Review: Herman's Hermits - Herman's Hermits (1965)

Tracks: 1) I’m Into Something Good; 2) Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter; 3) Kansas City Loving; 4) I Wonder; 5) Sea Cruise; 6) Walkin’ With My Angel; 7) Show Me Girl; 8) I Understand (Just How You Feel); 9) Mother-In-Law; 10) Your Hand In Mine; 11) I Know Why; 12) Thinking Of You.

REVIEW

In the first week of September 1964, ‘You Really Got Me’ by the Kinks officially entered the UK charts, and by mid-September it managed to reach the #1 spot, where it proudly remained for two weeks. The song was a major milestone not only for the Kinks themselves, who would go on to become one of Britain’s (and the world’s) most melodic, inventive, and intelligent bands of all time, but also for the evolution of rock music into hard rock, heavy metal, punk rock, and lots of other sub-genres. It helped open up new horizons, boldly went where no Londoner had gone before, and stimulated hundreds of thousands of people to open their eyes and ears to new musical possibilities.

In the third week of September 1964, ‘I’m Into Something Good’ by Herman’s Hermits officially entered the UK charts, and by the end of September it managed to reach the #1 spot, knocking off ‘You Really Got Me’, where it proudly remained for two weeks. The song was a major milestone not only for Herman’s Hermits themselves, who would go on to become the UK’s cheesiest export to the USA and the proverbial laughing stock of the Sixties, but also for the evolution of a genre which, for lack of a better term, I would propose to call «Diaper Rock» — a simplified, trivialized form of pop music in the formal format of a rock band; not so much of an actual musical genre as an ideological approach, to be picked up by the Monkees, the Archies, the Osmonds, the Bay City Rollers, and ultimately leading all the way down to the boy bands of the 1990s and (somewhat arguably) modern day crap like Imagine Dragons and the 1975.

Consequently, we can all hail September 30, 1964 as «The Real Day That Music Died».

Now, of course, [adopting a boring, pedantic tone], this is a figurative exaggeration, and one could probably even argue that the music died at least a month earlier, when a glorious five-week run of the Animals’ ‘House Of The Rising Sun’, the Stones’ ‘It’s All Over Now’, and the Beatles’ ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ was ended with the victory of Manfred Mann’s ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy’, another classic early example of «diaper rock» — and there may be even earlier examples. Yet for some reason, it is this particular chart victory of Herman’s Hermits over the Kinks that holds a sort of symbolic significance for my mind, if only because the two bands seem so diametrically opposed to each other. I mean, after all Manfred Mann were at least professionals, whose musical interests and ambitions went in many different directions; Herman’s Hermits, on the other hand, were born in diapers and went on to die without taking them off their heads.

I mean, how seriously can one take a band that was named after Sherman from The Adventures Of Rocky And Bullwinkle once somebody in Manchester noted the resemblance between the red-haired, gap-toothed cartoon boy and Peter Noone, lead singer of the Heartbeats (as they were originally called)? Then, of course, once Sherman got simplified to Herman (because everything about the band had to be simplified), at least if you were American at the time, you probably could not help getting a subconscious association with the country’s most famous Herman at the time — Herman Munster of The Munsters, who was definitely a bit bigger than Peter Noone but still similar in some ways. (And isn’t it totally weird that The Munsters launched on September 24, 1964, a mere six days before The Music Died?..) And while «Herman’s Hermits» is a beautiful alliteration in itself, the name ultimately suggests a circus troupe rather than a rock band — well, actually, the band was somewhat of a cross between the two.

