Review: Chad & Jeremy - Before And After (1965)

Tracks: 1) Before And After; 2) Why Should I Care; 3) For Lovin’ Me; 4) I’m In Love Again; 5) Little Does She Know; 6) Tell Me Baby; 7) What Do You Want With Me; 8) Say It Isn’t True; 9) Fare Thee Well (I Must Be Gone); 10) Evil-Hearted Me; 11) Can’t Get Used To Losing You.

REVIEW

On March 27, 1965, Chad & Jeremy signed a contract with Columbia Records, which symbolized their acceptance into the big leagues — apart from Bob Dylan himself, one of Columbia’s leading artists at the time were Simon & Garfunkel, and apparently the idea of propping up their American superstars with a thematically similar British duo really appealed to somebody in the management. To seal the deal, the kids were introduced to Van McCoy, one of the major songwriters for the April-Blackwood concern, tightly connected with Columbia — a reasonable choice, given McCoy’s knack for adorning the compositions aimed at his R&B clients with «Europop» stylizations, e.g. Barbara Lewis’ ‘I’m Yours’ and the like. For Chad & Jeremy, McCoy quickly came up with ‘Before And After’, a song that starts out almost exactly the same way as ‘I’m Yours’, except the mode is predictably changed from major to minor, because S-A-D. "His future’s bright, my future’s dim / And all the dreams we shared, you share with him" — it probably took McCoy one listen to any select side of any select Chad & Jeremy LP to work out their «eternal bespectacled loser» vibe. Admittedly, it’s a pretty well-written song, with a clever build-up that could have been really effective if the song were ever tried out by somebody a little less milquetoast than those guys (as it happens, it was first recorded by The Fleetwoods, then covered by Lesley Gore and The American Breed, and all those versions are even more milquetoast than Chad & Jeremy’s. Dang!).

Anyway, the entire album, which they rather quickly dashed off for Columbia in March 1965, sort of represents the peak of Chad & Jeremy’s «Melancholic Loserville» vibe — most of the songs are dreary and brooding, dealing with either the paranoid fear of losing your loved one or the depressed aftermath of the breakup. Oh yes, there’s also that third theme — quiet and shy adoration of the object of your desire without ever getting the courage to turn dreams into action. That, for the record, is the typical topic for the upbeat Chad & Jeremy song: ‘Little Does She Know’, which I’m kinda sympathetic to, stomps around with the smoothened and softened martial bravado of a Dave Clark Five number, but where the similar DC5 number would be a triumphant celebration of having gotten the girl, Chad & Jeremy can only admit that "I’m gonna show her I could be the apple of her eye", and get the appropriate support from a squealy-squeaky two-note guitar riff in the background (is that even guitar? sounds almost like a theremin to me). Don’t be too harsh on them, though. As a sorely shy loser on that front in high school myself, I can seriously relate, and so can hundreds of thousands of us nerdy guys.

No wonder, then, that all those Beatles comparisons, which were quite apt for the previous two albums, gradually fade away now, replaced by a vibe that is clearly more Zombies-like in essence, even if these guys do not share much of the Zombies’ melodic inventiveness, and their backing band lacks a proper musical talent like Rod Argent to transform the vibe into truly memorable and heavy-hitting art. It is a vibe that comes very naturally to them, and it would be unjust to attack any of those self-penned tracks for insincerity or lack of taste. In fact, each and every one of them feels more sincere than, say, something like ‘Baby’s In Black’, whose emotional palette is complicated but, as far as I can tell, hardly produces a lot of associations with either true black or true blue. But ‘Baby’s In Black’ still sticks in your head, while a song like ‘Say It Isn’t True’, despite formal catchiness and a nice stereo separation of the two guitars, does not.

A good hint is provided by the fact that when the "well I know that I shouldn’t believe it..." bridge section comes along, there are some clearly discernible vocal parallels there with the bridge section of ‘How Do You Do It?’, that soft little pop tune which The Beatles had rejected in 1963 in favor of ‘Please Please Me’ and which went on to be associated with Gerry & The Pacemakers instead. It shows that Chad & Jeremy’s songwriting was really still stuck in the early Sixties, unable to cross the simplistic teen-pop barrier that, for both The Beatles and The Zombies, had already been left far behind by early 1965. Essentially, this is the «formula of 1963» that, instead of being exchanged for something substantially more refined and advanced, is simply polished and improved with better production, slightly more thoughtful lyrics, and a bit of that pensive singer-songwriter vibe that gives the final product a more sincere feel, like now this stuff is really coming from the heart rather than merely written as a piece of commercial ware.

