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

Tracks: 1) Can’t You Hear My Heartbeat; 2) I’m Henry VIII, I Am; 3) The End Of The World; 4) For Your Love; 5) I Gotta Dream On; 6) Don’t Try To Hurt Me; 7) Silhouettes; 8) Heartbeat; 9) I’ll Never Dance Again; 10) Tell Me Baby; 11) Traveling Light.

REVIEW

If you see a Sixties’ record by somebody called On Tour, keep in mind that (a) this is a US-only album by a UK artist, (b) this is not a concert album, (c) this is almost certainly a bastard release of odds and ends from the respective artist’s past, present, and even future (in that sometimes it hosts songs that would only later be released on the proper UK album). The Animals On Tour works exactly the same way, and later still, Magic Bus: The Who On Tour would also become one of the weirdest entries in The Who’s discographic history. Nevertheless, some of these LPs did have the advantages of hosting some songs that would only be released in the UK as singles, or not released at all — and they also gave US fans a much earlier opportunity to acquire a long-playing record by their idols than UK fans. Indeed, by the time Herman’s Hermits got their second US album, they were still waiting to get permission for a first one in their own homeland: and the UK edition of Herman’s Hermits, following this summer release in the fall, would essentially be On Tour with three tracks (all the singles!) replaced by three LP-only tracks from the US edition of Herman’s Hermits.

Let’s start off with the singles, because 90% of all our hopes that occasionally Herman’s Hermits might really be "into something good" rest on the singles anyway. ‘Can’t You Hear My Heartbeat’, written by the songwriting team of John Carter and Ken Lewis and put out in January ’65, is a jolly and upbeat pop anthem very much in the early Goffin/King style, the ideal kind of contribution for the level of Herman’s Hermits — and, understandably, one of the weaker cuts when it was borrowed several months later by Marianne Faithfull for her debut album. (Even then, I think that her seductive solo vocal, as compared to the Hermits’ multi-tracked singing, and the baroque harpsichord arrangement as compared to the fairly simplistic electric guitar on the original, at least try to make an improvement — not something that can be often said about the Hermits themselves when they cover other people’s songs). As usual, the only offensive thing about such a song is that it shot to #2 on the US charts... then again, let’s not advance the US charts too much credit.

The next single, ‘Silhouettes’, forces me to make a correction because that, indeed, is a rare case when the Hermits’ attempt at modernizing an oldie works pretty damn well — not that it tells us anything about the specific artistic genius of Herman’s Hermits, because essentially what we have here is a patterned conversion of a stereotypical Fifties’ doo-wop hit into an equally stereotypical mid-Sixties pop-rock song. Our input: a slow, horn-enhanced, catchy-romantic serenade delivered by The Rays in a polite, sentimental Fifties fashion. Our output: a slightly sped up, guitar-enhanced, catchy-romantic serenade delivered by Peter Noone in a joyful, youthful, exuberant Sixties fashion. It does not take much imagination to develop this thread further and realize how the same song would sound in the Seventies (bombastic production), the Eighties (synth-pop), the Nineties (Oasis-style boring crunchy guitars), and the 21st century (umm... Autotune?). But what the heck, at least the melody is memorable.

Skipping then right through ‘Mrs. Brown’ (which was already discussed earlier) and a completely useless version of Sam Cooke’s ‘Wonderful World’ (which somehow failed to make it onto any of the LPs), we now get to the age of big business with the one and only song that Herman’s Hermits are going to be remembered for: ‘I’m Henery The VIII, I Am’ (although on the US album it was boringly spelled ‘Henry’, that extra e is actually totally crucial for the song’s success). The original, hilariously inverting the trope of Henry VIII and his wives by turning it into a story of one widow and her eight husbands all named Henry, was a big vaudeville smash for Harry Champion in the early 1910s — and the «honor» of reviving it for the pop-rock age of the Sixties actually belongs not to Peter Noone, but to the early UK skiffle and rock’n’roll pioneer Joe Brown, who pretty much pre-shaped the song for the Hermits from top to bottom. For Brown, this was sort of a natural thing, though, since he was interested from the start in integrating the American rock’n’roll sound with the UK popular tradition out of pure love for both; Herman’s Hermits had a far more pragmatic role to play — as one of Britain’s most promising exports to the US, they had to consistently deliver that British quirkiness and eccentricity to a hungry US audience, deprived of organic entertainment by their colonial masters for almost 200 years...

