Review: Ricky Nelson - More Songs By Ricky (1960)
Tracks: 1) I’m Not Afraid; 2) Baby Won’t You Please Come Home; 3) Here I Go Again; 4) I’d Climb The Highest Mountain; 5) Make Believe; 6) Ain’t Nothin’ But Love; 7) When Your Lover Has Gone; 8) Proving My Love; 9) Hey Pretty Baby; 10) Time After Time; 11) I’m All Through With You; 12) Again.
REVIEW
In retrospect, as I have noticed, More Songs By Ricky tends to get a rather bad rap; thus, William Ruhlmann’s brief assessment on the All-Music Guide largely talks about the album in the context of the general decline of rockabilly around 1960, mentioning how Ricky’d lost the assistance of the Burnette brothers as his trusty songwriters and had to replace the losses by falling back on oldies from Ozzie’s 1920s-1930s repertoire. If there were such a thing as a «stable general consensus» on the ups and downs of Nelson’s career (there isn’t really, because the statistical basis is laughably low), it would probably describe 1960 as a pretty bad year for the guy, followed by a miraculous, if brief, resurgence in 1961–62 with the triumph of ‘Travelin’ Man’ and ‘Hello Mary Lou’.
However, I do not seriously believe that such an impression could arise from simply listening to the music, rather than consciously placing it within the overall context of 1960 in a mental framework like «Well, Elvis, Chuck Berry, Gene Vincent, Bill Haley, and pretty much all the other survivors had lukewarm records that year, so it makes sense that Ricky would have a lukewarm record, too». The thing that makes Ricky different from all these guys is that Ricky had always had lukewarm records — «Lukewarm» was pretty much his middle name from birth — and thus, was lucky enough to have far less distance to fall than the «fully authentic» heroes of rockabilly. Listen to Gene Vincent in 1956 and then to Gene Vincent in 1960 and the difference hits you like a ton of marshmallows hits the feeding trough of a fighting dog. Listen to the stylistic and emotional distance traveled in the same period by Ricky Nelson, and you have a much more difficult case on your hands trying to prove that the boy had «sold out» to the record industry. Paradoxically, having been designed from the start as a softer, more polite antidote to the rock’n’roll craze, Ricky Nelson in 1960 almost sounds like a reliable little island of stability in a rapidly deteriorating landscape.
It is true that 1960 opened on a single particularly sickly-sweet note for Ricky, with the release of ‘Young Emotions’, a maudlin string-saturated ballad from the pen of Disney songwriter Jerry Livingston; the B-side, Baker Knight’s ‘Right By My Side’, was a much more acceptable piece of upbeat pop-rock that would be far more typical of the ensuing LP — along with its loud arrangement, prominently emphasizing Plas Johnson’s saxophone and the backing vocals: in addition to The Jordanaires, who had already been shadowing Ricky since 1958, 1960 marked a prominent use of female backup vocals, provided by Darlene Love & The Blossoms — which, perhaps, made the recordings a little cornier than usual, but also a bit more fun, even humorous at times. On ‘Young Emotions’, sappy sentimentality washes all over Ricky’s melancholic nuances that can occasionally ennoble his ballads, so I don’t really feel the song; ‘Right By My Side’, however, is a fun little romp with little pretense, and if you, too, happen to think that the B-side trumps the A-side here, I’m happy to say that More Songs By Ricky might be right up our alleys after all.
There are only two more of those sappy ballads on the album — although, like two faithful guard dogs, they bookmark it as the first and last track, so you’d have a completely skewed picture of the record if you were to simply taste it from the front and from the back. They do illustrate pretty well the contrast between manneristic cliché and emotional freshness: ‘Again’, a Tommy Dorsey oldie from the 1940s, feels like a dusty, lifeless formula — but ‘I’m Not Afraid’, newly contributed by Felice Bryant of the Boudleaux and Felice Bryant fame, sounds genuinely touching. Elvis would certainly have sung it with more depth, but Elvis would have a harder time with lyrics such as "People tell me I’m too young / But I disagree / Love can come to anyone / And love has come to me" than Ricky (who was, after all, not 21 yet — and Elvis, for that matter, already sounded like he was way over 21 when he was still 19).
The relative dearth of contemporary outside songwriters does push Nelson this time into falling back on oldies, including, surprisingly enough, a whole two songs from the crown repertoire of the legendary blues queens — ‘Baby Won’t You Please Come Home’ and ‘When Your Lover Has Gone’. Both of these are delivered in mild-lounge jazz style, sort of a «Sinatra-meets-Nashville» arrangement, and saving them from total oblivion is (a) the inspired interplay between Plas Johnson on sax and his brother Ray Johnson on piano (nothing ground-shaking, but quite tasteful) and (b) the fact that Ricky’s «emotionally frozen» vocal delivery always works better with melancholic-depressive material than it does with sweet romantic serenading. One problem I have with, for instance, Sinatra’s acclaimed «depressive» classics such as In The Wee Small Hours is that Frank is not really a natural when it comes to creating a light suicidal mood; Ricky, despite all of his popularity and teen idol status, always feels like the protagonist of the Beach Boys’ ‘In My Room’, and this helps him put his own little spin on those old time melancholy urban blues. He’s certainly not trying to steal the crown of Bessie Smith or Billie Holiday, but he gets this material. It’s more than just «a little something for the old folks».
As for the outside songwriters, at least our good old friend Baker Knight could still be relied upon. He’s in exceptionally high spirits this time around, providing three rhythmic, energetic numbers, of which ‘Ain’t Nothin’ But Love’ is probably the catchiest, totally in line with Elvis’ contemporary pop-rock stuff, and the slower ‘I’m All Through With You’ is probably the funniest, mainly due to The Blossoms’ ridiculous backing vocals (whatever they’re chirping there in the background, it sounds like shut up shut up shut up to me, which feels like a pretty adequate response to Ricky’s unfounded accusations of infidelity). Don Covay’s ‘Here I Go Again’ and one last gift from Dorsey Burnette, ‘Hey Pretty Baby’, are a bit too happy for Ricky to pull them off as convincingly, but their respectively New Orleanian, Fats Domino-style and Texan, Buddy Holly-like atmospheres are still fun.
Ultimately, the worst that can be said about More Songs By Ricky is not that there’s too much saxophone, or too few Burnette brothers, or too little rock’n’roll excitement, but largely that there are no obvious standouts — except for too many strings on ‘Again’, it’s a pretty even, tasteful, pleasant listening experience that does not disappoint, unlike quite a few records released by former rockabilly heroes in the same year. And since very few Ricky Nelson albums can actually be said to have any standout tracks at all, there’s no reason whatsoever to panick. For the standards of 1960, this music is perfectly adequate and self-sufficient.
Only Solitaire reviews: Ricky Nelson