Review: Gene Vincent - Sounds Like Gene Vincent (1959)
Tracks: 1) My Baby Don’t Low; 2) I Can’t Believe You Want To Leave; 3) I Might Have Known; 4) In Love Again; 5) You Are The One For Me; 6) Reddy Teddy; 7) I Got To Get To You Yet; 8) Vincent’s Blues; 9) Maybe; 10) Now Is The Hour; 11) My Heart; 12) Maybellene.
REVIEW
By early 1959, having had no luck whatsoever with the charts for more than a year, Gene was desperate enough to try out whatever came his way — even if it was a cover of ‘Over The Rainbow’, which Capitol put out as his first single in 1959 and promoted fairly heavily (you can actually see Vincent singing it live at the Town Hall Party show in mid-’59). This did not help; rock’n’rollers would most likely tear down their posters of Gene upon hearing him turn into Judy Garland, while grannies would find this version too rough and crude for consumption. If anything, it just served as further proof that Gene Vincent, once the amazing wildcat to rule over all the less-than-amazing wildcats, had lost his spark and was helplessly groping around in the dark, scrounging for survival without much luck.
Even the title of his next LP for Capitol feels pathetic: any record by Mr. X titled Sounds Like Mr. X subtly implies that it most likely doesn’t (which is why there actually aren’t a lot of them — the nearest example I know is 1965’s Sounds Like Searchers, released right after the Searchers had lost a key member and not really sounding that much like the classic Searchers from 1964). But even more ironic, Sounds Like Gene Vincent turns out to be a pathetically laughable title precisely because this is the first ever Gene Vincent record on which at least two-thirds of the tracks clearly give us Gene Vincent trying to sound like somebody else.
Sounds like... Little Richard on ‘I Can’t Believe You Want To Leave’, a slow doo-wop ballad on which Mr. Penniman gave us his more sentimental and vulnerable, uh, I mean, paranoid side, with a monumentally hystrionic performance. Next to that, Gene’s delivery is pure milquetoast, though he does formally succeed in conveying a state of emotional derangement. The accompanying lead guitar and sax solos are purely perfunctory. Further on down the line, another tribute to Little Richard is ‘Ready Teddy’ (misspelled as ‘Reddy Teddy’!), although Johnny Meeks’ guitar solo is more reminiscent of Scotty Moore’s work on Elvis’ records. The recording is every bit as exciting as any randomly chosen Little Richard tribute by a bunch of randomly chosen rockabilly enthusiasts performed at any time from 1960 to 2020.
Sounds like... Bo Diddley on ‘In Love Again’, a song formally credited to Gene himself but based primarily and almost exclusively on appropriating the Bo Diddley beat. A decent enough appropriation, and it is curious to watch the electric guitar weave all those extra chords into the rhythm pattern, making it less syncopated and more melodic, but also stripping it clean of that primal animal energy. It’s like an attempt to take Bo Diddley’s rock’n’roll and convert it into a pop song, but it does not go far enough to become melodically interesting, while going far enough to make it slothful.
Sounds like... Buddy Holly on ‘Maybe’, written for Gene by a couple of amateur rockabilly songwriters who had mastered the formula well enough for the sound to be pleasant and recognizable, but not well enough to be able to do anything with it that Buddy hadn’t already done. Worse, the exact same ‘Words Of Love’ chord progression is then used again on ‘My Heart’, written by none other than Johnny Burnette. To Gene’s credit, he does capture the sweetness and charm of Buddy’s vocal style almost to the extent that you could mistake any of these two tunes for a real Buddy outtake — but even if you persisted in your mistake, neither of the two would be outstanding Buddy outtakes. (Particularly since Buddy did have his share of non-outstanding and self-repetitive outtakes).
Sounds like... Elvis on ‘Now Is The Hour’ (originally Clement Scott’s ‘Swiss Cradle Song’, later gaining a secondary association with New Zealand after being oddly mistaken for a traditional Maori song). Although I don’t think Elvis ever did that one, Gene here adopts his vocal stylistics and makes his backing band sound like the Jordanaires — quite likely, this could fool some beginner fans, though not seasoned ones. Nice, but cheap.
Sounds like... Chuck Berry on ‘Maybellene’; this, at least, is a straight cover rather than a tricky imitation. The tempo is solid, but the sax replacement for Chuck’s guitar is limp, and so is Gene’s vocal performance. As usual, it can be clearly felt that he is simply not giving it his all — almost as if he does not really believe in the material, and that’s precisely what is ruining the effect. Utterly pointless.
Throw in an equally middle-of-the-road performance of Little Walter’s ‘My Babe’ (for some reason, spelled as ‘My Baby Don’t Low’ — sic! — on the original album cover; Capitol really messed up with proofreading on this one) and a ridiculous attempt to turn Big Joe Turner’s ‘Flip Flop And Fly’ into a slow, feeble, piano-led 12-bar blues (‘Vincent’s Blues’, cheekily credited to Gene again), and the result is, on the whole, the single most pathetic assembly of meaningless performances from Gene to-date. While it is true that 1959 was, on the whole, a fairly devastating and depressing year for the first wave of rock’n’rollers all through the USA, you could at least find plenty of excuses for most of them — from marrying their underage cousins to finding God to joining the army to being dead. For Vincent, there is really no such excuse: Sounds Like Gene Vincent (Lost His Way) is the album of a man whose short-term pact with the Devil had run out and who suddenly found himself utterly bereft of his special gift.
Admittedly, he could still sing his heart out, and his band could still play; like before, there is nothing here that would be way too unlistenable or too corny. Yet it is still a small step further down from the quality of the previous two records — which had at least a few occasional attempts at trying to retain or reinvent his own personality. Here, it’s like he just threw his hands up and said, «take me and do what you want with me». A pretty sad denouement.