Review: Ricky Nelson - Ricky Sings Again (1959)
Tracks: 1) It’s Late; 2) One Of These Mornings; 3) Believe What You Say; 4) Lonesome Town; 5) Trying To Get To You; 6) Be True To Me; 7) Old Enough To Love; 8) Never Be Anyone Else But You; 9) I Can’t Help It; 10) You Tear Me Up; 11) It’s All In The Game; 12) Restless Kid; 13*) I Got A Feeling; 14*) Gloomy Sunday; 15*) Brand New Girl; 16*) Cindy; 17*) My Rifle, My Pony, And Me.
REVIEW
Perhaps I’m imagining things, but it does feel to me as if Ricky’s third LP made a rather conscious move to specifically occupy the vacuum left behind by Elvis’ army draft. His image had already been crafted to somewhat mirror Elvis — the shy, fragile, retiring shadow of a far more powerful presence — but now that the presence itself was removed, here was a good chance to slightly flesh out and materialize the shadow. Notice how those big, blue eyes become bigger and bluer with each new album cover? This here is no longer the stare of a boychik, but that of a Serious Young Man, grown in stature and all set to assume new, more demanding responsibilities toward a generation of adolescent music lovers and their parents. Move over, old Elvis, cause the new one’s moving in.
Consistent with that idea, there is a slightly higher percentage of fast rockabilly numbers — the first three tracks in a row are, in effect, credited to Dorsey Burnette, and each of the three could have been an adrenaline smash for the Rock’n’Roll Trio in their prime. As recorded by Ricky, they are, of course, comparatively more tepid, but still sound fun after all these years. ‘It’s Late’ explores the same vibe as the Everlys’ ‘Wake Up Little Susie’, though melodically it owes far more to Hank Williams — and, honestly, Ricky Nelson just doesn’t look like the kind of kid who’d ever dare to bring his date back home one minute later than allowed, but at least he can do a good job of sounding scared shitless ("I hate to face your Dad, I know he’s gonna be mad" and all that, although the best lines of the song are probably "look up, is that the moon we see? can’t be, looks like the sun to me" — there’s something genuinely biblical about that stuff). ‘One Of These Mornings’ is more or less a rewrite of ‘Down The Line’, but it still rocks, and James Burton’s minimalistic «wobbly» solo oozes class. And ‘Believe What You Say’, which I already mentioned in the last review, joins a standard rock’n’roll melody with a catchy pop chorus that reinforces the status of Ricky Nelson as that one rock’n’roller who is always particularly gallant with his ladies ("I believe, pretty baby, believe you’re goin’ steady with nobody else but me" — yeah, you just keep on believin’ that, Mr. Nelson).
And then, wham!, after three fun, but stereotypical soft-rockers in a row, comes something completely different. We can all poke fun at poor Ricky for being the poor man’s Elvis from dusk till dawn, but once the dust clouds of cynical neurotoxin have dissipated, there is still no getting away from the fact that his stripped-down, moody performance of Baker Knight’s ‘Lonesome Town’, subtly echoed by the ghostly-shaped backing vocals of the Jordanaires, is one of the defining moments of the 1950s. I mean, hey, if it was good enough for Quentin, it’s good enough for us, right? The song is always compared with Elvis’ ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, but while they do explore the same topic, the vibes are seriously different — ‘Hotel’ is crunchy, bluesy, and depicts a hysterically depressed protagonist on the brink of suicide; ‘Lonesome Town’ is quiet, doo-woppy, and shows a melancholically depressed protagonist adjusting to a new plane of existence. For ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, the key word is "die", for ‘Lonesome Town’ it is "forget", and it is safe to say that I can no more imagine Nelson doing a convincing rendition of the former than I could imagine Elvis singing "maybe down in Lonesome Town, I can learn to forget" with the same pang of emotional resonance.
I think that the secret to the magic of ‘Lonesome Town’ is really quite straightforward — it is simply the song that Ricky was born to sing. In fact, he’d always been singing it, even on ‘Be-Bop Baby’ he was already singing it, which is part of the reason why his rockabilly vibe is so idiosyncratic. Ever the shy, introspective, asthmatic little kid who would probably never even get roped into show business if not for Ozzie and Harriet, he and ‘Lonesome Town’ were made for each other. And since shy, introspective, asthmatic (or alergic, or just generally depressed) kids keep on surging higher and higher with each new generation, it is hardly surprising just how many amateur covers of young people with guitars singing ‘Lonesome Town’ you can find on YouTube — far more than there are of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, as it seems to me. Few can match the courteous beauty of these dark overtones, though, not to mention how hard it is to pack an entire group of Jordanaires into your bedroom (you could certainly synthesize them digitally, but there’s a big difference between the erotica of «me and my acoustic guitar» and the pornography of «me, my acoustic guitar, and my laptop»).
