Review: Johnny Burnette - Johnny Burnette Sings (1961)

Tracks: 1) Little Boy Sad; 2) Mona Lisa; 3) I’m Still Dreamin’; 4) In The Chapel In The Moonlight; 5) Red Sails In The Sunset; 6) Big Big World; 7) Ballad Of The One Eyed Jacks; 8) The Treasure Of Love; 9) The Fool; 10) Blue Blue Morning; 11) Memories Are Made Of This; 12) Pledge Of Love.

REVIEW

It is probably safe to say that people did not turn ‘Dreamin’ and ‘You’re Sixteen’ into big hits because of Johnny Burnette or Snuff Garrett — they just happened to be catchy songs with sharp romantic hooks. Johnny had a good singing voice to put to them, but not an outstanding one; also, it was a voice that probably worked best when set to «hiccupy rockabilly rasp» mode, and that mode was no longer in fashion by 1960. As a romantic singer, he had neither the sweep-you-off-your-feet power of Elvis nor the seep-under-your-skin melancholic subtlety of Ricky Nelson. What this meant for his own career was simple enough: Johnny Burnette + strong original songwriting = potential success; Johnny Burnette + lazy songwriting or cover versions = boring failure.

Country songwriter Wayne Walker’s ‘Little Boy Sad’, written for Johnny and recorded by him on the very first day of the same session that yielded most of Johnny Burnette, showed that well enough when, released as a single, it failed to break into the Top 10. It was a relatively energetic country-rocker with a distinctly rocking high-pitched electric guitar riff (quite pleasantly flowing together with Garrett’s light strings), but it did absolutely nothing melodically that a couple dozen Carl Perkins or Elvis songs had not already done, and the world had relatively little use for it (in fact, I strongly suppose that most people bought it on the strength of ‘You’re Sixteen’ and ended up disappointed). It fared a little better in the UK than in the US, though, and even ended up being covered six years later... by Herman’s Hermits. Uhm, well, that’s life. (The Hermits cover is much more interesting, by the way — turned into a crunchy sugary slice of mid-Sixties’ bubblegum-hard-rock at its, well, bubbliest).

Things took an even odder turn from there. In February 1961, Johnny returned to the studio to record ‘Big Big World’, an even more generic number that completely left the «rock» out of «country-rock» and replaced it with loud backing vocals and obnoxious strings (here they really fill up all the space, as opposed to Garrett). It was rootsy enough to avoid any straightforward accusations of plunging head first into «teen-idolism», but so toothless and hookless that it absolutely did not matter anyway. The B-side was at least on the weird novelty level for Johnny: ‘Ballad Of The One-Eyed Jacks’ was, indeed, a rambling story-based country ballad à la Marty Robbins, apparently written as a «musical companion» to Marlon Brando’s only directorial experience, the 1961 Western movie One-Eyed Jacks. While the movie did go on to become a bit of a cult classic, the song (which, as far as I know, was written about the movie rather than part of the actual soundtrack) never really went anywhere. It tries to conjure up a little of that Western mystique, but Johnny’s voice has nothing mystical about it and the arrangement is as formulaic in every little detail as they come in the field of Western soundtracks. Well... the only good thing I can say about it is that at least Johnny Burnette is a little more credible as a cowboy than he would have been as a surfer.

Even though ‘Big Big World’ fared even worse than ‘Little Boy Sad’, Johnny was given the green light for yet another short LP — comprised of these two singles, a few outtakes from the November 1960 sessions and the results of one new extensive session in March 1961 that yielded seven new tracks, all of which are here. These are mostly covers of relative oldies, with one notable, but unnecessary exception: ‘I’m Still Dreamin’, as one might have easily guessed, is a shadow-sequel to ‘Dreamin’, written by the same people and working as a «happy ending» to the original: "I’m still dreaming / But not like before / Though I’m dreaming / I’m lonely no more". Perhaps it would have made sense if the original had a properly tragic atmosphere and the sequel would be the melodramatic resolution. As it is, the original was already syrupy enough for the sequel to send you into the spasms of sugar shock.

Slightly more interesting is the decision to turn Nat King Cole’s ‘Mona Lisa’ (after a deceptive slow intro) into a rollickin’ pop-rocker that is melodically closer to ‘Jambalaya’ than Tin Pan Alley — even if, ultimately, this has more shock value than common sense (and even the shock value would be appreciated by only a handful of people). Invading the territory of Fats Domino (‘Red Sails In The Sunset’) and Clyde McPhatter (‘The Treasure Of Love’) does not work too good, either, because Johnny shares neither Fats’ quirky sense of New Orleanian humor nor the pristine angelic beauty of Clyde’s vocal cords. And then there’s a Dean Martin cover (‘In The Chapel In The Moonlight’) which is all about trying to modernize the romantic Broadway ballad of the 1950s, but who really gives a damn?

One song that makes me a little more happy than the rest is ‘The Fool’, a song that was first released by Sanford Clark in 1956 and, if I am not mistaken, first dragged out of the country circuit and exposed to a wider market by Johnny on this LP (subsequently covered by Johnny Kidd & The Pirates in 1966, by Elvis in 1971, and even by Paul McCartney for his Unplugged performance in the early 1990s). ‘The Fool’ is notable for basically being the very first song submitted to the world by the genius of Lee Hazlewood — in this case, «genius» consisting of taking the riff of ‘Smokestack Lightning’ and adapting it to a country tale of self-deprecating depression, showing how pretty much the exact same melody, with but a slight tonal shift, can be used to express both extroverted menace and introverted sarcastic melancholy. Unfortunately, Johnny’s version does not expand the song’s potential beyond whatever Sanford Clark had already done with it. But it’s a likely bet that this is the version all those UK kids heard first, so there’s that.

In any case, Johnny’s second LP from 1961 does not really show him sliding significantly deeper into the precipice of cheese and irrelevance than the levels of his first one. ‘Little Boy Sad’ and ‘Mona Lisa’ show that he still vaguely remembered how to rock, while oddities like ‘Ballad Of The One Eyed Jacks’ show that he was certainly not happy about the idea of being branded as one of the «teen idols». But he still hadn’t learned to write his own material, nor could he afford collaboration with professional songwriters who could write songs specifically for his needs — creatively, he was more or less on the level of Gene Vincent, whose own slide into mediocrity followed similar lines (except that Vincent was never lucky enough to find a gold nugget like ‘Dreamin’ or ‘You’re Sixteen’ in that time period).

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