Paradoxically, this gives the album... well, not a unique vibe for 1965, as obviously there were plenty of similar well-behaved mediocrities all over the place, but a vibe that, when you let it soak through your living room, generates more nostalgia for the spring and summer months of 1965 than any Beatles record. The Beatles, after all, strived (perhaps unconsciously so) to make their music relatively timeless, with each of their albums existing more in the context of their other albums rather than in the context of the time and space around it; meanwhile, a record like Before & After best exists in the context of something like set of 3 retro hair model posters from "American Hairdresser" (in stock on eBay for $21.00). It’s a kind of nostalgia that I can certainly get behind, though, to some extent at least.

However, I can only get behind it as long as Chad & Jeremy are truly and sincerely doing their thing — singing nerdy teen serenades or spinning teen tales of broken hearts. Conversely, when they try on another old folk shanty nicked from one of Joan Baez’s albums (‘Fare Thee Well’), they exchange the 1965 vibe for a wannabe-Greenwich Village sound that is even less authentic than Peter, Paul & Mary. And God help them when they decide to rock out: ‘Evil-Hearted Me’ is a diet take on ‘Long Tall Sally’ (they even manage to copy Harrison’s lead guitar part almost note-for-note!), one of those proverbial «we need to include a rock’n’roll number to retain the hipness quotient» moments where you begin to wonder about what happened to the concept of human dignity.

They fare a little better with the cover of Gordon Lightfoot’s ‘For Lovin’ Me’, which gets a nice twin guitar arrangement and a more vocally polished sheen than the original — even if the song’s lyrical message, with its (rather ugly, but highly traditional) Don Giovanni attitude, seems fairly distant from the typical Chad & Jeremy formula. Feels a bit weird for the same guys who, just a moment ago, complained about losing their lover to an alpha competitor, now try to convince us that "I ain’t the kind to hang around / With any new love that I found". But that’s just a matter of artistic transformation, and even so, there is so much warmth in the singers’ harmonies that the breaking of character comes across only when you pay serious attention to the lyrics.

It does cast a bit of a shadow on songs like ‘Tell Me Baby’, which is probably one of the best-written and arranged com­positions on here — the horns and strings could use a bit more energy, but the triumphant way in which they waltz around each other is still infectious, and the resolution of the melody is proverbially «glorious». However, given the Gordon Lightfoot cover that preceded it, words like "can’t hide it from you, I want you so bad, if he’s gone, I’ll be sorry for you, but for me I’ll be glad" come across as, if not exactly «predatorial» (Chad & Jeremy look about as much as predators as a couple of purry kittens... well, okay, kittens are predators), then at least a bit sleazy. Then again, whoever said shy nerdy guys cannot be ruthless womanizers deep down inside?..

To sum up, Before & After has about a half-dozen expertly written, adequately performed, and modestly catchy folk-pop or baroque-pop numbers, whose main problem is an irritating lack of sharpness. Give this stuff a bit more crunch, make these guys’ harmonies sometimes ring out in true Beatles or Zombies fashion, let the songs sound with a little less of that «we don’t want to offend anyone’s auditory senses, no really we don’t!» attitude, and you just might have something there. As it is, the dreamy comatose aura that Chad & Jeremy self-imposed on themselves became their trademark and their curse. Even when the goddamn songs are good, they’re so smoothly oiled that they just slip out of your brain.

The remastered edition of the album on CD throws on lots of bonus tracks, alternate versions, and awful San Remo-style outtakes of the duo singing in Italian. Most of these are forgettable, but perhaps a word of kindness should be spoken about the two tracks credited to «Chad & Jill» — Chad Stuart’s duets with his wife, who temporarily filled in as his musical part­ner while Jeremy was away in London, trying out for a music hall acting career (a move that he has since come to regret, blaming it for effectively killing off their American popularity). ‘The Cruel War’, in particular, is a highlight — a harpsi­chord-led, livelied-up baroque-pop rearrangement of the old anti-war folk song, popularized by Peter, Paul & Mary, and Jill Stuart has one of those lovely fair-maiden voices that, unfortunately, never went anywhere (allegedly, she felt herself roped into the business, never aspiring for a professional musical career).  

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