For the record, ‘Lonesome Town’ is not even the epitome of Nelson’s moodiness: if you have the extended CD edition of the album, one of the bonus tracks is Ricky’s own solo recording («me and my guitar» again) of the infamous ‘Gloomy Sunday’, a.k.a. the ‘Hungarian Suicide Song’, whose composer would later take his own life and whose defining English-language version, recorded by Billie Holiday in 1941, was famously banned by the BBC as being «detrimental to the war morale». Ricky’s version was apparently recorded at about the same time as ‘Lonesome Town’, but it is not even clear if it was ever intended for release, or if it was made merely for his own «amusement» — it would only resurface in 2000, when Ricky’s children made a clean sweep of the archives and put it out on the Legacy box set. Obviously, there could be no question of a song like that officially published under Ricky’s name in 1958 — especially since he did not bother to include the fakey-fakey Hollywoodish «happy ending» that was tacked on in Billie’s version ("Dreaming, I was only dreaming / I wake and find you asleep"), instead rounding it up with the truly uplifting "with the last breath of my soul I’ll be blessing you" and what might have been the single creepiest use of a baritone twist in 1950s popular music on the final "gloomy Sundaa-yyy". If there ever is one song that can completely and utterly change your perspective on an artist, ‘Gloomy Sunday’ should at least be in the top ten runners or so.
Meanwhile, on another plane of existence Ricky Sings Again in his quest to banish memories of Sergeant Presley from the young people’s hearts — for instance, attempting to directly re-appropriate Elvis’ own classic ‘Trying To Get To You’ (nice, but no banana), or successfully adopting his doo-wop waltzing mode only to fall into an embarrassing lyrical trap: if your verse begins with "higher than the mountains, taller than the trees" and ends with "...yeah, I’m old enough to love", this alone should be enough to raise serious suspicions about the veracity of the latter line (Elvis could definitely start out with the former, but could you imagine him ever needing to prove to anybody that he’s ‘Old Enough To Love’?). I mean, come on, Ricky, you proved well enough with ‘Lonesome Town’ that you’re old enough to get over love; why the hell do you still need to show your fans that you have reached the age of consent?
There is also a so-so cover of Hank Williams (no matter how many millions of covers ‘I Can’t Help It’ endures, you still cannot beat the original), yet another song donated by Baker Knight (‘Never Be Anyone Else But You’, a bit of sweet sappy country-pop which is hardly even believable as coming from the same guy who wrote ‘Lonesome Town’), and an interesting case in which Johnny Cash apparently wrote a song specially for Ricky — ‘Restless Kid’, with its reference to Rio Bravo, is clearly a gift related to Ricky’s concurrent starring in Howard Hawks’ movie. You can almost hear echoes of Cash singing the vocals himself (in fact, there is a demo version of him doing exactly that), and the song is clearly better suited for Johnny than for Ricky, but then there’s always a place for grizzled old cowboys like Johnny and perky young cowhands like Ricky, right? (and that was pretty much the part he played in the movie anyway). At least that’s one way to finish the LP on a starkly non-Elvis-related note, as compared to at least half of the songs on here all giving out an I-wanna-be-Elvis (or, maybe, I-don’t-really-wanna-be-Elvis-but-what-choice-do-I-have?) vibe.
Actually, Ricky’s acting turn in Rio Bravo is honored in more detail on the extended CD edition, which throws in alternate (studio and movie) versions of the several tracks he performs on screen, such as ‘Cindy’ and ‘My Rifle, My Pony, And Me’. The very fact of his starring (albeit in a relatively minor role) in his first movie was quite symbolic — if you want to be the substitute Elvis, do what Elvis does — but, although he did good, one must give credit to both Rick and his management that they never pushed him the same way Colonel Parker did with his client (he would only reprise his acting career every once in a long while, always placing the music first). Although, overall, it could probably be argued that Ricky, by his very nature, could never rise to the highest of Elvis’ highs — nor sink to the lowest of Elvis’ lows; so a busy acting career would probably not be able to blow up his reputation. Yet for all his young cowboy charm, they’d never make a Clint Eastwood out of him, either.