...er, uhm, anyway, those rock’n’roll guitar licks you hear played at the beginning of the song, as if it’s gonna be an angry rhythm’n’blues number instead of a vaudeville joke — they’re actually copied from Joe Brown’s version, except they’re thicker and louder, and also there’s a relentlessly plowing bass bottom that almost overpowers the rhythm guitar, and then Peter Noone’s vocal is also louder, more aggressive and obnoxious than Brown’s quiet tone. Think of the transition as «modest rockabilly corrupts itself into brash pub-rock», and you might be getting somewhere. On top of that, Noone’s hyperbolic, braggardly exhibited Cockney accent on the song might be the most transparent representation of Britain’s lower classes to be presented to the American market by 1965 — ultimately, the song became sort of a cult favorite for both the UK and the US punk scene a decade later. And not just because of the vocals, but mostly because of how gleefully it revels in its own simplicity and stupidity. Yes, the arrangement may have been borrowed from Joe Brown, but nowhere in Joe Brown’s version do we find the classic "SECOND VERSE, SAME AS THE FIRST!" (even if Joe’s second verse is indeed the same as the first) that would, ten years later, be famously borrowed by the Ramones for their own ‘Judy Is A Punk’.

If only the typical Herman’s Hermits repertoire consisted of songs like ‘Henery’... but then if it did, they would have entered the musical annals as pioneers of «comedy rock» or «goof-off rock» or whatever, an early precursor to the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and the like, and this would not be quite right. In some strangely perverse manner, I now begin to think that the few songs like ‘Mrs. Brown’ and ‘Henery’ actually work better in the context of general pop music evolution when they are surrounded by boring and inadequate «serious» filler than if they were entirely and completely surrounded by goofy vaudeville and nothing but goofy vaudeville. It sort of goes like this: Herman’s Hermits are a bland, untalented band that fails every time it tries to take itself seriously, but succeeds almost every time it takes itself stupidly. But if it always took itself stupidly, who would even pay serious attention to them in the first place?..

So I’m not going to waste a lot of time bashing all those other songs on this album; most of them really just exist to provide context for ‘Can’t You Hear My Heartbeat’ and ‘Henery The VIII’. Those that are well-known in their more original versions are the quickest to be forgotten: Buddy Holly’s ‘Heartbeat’ (probably recorded for a «pairing» with ‘Can’t You Hear My Heartbeat’) and the Yardbirds’ ‘For Your Love’ only detract from the classic patterns without adding to them. The senti­mental ballads (‘The End Of The World’, ‘I’ll Never Dance Again’) were not all that great to begin with, and Peter Noone is not the kind of guy to justify fluffy sentimentality. Only two songs represent semi-original songwriting, courtesy of the highly limited talent of the band’s rhythm guitarist Keith Hopwood: ‘Don’t Try To Hurt Me’ is a run-of-the-mill little rhythm’n’blues pastiche, somewhat in the style of very early Kinks (think ‘Nothing In The World Can Stop Me Worryin’ About That Girl’, etc.), and ‘Tell Me Baby’ is sort of like a watered-down imitation of the Dave Clark Five.

Finally, the good-night-to-y’all closing cover of Cliff Richard’s ‘Travellin’ Light’ throws Peter Noone onto the ring with Cliff in a fight for the «Champion Of The Smooth And Suave» title... and I think that Noone wins on points. More importantly, listening to the song got me thinking about how much the Monkees’ ‘I Can’t Get Her Off My Mind’ owes to it, and, con­sequently, about how there probably wouldn’t have been any Monkees without Herman’s Hermits to show them the way. Then again, why should we really dream about a world bereft of Herman’s Hermits or Monkees, in which they act as sometimes embarrassing, sometimes entertaining, and occasionally even enlightening court jesters to superior powers? It is only a world in which court jesters overthrow their superiors, like Malcolm of the Legend Of Kyrandia, that is ultimately doomed to extinction, and, fortunately for us, we are still living in 1965 here rather than 2025... ohmygosh, look at the time, actually, I’m outta here!

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