Review: Gene Vincent - A Gene Vincent Record Date (1958)
Tracks: 1) Five Feet Of Lovin’; 2) The Wayward Wind; 3) Somebody Help Me; 4) Keep It A Secret; 5) Hey, Good Lookin’; 6) Git It; 7) Teen Age Partner; 8) Peace Of Mind; 9) Look What You Gone And Done To Me; 10) Summertime; 11) I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still In Love With You); 12) I Love You; 13*) Lotta Lovin’; 14*) I Got It.
REVIEW
By early 1958, Vincent had vanished from the US charts: although he released six singles throughout the year, not one of them was able to repeat the modest successes of ‘Lotta Lovin’ and ‘Dance To The Bop’, even if ‘I Got A Baby’ rocked at a frenetic tempo, with one of Johnny Meeks’ wildest solos ever (still not on the Cliff Gallup level, though), and ‘Git It’ was funny, catchy, and had plenty of teen appeal ("I don’t have it now but I can get it... and I’ll do the best I can"). Not quite clear what happened here: perhaps the songs were just dropping into the infamous middle-of-the-road void, being much too rock’n’roll-ish for that part of the public taste which was veering toward teen idols, and not enough rock’n’roll-ish for the original fans who still remembered the rip-roarin’ leather-clad echo-boomin’ Gene Vincent with the true, original, authentic Blue Caps. Then again, perhaps Capitol Records just forgot to promote them or something — answers to these questions are often more dry and business-like than we, the philosophizing inspectors of pop culture, would like to imagine.
Anyway, one thing is for sure: despite the lack of commercial success, Capitol executives continued to be more than willing to accommodate their artist when it came to recording. In 1958 alone, Vincent pulled off not one, but two LPs — and neither of the two was just a collection of A- and B-sides. This second one, recorded with more or less the same personnel as Gene Vincent Rocks!, also reflects the results of a single recording session held sometime in the fall of ’58 and released in November — and the only song here to have been featured as a single is ‘Git It’, the rest are LP-only tracks.
Of course, it would be odd to expect something radically different from Gene Vincent Rocks! If anything, this record feels a tad more mellow than its predecessor, reflecting even more softness and quiet than before. In fact, on several of the tracks Vincent ends up sounding exactly like Buddy Holly — ‘I Love You’, closing out the album, has Holly-style jangly pop guitar, Holly-style romantic chimes, Holly-style nerdy-hiccupy vocals, and Holly-style simplistic-romantic lyrics; play this tune to anybody with less than subtle ear-hearing and see if the mistake is not made (at the very least, nobody will be able to identify this as Gene Vincent if all one knows are the classic hits). Likewise, the bonus track ‘I Got It’ (the original B-side to ‘Dance To The Bop’) appropriates the Crickets’ percussive style and Buddy’s vocal melody contours, with the Clapper Boys providing Picks-style harmonies as well.
Elsewhere, Gene is continuing his love affair with old-fashioned country, borrowing two Hank Williams tunes and slightly rockifying them — ‘Hey, Good Lookin’ is seriously sped up, set to the piano boogie riff of ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On’, graced with a wild piano solo, and touched up with a bit of barking as Gene reaches out for his wildman throaty delivery at the end of the bridge section; meanwhile, ‘I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still In Love With You)’ has barrelhouse piano and sharp, bluesy lead guitar phrasing all over it, ditching the romantic melancholy of the original and transforming into something more upbeat and aggressive. Unfortunately, the rearrangements do not really work: ‘Hey, Good Lookin’ loses its perfectly paced subtle salaciousness with the new tempo, and ‘I Can’t Help It’ is devoid of magic with Gene’s lackluster, uninspired, largely expressionless vocal performance (at least that’s the way it feels if you remember Hank).
It’s not really a matter of running out of ideas — it’s more a matter of being unable to find ideas that mean something. We can certainly give credit to Gene, for instance, for not wanting to record just another cover of ‘Summertime’, but instead reimagining it as an exotic, mambo-influenced danceable number with fussy guitar and piano solos. But does it work? It’s a frickin’ lullaby, for Christ’s sake. Your mummy and daddy aren’t supposed to be rockin’ it out in front of the cradle. If you scratch out all the sadness and depth and internalised pain from the tune, what exactly are you intending to replace it with? A Les Baxter-style arrangement?
Even Gene’s own compositions are not spared from humiliation: for some reason, we have to endure a «proto-soft rock» re-recording of ‘Teen Age Partner’, with the Clapper Boys and Gene competing over who can inject more tenderness into a rockabilly classic which was never intended to be tender in the first place. The only point in this new version’s existence is that, by comparing the 1956 Cliff Gallup-era recording with the 1958 Johnny Meeks-era one, you can get a much more transparent and obvious picture of the «temporary death of rock’n’roll in the US» than you would from reading a hundred books or watching a hundred documentaries on the subject. It is one thing when your wild and rebellious rock’n’roll heroes are being squeezed out of the public eye by teen idols; it is quite another one when they begin reducing themselves to the level of teen idols to fit in with the times.
This does not mean that A Gene Vincent Record Date does not at all rock, or is somehow unlistenable — by the average standard of 1958, the album does OK, and the new Blue Caps continue to be more slick, tight, and professional than the old ones. For fairness’ sake, Gene sounds sincere and beautiful on the gospel-style love ballad ‘Peace Of Mind’ (still would rather hear this from Elvis), and further matures as a singer on slow country tunes such as ‘The Wayward Wind’ and ‘Keep It A Secret’. And yet, it is not difficult to understand why none of these songs ever became classics, and why all the young British lads would rather prefer to cover ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ for the millionth time than give a damn about whatever Mr. Vincent was up to in the fall of 1958.
Only Solitaire: Gene Vincent reviews