Review: Duane Eddy - Especially For You (1959)

Tracks: 1) Peter Gunn; 2) Only Child; 3) Lover; 4) Fuzz; 5) Yep!; 6) Along The Navajo Trail; 7) Just Because; 8) Quiniela; 9) Trouble In Mind; 10) Tuxedo Junction; 11) Hard Times; 12) Along Came Linda.

REVIEW

You know, maybe you should just ignore whatever was written in my review of Duane Eddy’s first LP: the more I listen to his early records, the more I am convinced that nobody played instrumental rock’n’roll better than Eddy’s Rebels at the tail end of the 1950s. Just because it was all so low-key, and because Eddy’s twangy guitar rarely gets square in your face, and because the sound is comparatively clean and glossy next to, say, Link Wray, does not take away the tightness, classiness, and unpredictability of the music. It’s just that most of it gives off an «evening vibe», best listened to in darkness and solitude, rather than the «endless party vibe» of the Ventures — but if you manage to get in the mood, 30 more minutes of Duane Eddy at his peak is the epitome of modestly-sublime.

It is doggone difficult to even properly reconstruct the lineup of the Rebels at the time: original LP and even early CD issues list none of the players other than Duane, and to procure a proper sessionography for the man, you still need to go to the library or do some super-sleuthing. But at least the back cover of the latest LP re-issue tells us that in March 1959, when these tracks were recorded, the band included Corkey Casey on rhythm guitar, Buddy Wheeler on electric bass, Jimmy Simmons on upright bass, Al Casey on piano, Mike Bermani on drums, and Plas Johnson and Steve Douglas on saxes (no idea who plays on which track, though). Lee Hazlewood still took care of production, and co-wrote most of the material with Duane. It’s all relevant, because these tracks are a collective work, and the wholesome groove worked out by the band is no less important than Eddy’s guitar presence — in fact, I would say that Eddy’s guitar presence is almost surprisingly modest, seeing how often he cedes the spotlight to his sax players (and, less often, his piano and bass players). Formally, this should be more like The Rebels Featuring Duane Eddy than Duane Eddy and The Rebels.

And nowhere more so than on the opening track, which is probably still one of Eddy’s best-remembered hits — Duane and Lee’s reworking of Henry Mancini’s ‘Peter Gunn’ theme. While the original version (which, by the way, also featured Plas Johnson on sax, though some sources say that on Duane’s version it is actually Steve Douglas blowing the instrument) was certainly no slouch, Eddy’s deep, grumbly twang, multiplied by the bassline-in-unison, takes it even closer to proto-heavy metal territory — and as for the sax part, it is much more pronounced in his version, actually giving it its own voice rather than drowning it in the mix (the original had the main theme played by a big brass section, but here the saxophone takes care of both the theme and the improvised soloing). Basically, Eddy and Hazlewood just took this superb piece of swaggy, but humorous musical menace and gave it its independence from the status of a TV show theme; in their hands, it sounds almost ahead of its time, just a mammoth jazz-metal groove predating a lot of mid-to-late Sixties prog-rock excitement.

Consequently, the easiest, and most natural, thing in the world is to define Especially For You as «that album with ‘Peter Gunn’ on it and some forgettable stuff», as most people who actually took the trouble to spin the entire LP usually do. Even the album’s second-best known track, the Eddy-Hazlewood original ‘Yep!’, which was originally released as the B-side to ‘Peter Gunn’ and then as its own A-side, feels like a slight, joyful party-style piece of fun in comparison — although it largely follows the same formula, establishing a firm mid-tempo guitar / bass groove over which the sax player is given full licence to do his thing. But unlike Mancini’s theme, this one is nowhere near as aggressive — even despite all the «twang», the theme in general is more reminiscent of vaudevillian R&B: speed it up and you get a good backing track for a good old Coasters comedy number. It’s loud, rambunctious, a lot of fun, but you don’t exactly punch holes through brick walls with it the same way you do with the ‘Peter Gunn’ jackhammer.

But if you persist long enough to give Especially For You two or three listens, eventually it may begin to win over you, like it did over me, through the sheer power of its diversity and imagination. Just look at this: ‘Peter Gunn’ is followed by ‘Only Child’, a slow, soulful blues tune with guitar, sax, and piano taking solo turns, competing with each other in who can come out with the sharper and shriller sound (well, actually, only the guitar and sax; Al Casey on piano plays it smooth and subdued in contrast). Then, out of nowhere, jumps out ‘Lover’, a short jazzy bit with lightning-fast and oddly processed guitar playing which immediately brings to mind the style of Les Paul’s early 1950s sonic experiments (one of the weirdest guitar sounds ever invented — while most people only remember Les Paul as a guitar builder, for obvious reasons, he was also an inimitable musical innovator... well, scratch «inimitable», since Duane here does a note-perfect imitation of his style on 1950’s The New Sound). Then it’s on to ‘Fuzz’, a rhythmically complex and confusing mix of R&B and kiddie music; on to ‘Yep!’, which I already described; and, finally, an instrumental take on the old country ditty ‘Along The Navajo Trail’, with a strings-and-backing-vocals shift from the perennial sax for a change. And that’s just Side A.

Individually, each of these five tracks does not amount much to anything, but together, they work a bit of strange magic (think ahead to the Abbey Road suite or something like that) — Duane’s moody «twang» is the glue that keeps it all together, but even without focusing on the twang, it feels like a small, dollhouse-ish musical universe where jazz, blues, pop, country, and R&B all come together in a light-hearted, but adorable synthesis. I am pretty sure that this achievement would be unachievable without the vision of Lee Hazlewood behind the controls, but this should hardly be surprising: few, if any, great albums made by great guitarists are able to pass into legend on the creative strength of the guitar playing alone. And if Lee Hazlewood could even make the usually more-wooden-than-wood-itself Nancy Sinatra come alive, what wouldn’t he be able to achieve in collaboration with a real talent such as Eddy’s?

On to the second side of the album, which greets us with another Coaster-ized version of a country-rock’n’roll classic (‘Just Because’, which we mostly know in the Elvis version), throws in another bit of playful, but melancholy blues (‘Trouble In Mind’), travels through a downhome reinvention of Glenn Miller’s big band standard ‘Tuxedo Junction’, and ultimately winds down on a soft, romantic note when the rhythm section goes home and only the strings and backing vocals remain to accompany Eddy’s little good-night-style serenade of ‘Along Came Linda’. The major highlight on Side B, however, is the oddly-titled ‘Quiniela’ which, as can be seen from the alternate take included in the bonus tracks on the CD edition, began life as a variation on the old blues of ‘St. James’ Infirmary’, but ended up becoming a lengthy Latin-tinged jazz workout, with Eddy delivering a sparse, but beautifully bitter and gloomy passage (sax, piano, and bass solos are also decent, but they don’t seem to get that much payoff from their hush-hush attitude here as Duane does).

In short, one thing this record can never be accused of is monotony — an accusation which is usually hard to evade for an instrumental pop album, and would seem to be even harder to evade for a guitar player known for some particularly idiosyncratic style or technique, like Eddy. I am actually pretty sure that these albums would have more recognition, as actual albums, had they been credited to «Duane Eddy and Lee Hazlewood», given the critical reverence typically paid to the latter (as such, I’m pretty sure a lot of people do not even remember the close partnership between the two — I certainly knew nothing of it when I had my first share of Duane Eddy listening). But even without it, all you have to do is not try to focus as hard on the individual tracks as on the transitions between them, which really give the impression of Duane and Lee as Don Quixote and Sancho on some unpredictable journey, never knowing where the road is going to take them the very next minute.