By now you might have formed the wrong impression that this writer hates and despises ‘I’m Into Something Good’ with the same passion that he had formerly reserved for the likes of Kansas’ ‘Dust In The Wind’ or Aerosmith’s power ballads. Nothing could be further from the truth, though. First, ‘I’m Into Something Good’ is a Goffin / King song, and Carole King never wrote a bad song in the Sixties. Second, ‘I’m Into Something Good’ is chirpy, fun, optimistic, and impossible to hate. It was already cute and cuddly when originally recorded by Earl-Jean of the Cookies (the same girl group that originally did ‘Chains’, which the Beatles covered on Please Please Me), and Herman’s Hermits further polished its rather rudimentary piano-based melody, adding jangly folk-pop guitar (and throwing out the meddlesome saxophone on the instrumental break). And, for what it’s worth — while the teeny-weeny ditty about how "last night I met a new boy in the neighborhood" might have seemed perfect for the naïve-romantic looks of the Cookies, Earl-Jean McCrea was actually 22 years old in 1964, whereas Peter "Herman" Noone had not even turned 17 when the single was released, so Herman’s Hermits were even more qualified for an authentic anthem about teenage dating.

So the song itself is perfectly fine for what it is — as is every other song recorded by Herman’s Hermits in a similar style. What is not perfectly fine is that an entire frickin’ nation went head-over-heels for it (after all, the song could not have shot to #1 merely on the strength of 17-year olds saving up their lunch money to buy the single), and that its impact spread over to the US as well, where the single made it to #13 and gave the band full access to the American market, which they would go on to have an active share in for the next two years. In fact, as it happened with quite a few other British Invasion acts as well, the American market began capitalizing on the band’s potential far more rapidly than the lazy British market: the group’s first LP, the self-titled Herman’s Hermits (sometimes referred to as Introducing Herman’s Hermits because of the inscription on the back of the sleeve), came out in February 1965, a whole four months before a record with the same title, but a decidedly different track list, would be issued in the UK. Because of this, and also because the US-based MGM did a better job of packaging the band’s singles into LPs, here I will be following the American rather than the British discography — exactly the same way that I do with the Animals, who got a very similar deal, possibly because both bands were managed by the exact same deal-breaker, the infamous Mickie Most, who was responsible for the careers of as many excellent artists as truly horrendous ones throughout his lifetime.

The American debut LP arrived just in time to include the band’s first two singles: ‘Something Good’ was quickly followed by ‘Show Me Girl’, a new song which, so it seems, was already specially commissioned from Goffin and King in light of the previous success — and, while it is not bad as such, was probably knocked off by the songwriting duo in about 15 minutes. While seemingly following the same formula as ‘Something Good’, the combination of its melody and lyrics lacks the feel-perky sunny-morning vibe of its predecessor and has nowhere near the same emotional impact — not surprisingly, it failed to repeat its success, stalling at #19 and, furthermore, exposing the vocal limits of Noone, whose higher range is really weak and wobbly. Who needed this kind of stuff from the Manchester boys when you could have much tighter acts, like the Hollies, doing the whole love-plea shtick in a far more convincing manner?

But the real disaster struck when it came to actually recording an entire LP’s worth of material. At the end of the day, Herman’s Hermits were amateurs, a pack of nice young Manchester lads who could barely play their instruments (there is still a lot of debate about which songs the band did play on and which ones were salvaged by session musicians), with a lead singer more suitable for comic performances on a second-rate TV show than the position of an actual frontman in a pop-rock band. Without any solid players or competent songwriters in the band, how could they pull it off?

Arguably the only way they could pull it off was by including as many lightweight, comical, vaudeville-style numbers as possible — and the rule of thumb, both about this album and all of its successors, is that the more serious the band is trying to get, the flatter it falls on its face. The worst cases are sentimental ballads: ‘I Wonder’, credited to a certain Richard Pearson, is a slow «moody» waltz with non-existent musicianship and a vocal performance on the level of an average junior school vocal talent show (I think they were going for the classic suicidal Shangri-La’s vibe here, but they should have stuck with the Cookies), and ‘I Understand’ is a doo-wop cover that goes all the way back to The Four Tunes in 1954, but this version more closely follows a recent hit by Freddie & The Dreamers, who came up with the «brilliant» idea of merging the doo-wop original with a stanza from ‘Auld Lang Syne’ — and believe me, you don’t want to hear Herman’s Hermits sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ any more than you want KISS performing Liebestod.

