Review: Jackie Wilson - Lonely Teardrops (1959)
Tracks: 1) Lonely Teardrops; 2) Each Time (I Love You More); 3) That’s Why (I Love You So); 4) In The Blue Of Evening; 5) The Joke (Is Not On Me); 6) Someone To Need Me (As I Need You); 7) You Better Know It; 8) By The Light Of The Silvery Moon; 9) Singing A Song; 10) Love Is All; 11) We Have Love; 12) Hush-A-Bye.
REVIEW
Jackie Wilson’s discography is fairly sprawling — like many other pop artists with plenty of soul to burn, but not enough independent vision to hold one’s own ground, he was over-exploited by his record label throughout the peak years of his career. But this does not necessarily mean that each of those albums consists of one or two great singles and a pack of filler. Letting aside the fact that if you really love Wilson’s voice, you will never even distinguish filler from non-filler, there is absolutely no telling with this guy when one of his obscure B-sides might turn out to be more fascinating than the formulaic A-side, or when an LP-only track will feature some stunning vocal acrobatics that puts the concurrent single to shame. It is, therefore, not entirely meaningless to plow your way through the jungle of Jackie’s LPs to make your own ultimate playlist, rather than rely on best-of compilations — provided you have the time and energy. And if you don’t, well, you can always rely on the impeccable taste of your musical host, heh heh.
Lonely Teardrops was, of course, built around the smash success of Jackie’s fifth single, his highest Fifties’ entry on the US charts and still the song that probably defines him in the memories of the casual listener. But if we want to remain rigorous in the chronological aspect, the oldest recording to appear on the LP is actually his interpretation of ‘By The Light Of The Silvery Moon’, which was originally the B-side to 1957’s ‘Reet Petite’. All I can say here, though, is that the accordeon sounds cheesy, the backing vocals sound unbearably retro, and that my favorite thing about the song is still its linguistic anachronism — "By the light of the silvery moon / I want to spoon" certainly sounds different today than it used to in 1909, or even in 1957, doesn’t it? (If you are not a native English speaker, check out meanings 2 and 3). Oh well, at least it is still much better here than in Little Richard’s version, and I also appreciate the oddly out-of-the-blue bits of quasi-bel-canto crooning that Jackie does during the instrumental break.
Next in line is Jackie’s fourth single, which is precisely what I was talking about: the A-side is ‘We Have Love’, an arch-pompous, anthemic ballad from Berry Gordy, is a melodically generic waltz which tries to override its predictability with as much bombast as possible — Tchaikovsky’s strings, Wagnerian brass, and Neapolitan vocal energy. Official members of the Jackie Wilson fan club will adore this, but I much prefer the equally pompous, but speedier and more playful ‘Singing A Song’, credited to Jackie himself and some of his Wilson relatives; here, Jackie actually takes a vocal lesson from Elvis, borrowing the agitated-exuberant jumps and hiccups from ‘One-Sided Love Affair’ and smoothly leading them into the anthemic conclusion — except that his triumphant "singing a song of looooooove!...", which one would expect to be cut off on a high note, paints a sonic arc in the sky and hilariously comes crashing down in a creaky voice overtone, creating a fun bit of dissonance between the sacred and the profane.
Perhaps if ‘Singing A Song’ were the A-side, the single would have charted higher — because the public clearly liked Jackie for the fun things, not so much the predictable things he did with his voice. They got this right for the next single, where the B-side was ‘In The Blue Of The Evening’, another fairly generic crooning number. The A-side was ‘Lonely Teardrops’, which they apparently first recorded as a slow ballad, but when this did not work, the tempo was slightly sped up, the rhythm was slightly Latinized, and the flow was reinvented as a series of startling stops-and-starts to bring Jackie’s voice to full effect. To properly appreciate it, I think, one might want to compare the song with the inferior 1975 cover on John Fogerty’s solo album — it is nice to see John tipping his hat to Jackie, but he smoothes out the song’s whackiness with a stupidly boring 4/4 beat and pretty much loses everything that made it so interesting in the transition. We could complain, of course, that there is not much of a truly lonesome or tearful atmosphere throughout, but then neither does Ruth Brown truly sound like she’s got teardrops raining from her eyes on ‘Teardrops From My Eyes’, and that one’s still a great song as well (though Ruth plays it out as a power statement, whereas Jackie is all about submission).
‘Lonely Teardrops’ turned Jackie into a superstar, but this would be hard to guess from just listening to the recordings in chronological order — the very next single, ‘That’s Why (I Love You So)’, is a simple, light-hearted, and catchy pop song which neither tries to repeat the inventiveness of ‘Lonely Teardrops’ nor somehow aggrandize the artist; and the B-side, ‘Love Is All’, is another schmaltzy-bombastic doo-wop ballad from the standards vault. Much better are a couple of the LP-only tracks: ‘You Better Know It’ is a «soft-rock» number echoing Fats Domino (there are lyrical and melodical borrowings from ‘All By Myself’) with Wilson at his most engaging and pleading, and ‘The Joke (Is Not On Me)’ is the only number on the entire record whose overall playfulness and naughtiness equals the levels of ‘Etcetera’, ‘Reet Petite’, and ‘It’s So Fine’ — he laughs! he clowns! there’s a mischievous guitar solo! now that’s entertainment!
Finally, there is at least one performance of a slow waltzing ballad here which manages to transcend mediocrity: ‘Someone To Need Me’, for some reason not issued as a single, is one of Jackie’s most powerfully soulful performances of all time. On all the other doo-wop stuff on this album, he seems to be taking his duties rather professionally, but with this next offer from Gordy, some special switch seems to have been triggered, and he takes the song with him to the stratosphere, like Elvis did with ‘I Want You, I Need You, I Love You’ before him (and like he would do with ‘If I Can Dream’ a decade later). It is difficult to put in words why ‘We Have Love’ feels like having more Vegasy glitz than substance and why ‘Someone To Need Me’ feels like its substance transcends the orchestral glitz, but (a) I do feel that way and (b) there is no reason why this should be impossible, so let’s leave it as a hypothesis which you are all welcome to test.
Ultimately, my countdown is six great-to-good songs and six mediocre-to-rote songs, which still counts as proof that Jackie Wilson’s LPs are worth investigating (and certainly do not deserve being snubbed by Wikipedia, which, as of this moment, still refuses to feature separate pages on them, even if I’d gladly take Lonely Teardrops over the entire catalogs of hundreds, if not thousands, of artists with far more dedicated fanbases). And even if they were not... how could you resist that piercing Rodin-ish stare on the front cover? He clearly needs you as much as you need him.