Review: Gerry and the Pacemakers - How Do You Like It? (1963)
Tracks: 1) A Shot Of Rhythm And Blues; 2) Jambalaya; 3) Where Have You Been?; 4) Here’s Hoping; 5) Pretend; 6) Maybellene; 7) You’ll Never Walk Alone; 8) The Wrong Yo Yo; 9) You’re The Reason; 10) Chills; 11) You Can’t Fool Me; 12) Don’t You Ever; 13) Summertime; 14) Slow Down.
REVIEW
It is, of course, ironic and telling that ‘How Do You Do It?’, a song that the Beatles allegedly hated when it was forced on them and ultimately rejected as their next single in favor of ‘Please Please Me’ — and the world would never be the same again — anyway, that very same song went instead to Gerry and the Pacemakers, and became their first #1 in their homeland. That particular irony is well known; much less known today is the other kind of irony — namely, that Gerry and the Pacemakers actually played that song much, much better than the Beatles.
Admittedly, the Beatles never released an official version of ‘How Do You Do It?’; the one eventually published on the first volume of the Anthology series is little more than an early demo, and maybe, had the lads been pressed firmly, they would have turned it into something more respectable than the sappy-fluffy cornball piece it is on that record, with John trying to portray cheap sentimentality and the others supplying suitably cornball harmonies. But these are hypotheticals; the reality is that Gerry Marsden found just the perfect vocal pitch for the song — loud, brash, playful, defiant, while the rest of the band tightened up their belts and delivered a punchy, vivacious Merseybeat sound that pretty much expelled all the corny sentimentality from the track. No la-la-la harmonies, either. And Les Maguire’s steady, self-assured, slightly jazzy piano playing at the heart of the song (including the solo) sounds not only more professional, but even more exciting than quite a few (though certainly not all) rhythm and lead guitar tracks on contemporary Beatles recordings.
This is not to say that there ever was a time, even a very brief period of time, when Gerry and the Pacemakers, Liverpool’s main original competition for the Fab Four, could be considered their superiors or even their equals. Maybe some near-sighted, old-fashioned musical critics, fooled by the seemingly same volume level of screaming girls whenever a Merseybeat group appeared on stage, could not feel the difference between ‘How Do You Do It’ and ‘Please Please Me’, but I really have no idea how one could play the Beatles’ and the Pacemakers’ first LPs back-to-back and not immediately understand which one is the real thing — a path to the future — and which one is the facsimile — a petrification of the present.
Ironically, Gerry Marsden himself would place his band squarely into the Beatles’ camp ("The Beatles and ourselves, we let go when we get on-stage... in the south, I think the groups have let themselves get a bit formal; on Merseyside, it’s beat, beat, beat all the way"). Indeed, brother Freddie Marsden pounds on his kit and thrashes his cymbals with pretty much the same energy as Ringo Starr, and brother Gerry’s and bassist Les Chadwick’s well-coordinated rhythm-bass twin attack chugs with the same general power and defiance as Lennon-McCartney. Next to this, bands like the Shadows do sound fairly rigid and scholarly (then again, they have always sounded rigid and scholarly even without any comparison). These are all trademarks of the Liverpool rock’n’roll sound circa 1963, in which the Beatles were far from unique.
Yet there is not a single song on the Pacemakers’ debut album that would rival the rock’n’roll fire of ‘I Saw Her Standing There’. Instead, the Pacemakers open with a cover — a cover! — of Arthur Alexander’s ‘Shot Of Rhythm And Blues’, a fine song in its own right, but slower, a little more pompous, and a little stiff: note that although the Beatles also liked the song and frequently performed it live in the early days (a nice version with a very leonine Lennon on vocals can be found on the BBC Sessions), they never chose to put it on any of their studio albums. On the other hand, the Pacemakers’ performance is technically flawless — and the sound and mix feel really great, which is no wonder considering that the band, like the Fab Four, was produced by George Martin.
The biggest problem is that the Pacemakers were not songwriters. Of the 14 songs, only one is an original: credited to Gerry, ‘Don’t You Ever’ is a laughably unoriginal nursery pop ditty with perfectly predictable chord changes in the middle section and a weirdly disjointed «dark blues» guitar solo which does not really fit in with the joyful mood of the song. The rest is just a mish-mash of the usual fare: a little proper rock’n’roll (Chuck Berry’s ‘Maybellene’, which adds nothing to the original but detracts quite a bit of something; Carl Perkins’ ‘Wrong Yo-Yo’, which detracts nothing from the original but adds only clearer production values), a little melodic R&B (Arthur Alexander’s ‘Where Have You Been?’; Tony Orlando’s ‘Chills’, with a funny falsetto explosion from Gerry), and some oldies-but-goldies which we will never associate with Gerry and the Pacemakers just because (‘Jambalaya’, ‘Summertime’).
Funny as it may seem, the actual lonely highlight on this record is the band’s cover of the one song that the Beatles would never have attempted — the Rodgers-Hammerstein classic ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’. Although Gerry Marsden is no Sinatra and no Elvis, his vocals are suitable for anthemic, operatic musicals, and he pulls it off splendidly, without the power and aristocratic class of a well-trained singer yet with all the right notes and all the right feelings: no wonder the performance went as far as to influence the Liverpool Football Club and eventually spread in that function all over the world a long, long time before ‘We Are The Champions’ did the same trick (with far less taste, I might add). But in the long run, this, too, goes against the Pacemakers’ intended image as rebellious, beat-centered rock’n’roll kids: they were too, let’s say, gentlemanly to be able to convincingly uphold it.
Yet, all said and done, How Do You Like It? still remains a fun, easily listenable record. Really, it may be worth it if only for the overall sound: whenever you get tired of the sloppy, scratchy, lo-fi jumble of early garage bands, yearning for stuff that is decades old and sounds crispy and clean, remember that you can rarely go wrong with a George Martin production. True enough, on their first run the Pacemakers have to be heard mainly in order to better place the Beatles inside their historical context: you gain a whole new perspective on the greatness of Please Please Me that way. But on its second run, How Do You Like It? is just an excellent illustration of the «average» Merseybeat sound circa 1963, a sound which was unique back then in its own way and has never since been properly replicated.
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