Similarly, you probably wouldn’t want your Herman’s Hermits getting too close to actual rock’n’roll territory: their cover of ‘Kansas City’ (for some reason, listed as ‘Kansas City Loving’ on the album) is limp and lousy, with no energy whatsoever and one of the worst excuses for a guitar solo in the history of 1964-1965. But they do sound a bit more tight and inspired on the comedy number ‘Sea Cruise’, which they nicked from the legacy of comedy-rock hero Huey "Piano" Smith. Maybe this is one of the tracks on which they used session musicians, because the rhythm section sounds much more collected and the lead guitar work is at least cohesive. It is also possible to listen to Allen Toussaint’s ‘Mother-In-Law’ (originally recorded by New Orleanian R&B singer Ernie K-Doe) and to ‘Walkin’ With My Angel’, yet another Goffin / King number that was a hit for Bobby Vee in 1961 — they manage to give the song a nice country-rock reading instead of the slightly more carnivalesque atmosphere of Bobby’s original. (Hilariously, every time I put on the song I keep expecting that opening bassline to resolve into the open E of ‘Psycho Killer’... and it fuckin’ never does, what a bummer).

There is a weak attempt at original songwriting with ‘I Know Why’, originally the B-side to ‘Show Me Girl’, a fast-paced sweet soft pop ditty credited to Derek Leckenby, the band’s lead guitar player; but soft crooning romance is yet another area in which Herman’s Hermits suck, next to moody morose melancholy and all-out rocking, and even a surprisingly smooth and melodic acoustic guitar break does not save the song, and its writer, from total oblivion.

So, can we actually be into something else that’s good here, other than the lead-in track and the other (inferior) Goffin / King covers? Well, yes, as a matter of fact, it is this album which features the original apparition of Herman’s Hermits’ second greatest success — their cover of ‘Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter’, a cute-corny little vaudeville number that was originally sung by actor Tom Courtenay in The Lads, a 1963 TV play. This is precisely the kind of material that was tailor-made for Herman’s Hermits — cute, eccentric, and oh-so-very-British. Peter Noone goes all the way to put up a heavy accent ("luvly daughtah"), Leckenby and Hopwood do their best to conjure a mid-Fifties skiffle atmosphere, and the song becomes a perfect atmospheric counterpoint to ‘I’m Into Something Good’ — a bit of a broken-hearted disappointment after such an optimistic morning.

Instructively, the song was not even released in the UK as a single — never intended to — but when tentatively put out on the American market, one month after it had already appeared on the LP, it shot up all the way to #1. That’s how strong the American love for all things markedly British was at the time; the American popularity of ‘Mrs. Brown’ (as well as its sequel about Henry the VIIIth, which we shall discuss in our next review) might arguably be the single biggest testimony to just how far them Yankees would go at the time to swear back their allegiance to the Crown. (Great idea for a movie, by the way: the British turn back the sands of time and manage to win the War of Independence by sending Herman’s Hermits into the past and making them play ‘Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter’ to the Americans at Lexington and Concord).

Jokes aside... no, wait, it is just too dangerous to put aside the jokes when talking about Herman’s Hermits. Jokes not aside, the self-titled LP has two really fun tracks (the first two, that is), three or four mildly tolerable ones, and a ton of dreck which cannot be redeemed by the simple fact that it was all recorded in 1964-1965, and therefore it must all be good. But this should by no means undermine the legendary historical significance of the first months of Herman’s Hermits’ musical career. Obviously, there had already been lots of minor, not particularly talented artists in the British Invasion, but Herman’s Hermits were actually the first successful act to intentionally launch the process of dumbing down the entire movement, and reap the correlated commercial benefits — and that certainly has got to count as an achievement.