might be permissible for a kid has to be ruled out for a lady. It’s weird, though, how Brenda manages to look more or less like both on that front cover photo.
The big hit on here — Brenda’s second and last #1 on the charts —was ʽI Want To Be Wantedʼ, originally an Italian pop song called ‘Per Tutta La Vita’ and translated into English by Kim Gannon, the lyricist to ‘I’ll Be Home For Christmas’ and a bunch of other standards. Like the absolute majority of Italian popular songs of the San Remo Festival variety, I absolutely cannot stand the original Italian version(s) — corny sentimental pap at its worst, mi dispiace, all of my Italian friends — but the melody, with some interesting chord changes between verse and bridge, had potential, and Gannon’s new lyrics just about completely turned the song around: where the original was just a puffed-up declaration of love dressed up in tattered clichés, a poor paisan’s Petrarca at best, Gannon added a touch of personal tragedy, which did not exactly turn the words into high poetry but made it easier to empathize with the sentiment. It’s an interesting, and largely successful, experiment in turning the generic sleazy under-the-balcony plea of a «Latin lover» into a teenage girl’s moment of i-can’t-get-no-satisfaction ("I wanna be wanted right now / Not tomorrow, but right now!"), even if we omit the slightly uncomfortable circumstance of the words being written by a 60-year old dude. Brenda catches on quickly, though, and there is no denying the deep sense of yearning and unfulfillment here — I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that most of the record buyers for the single were female — so much so that it only takes to hear her go "where is this someone somewhere meant for me?" to understand why somebody like the Beatles simply had to come along, sooner or later.
The plea for release (both spiritual and physical) goes farther than that. ‘Teach Me Tonight’, the vocal jazz oldie from about 1953 — essentially a song about losing one’s virginity to an older partner, so that he can "help me solve the mystery of it" — certainly sounds more, umm, believable coming from a 16-year old Brenda Lee than a 30-year old Dinah Washington, although she sings the words with so much power and confidence that in the end, it is not exactly clear who’s teaching who in this context. (There’s so much sternness in the "One thing isn’t very clear my love / Should the teacher stand so near my love" passage, it’s clear that this is one gal that’s definitely not about to get victimized).
Even after she has been properly taught tonight, it seems like Brenda cannot get enough: in ‘Just A Little’, contributed by minor contemporary songwriter Betty Chotas (finally, an actual woman songwriter!), she ends up all but terrorizing her partner with her endless nagging. Lines like "You’re just about to make me lose my mind / I’m getting tired of playing second fiddle" sort of imply that the gentleman prefers locking himself up in the bathroom with a copy of Playboy to doing what’s right for the family — and the lady is getting more than a little desperate, with the endlessly nagging (but catchy) chorus confirming this on a second-by-second basis. Amusingly, the song would undergo a sort of reverse fate to ‘Per Tutta La Vita’ / ‘I Want To Be Wanted’: in Europe, it would be picked up by rising ye-ye star Sylvie Vartan and turned from ‘Just A Little’ into the much more aesthetically complex ‘Je Suis Libre’, a punchy declaration of girl-power with really interesting lyrics (the first half is about freeing herself from the chains of her family and the second is about wilfully embracing the chains of her new relationship — "Je serai la servante de mon maître et seigneur" = "I shall be the servant of my lord and master"). But at least this time around, I can genuinely enjoy both versions (even if the ye-ye stylistics, with its slightly clumsy adaptation of Anglo-American musical patterns to the French language, has never been that much of a turn-on to me, much like the entire «classic Russian rock» movement in the 1970s-1980s... but we’re getting way too much off topic here, I’m afraid).
The rest of the tracks fall into three little groups. The first one are golden oldies from the likes of the Ink Spots and Nat King Cole (‘Pretend’, ‘If I Didn’t Care’, ‘We Three’), usually pitching corny strings against passionate, but not too inventive deliveries — nobody would really want to re-associate this stuff with Brenda Lee upon release. The second is a couple of songs that seems to have been written specially for her — ‘Love & Learn’, penned by Bob Montgomery, one of Buddy Holly’s chief songwriters, is a nice, quiet Buddy-style trifle with an interesting «muffled» sax solo from Boots Randolph, and Chuck Taylor’s ‘Build A Big Fence’ is like somebody trying to... uhh, write a song for Ricky Nelson that would copy a song written for Elvis, that sort of thing. It even directly quotes ‘I Got Stung’ (the "holy smokes and land sakes alive" line)! But for all the condescending attitude, I really like this stuff when the word of the day is «playful» — I wouldn’t mind an entire album of such «trifles» for Brenda, as long as they offer nifty little alt-takes on previously explored ideas.
Because the third group is the most befuddling: copies of recent and not-so-recent hits from the black giants of R&B, namely Ray Charles (‘Hallelujah I Love Him So’) and Fats Domino (a whoppin’ three covers, from the recent ‘Walking To New Orleans’ to the much older ‘When My Dreamboat Comes Home’ — and yes, sadly there is also a ‘Blueberry Hill’ wedged between the two). They are all finely and professionally recorded, and I can at least sort of see the point of genre-inverting ‘Hallelujah’ — a womanly revenge on the egotistic sexism of the original, since now it is the guy, not the girl, who has to go "every morning when the sun comes up, he brings me coffee in my favorite cup". But a visual image of Brenda Lee who is "walkin’ to New Orleans", with her suitcase in her hand, because "New Orleans is my home"... nah. First of all, everybody knows that to really get in the spirit of Fats Domino, you have to weigh two hundred pounds, and with Brenda’s tiny height and all, she wouldn’t probably get the achievement even if she chomped on muffuletta sandwiches all day. Second, you have to sing as if you do not give the slightest damn about all the troubles in the world — you’re just shaking them off like water off a mangy dog’s fur — and that’s not really Brenda’s style either, she’s a pretty troubled gal, or, at least, a pretty focused one. She can’t really relax like Fats does.
That said, I cannot really dislike the record, and neither should anybody, I believe. It still shows plenty of spirit, and even if in the long run there is not much sense in Brenda Lee singing Fats Domino, the very fact that she was ready and willing and able to land three Fats Domino tunes on an LP in late 1960 — an era when nice young ladies like herself were generally expected to bury themselves in the backlogs of Jo Stafford and Doris Day, if not the Andrews Sisters — speaks volumes. (And how many nice young ladies could be expected to give out that guttural roar on the second iteration of the "moonlit waters will sing..." verse in ‘When My Dreamboat...’?). The hooks, the playfulness, the strong feminine vibe, the relative lack of arch-sweet sentimentality — all of this makes This Is... Brenda a keeper. Like Elvis Is Back!, this is a «post-army» Brenda Lee album whose added «maturity» does not yet result in flat-out «squareness», even if we can all shed a tear for the departure of Little Miss Dynamite with her cutesy rockabilly flourishes of old.
Only Solitaire reviews: Brenda Lee