Review: P. J. Proby - P. J. Proby (1965)

Tracks: 1) My Prayer; 2) I Will; 3) Mission Bell; 4) The Nearness Of You; 5) Lonely Weekends; 6) If I Loved You; 7) When I Fall In Love; 8) She Cried; 9) Secret Love; 10) I Will Come To You; 11) Lonely Teardrops; 12) With These Hands.

REVIEW

On January 29, 1965 — just as the whole world was preparing to witness the solemn state funeral of Sir Winston Churchill — at the relatively small venue of Castle Hall, Croydon, world history was changed forever in a drastic incident when P. J. Proby, enjoying the perks of a double-bill tour with Cilla Black, inadvertently (or so he claimed) ripped both legs of his pants onstage while performing some of his famous body moves. No recordings exist of the incident, so it is impossible to verify precisely how much skin tissue (and in which particular locations) was exposed, but it definitely was enough to set the local — and then the national — newspapers on fire. Long hair and wild body gyrations are one thing, but naked hairy knees? Impossible!

Proby’s own recollections and explanations of the incident have been conflicting over the years, but I particularly like the conspirology version in which he complains that the manager of Tom Jones had been trying to bribe the tour manager to replace P. J. with Tom, implying that, when that attempt failed, some saboteur must have loosened the threads on the poor trousers to wreck Proby’s reputation. The problem with that version is that P. J. split his pants not once, but twice: precisely the same thing repeated itself two days later at the Ritz Cinema in Luton, and you’d think the singer would have been careful about checking his wardrobe after his enemies got the best of him first time around. Far more likely is that the second time around, the splitting was intentional — in the same way that Pete Townshend began intentionally smashing his guitars after an accidental first time — and that Proby and his own crew were operating under the «there ain’t no such thing as bad publicity» principle, to further enhance his wildman image.

Unfortunately, as the 2004 Super Bowl event would show, bad publicity does exist even in the 21st century, where self-appointed taste arbiters, hypocritical tabloids, and cowardly business executives continue to divert public indignation to silly trivialities instead of anything that might expose their own asses — and there was certainly a lot more of that back in 1965. Moral pundits, such as the almighty Mary Whitehouse (thankfully immortalized by Roger Waters in the lyrics to ‘Pigs’ so that the name is not completely empty even to those who never lived through those times), raised such a fuss over the incident that P. J. was, indeed, booted from the tour and replaced by Tom Jones, whose ‘It’s Not Unusual’ was climbing up in the charts at the same time. More than that: Tom Jones, preserving some of Proby’s onstage wildness and freedom of expression, was careful enough to cut down on his edgier tricks and quickly became accepted by Proby’s (mostly female) fan audiences — while poor P. J. found himself barred from touring in the U.K. and even had his work visa revoked for a while, so he had to relocate to Canada for his live shows. What an insult!

The truly bad news is that the accident pretty much put an end to any hopes one could have for Proby making it as a hard-’n’-heavy rock’n’roller. His early singles were interesting in that they managed to combine pop, soul, and rock elements in a well-working cocktail: already ‘Hold Me’, his first UK record, had a super-heavy, bombastic drum beat and a shrill, nastily distorted guitar solo from Big Jim Sullivan — but his very best experience in that genre, I think, was ‘Together’, released in August 1964 and counting as one of the year’s finest pop concoctions. On that song, Proby tests out the highest limits of his vocal range (those double-tracked falsetto bits are almost psychedelic!), and Big Jim Sullivan lets rip with one of the weirdest guitar breaks of that early era, combining an early example of the «woman tone» with a proto-Gilmouresque approach to note-bending — highly unusual and exciting (some people mistakenly assume that the leads on both ‘Hold Me’ and ‘Together’ were played by Jimmy Page, but he, as per his own memories, only played rhythm guitar on both of these songs; so give Big Jim his due, as he was actually a more accomplished lead player at that time, being three years older than Jimmy and all).

After the pant-splitting debacle, however, it was decided that P. J., unable to give any more concerts in the UK but still capable of recording new material, would have to tone down his image, and that meant concentrating more on the «soul» and «pop» aspects of his artistry and less on the hard-rockin’ angle. Not coincidentally — not coincidentally at all, I’m sure — Proby’s first single release of 1965 was a cover of Bing Crosby’s ‘I Apologize’, arranged with plenty of schmaltzy strings and angelic backup vocals and delivered in Proby’s finest Elvis-imitating mode. The opening "I’m sorry, I am so sorry, what more can I say?" must have sounded quite unambiguously to everyone concerned at the time — today, P. J. would probably have simply tweeted same the words, which makes for a much more generic and artistically less interesting manner of self-flagellation — but taken outside of its educational historical context, the song would probably have Mary Whitehouse as its biggest fan. Personally, I miss Big Jim Sullivan.

Fortunately for Proby, his UK fans remained steadfast and true; despite an inevitable drop in sales due to lack of public appearances, the singles continued to fare nicely on the charts (‘I Apologize’ reached #11), and by June 1965, he was already feeling confident enough to record something a bit less schmaltzy, such as the recent, but relatively obscure, Ben E. King song ‘Let The Water Run Down’. I’m not 100% sure, but I do believe it also has Jimmy Page on rhythm guitar, playing that frantic Bo Diddley-style rhythm, and while the shrill vocals of the backup girls already sound a bit cheesy for 1965, the overall groove is efficient and tasteful — already the original did a damn good job of combining the Bo Diddley punch with the energy and beauty of a great soul vocal, and Proby’s version sounds both more raw (instrument-wise) and more polished (vocal-wise) than the original.

Another minor success, released around the same time as Proby’s second LP (in fact, it was chosen to replace the lead-in track for the US issue of P. J. Proby), was ‘That Means A Lot’, a Beatles self-reject that, paradoxically, is probably still better remembered these days in the Beatles’ demo version, after it was officially released on Anthology 2. The song, conceived by Paul during the sessions for Help!, was ultimately rejected because they thought none of them had the proper singing power needed to make it work — so, naturally, they bestowed it upon their good friend P. J., and while it is true that his range and power make those soaring lines like "...you know that your love is all you’ve go-o-whoa-whoa-whoa-oo-t!" stand out much stronger, somehow it still ends up sounding half-finished. The reason is that Proby is heavily investing here in the production, with thick layers of strings, horns, backing vocals, and his own bombast — but he has no incentive, of course, to invest in the melodic tightening of the verses. (Some critics had dubbed the song as a weak attempt on Paul’s part to mimic Lennon’s ‘Ticket To Ride’, and I would have to agree).

Still, when push comes to shove, I do believe I’d rather end up with Proby’s take on ‘That Means A Lot’ on my playlist than with most of the songs that ended up on his second record, uninventively titled just P. J. Proby because P. J. Proby With His Brand New Pants On probably felt too painfully suggestive, and P. J. Proby Still Kicks The Shit Out Of Long, Lean, Lanky, Back-Stabbin’ Tom Jones could not fit in its entirety on the front sleeve. The reason is that most of the songs are way too old-fashioned: the selection is squarely targeted at those whose musical tastes had been fully formed before the British Invasion — and while it could be said that P. J. is still possessed by the idea of playing Elvis to his audiences, much of this, oddly enough, sounds like a preview of the «1970s mark» Vegas-era Elvis, rather than even the cheesy movie-era Elvis of the early Sixties.

In all honesty, I wanted to shut down the record and forget about its existence in the opening six seconds of ‘My Prayer’, when Proby’s grandiose "WHEN THE TWILIGHT IS GO-O-O-ONE!" already has him jumping down the Empire State Building, and the introductory orchestral sweep promises you, at the very least, a soul-shattering Hollywood drama on the scale of That Hamilton Woman or something like that. Not even The Righteous Brothers offered that kind of bombast with their version, let alone Roy Orbison, The Shirelles, or whoever’d covered that Georges Boulanger oldie over the previous half-decade, and for a good reason, too, but subtlety was certainly not on the menu for P. J., who, deprived of the classic opportunity to sway teenage girls in movie theaters, now had to unleash all the sixty tons of his swashbuckler charm on little old ladies. In addition to ‘My Prayer’, said ladies also receive hyper-inflated versions of such oldies as ‘The Nearness Of You’, ‘If I Loved You’, and ‘When I Fall In Love’, all featuring the HEALING SEXUAL POWER of THE MOST MASCULINE VOICE IN THE WORLD, riding atop an endless whirl of romantic waves of strings and horns... this is simply one massive musical orgasm after another... by the end of it all, you’ll be so exhausted you’ll want to join a monastery.

Seriously, this is heavy stuff, man. Even the cover of Jackie Wilson’s ‘Lonely Teardrops’, compared to the light, on-its-feet groove of the original, feels massive and lumbering; the backing band and orchestra are all given orders to whack and smash at it for all they’re worth, and Proby sings with the effort of an Atlas trying to get the weight of Heaven off his back. Sometimes it’s hilarious, sometimes (fairly rarely) it can be taken seriously, but the general impression is that he overcooks pretty much everything that falls into his hands — which, granted, makes this kind of approach somewhat unique for 1965, because sometimes even Tom Jones sounds like a wimp in comparison. Half an hour later, I have bass drums, violins, and French horns seeping out of my ears and no individual memories of any songs whatsoever.

Of course, it cannot be said that this switch to 100% old-fashioned operatic bombast was all due to the split pants incident. There had been quite a few bombastic orchestrated oldies on the first LP already, and one of P. J.’s biggest hits in 1964 was West Side Story’s ‘Somewhere’. But he did make sure to alternate them with lighter stuff like ‘Rockin’ Pneumonia’ or ‘Louisiana Man’, not to mention all those nice singles with Big Jim Sullivan — I so sorely miss his inventive lead guitar on this record that it’s not even funny. In some strange manner, then, the split pants incident sort of mirrors the various misdemeanors that, several years earlier, had all but extinguished the fames and fortunes of Fifties’ rockers like Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry; but «mirrors» in an ironically comical manner, because what is a pair of ripped pants next to marrying your underage cousin or trafficking a minor across state lines? In the end, all this story does is amply demonstrate that «standards of morality» in the UK circa 1965 tended to be upheld even harsher than they were in the US, and that it is quite a miracle that the Beatles, Stones, etc. all somehow evaded the fate of P. J. Pantsmaster; it was not until the coming of the Drug Age that open season would be declared upon all those gentlemen.

At least it can be argued that P. J. gave us all a damn good story that year, which is more than can be said about the album. Outside of that context, P. J. Proby is worth very little. But the next time you put it on and the earth-rattling wail of ‘My Prayer’ brings the ceiling down on your head, don’t forget to remember — this is the guy who ripped his pants on stage and suffered years of hell for it. When the twilight is gone / And no songbirds are singing... RIP! When the twilight is gone / You come into my heart... RIP! And here in my heart / You will stay while I pray... BANNED! Brings on a whole different perspective, I tell you. Just put two and two together and you’re all set.

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