Review: The Coasters - One By One (1960)
Tracks: 1) But Beautiful; 2) Satin Doll; 3) Gee Baby Ain’t I Good To You; 4) Autumn Leaves; 5) You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To; 6) Moonlight In Vermont; 7) Moonglow; 8) Easy Living; 9) The Way You Look Tonight; 10) Don’t Get Around Much Anymore; 11) Willow Weep For Me; 12) On The Sunny Side Of The Street.
REVIEW
«Fresh thinking — the developing of new concepts in the presentation of music — is the basis of creative progress in the record industry». Thus open the liner notes to this album, written by BillBoard editor Paul Ackerman, and if that don’t already communicate to you the idea that you’re about to get bullshitted on a grand level, listen to this: «The present album... taps an even broader vein of the consumer market than earlier records. It will appeal not only to youthful fans, but to adults of cultivated and more advanced musical taste». Translation: The Coasters are about to go all easy listening on your ass, you poor unfortunate adult of cultivated and advanced musical taste.
Admittedly, we should not rush to blame the record industry on this disaster — sometimes the responsibility lies as much on the individual as it does on the system, and in this particular case, sources indicate that it was actually the initiative of Carl Gardner, the informal «leader» of the group (Coaster #1, so to speak), who took the relative commercial failure of some of the group’s regular singles in early 1960 as a sign that it was high time they did something «serious», shaking off the sticky tag of «clown princes of R&B» and showing the world that behind those masks they were all wearing frowns, or something to that effect. Theoretically — why not? All of the Coasters were excellent singers, whose individual range and expressiveness were always hidden from view by the group approach and the novelty factor of the recordings. What could be wrong with trying to recast themselves as a serious pop outfit?
Surprisingly, they got everybody to come on board with the plan — even Leiber and Stoller, who are credited with «supervising» the album, whatever that means. Legendary Phil Ramone engineers the album, and the equally legendary Stanley Applebaum, whose strings would grace so many Atlantic releases, oversees the orchestration. Although the band only had two days to complete the sessions, everything went smoothly, and seemingly everybody — most importantly, Gardner himself — was pleased with the final result. Everybody but the buyers, that is.
The LP title itself gives a very clear hint that The Coasters are presented here individually: each of the four members gets three lead vocals all to himself, while the others stick to quiet, unintrusive occasional harmonies. And it is hard to argue that this approach is entirely unsuccessful: each of the band’s three tenors is capable of demonstrating his accomplishments on a scale that was all but impossible in the context of their group-oriented «novelty» material, although arguably the biggest boost is for the bass voice of Will Jones, who rarely ever got any lead lines at all (other than the hicky punchlines) on the band’s hit singles. So yes, each and every one of The Coasters could sing, that much is understood. The problem is: what exactly did they like to sing?
Again, in sheer theory an album of musty standards as covered by The Coasters, with their trademark satire and irony, could have been something special. But the catch is precisely that the album had to be 100% free from the smallest demonstrations of satire and irony. Okay, that’s fine too: Atlantic vocal groups and solo artists were performing plenty of top-notch original pop songs at the time, from Ben E. King’s ‘Spanish Harlem’ to The Drifters’ ‘This Magic Moment’ etc., so it would not have been impossible for Leiber and Stoller to properly «supervise» the album by accumulating some newer material in order for each of the Coasters to try and leave his own mark on it.
Instead, they settled on the tried and true, following the Sam Cooke model of doing things: «uncultured» pop singles, written by contemporary songwriters, are targeted at young audiences who don’t have enough money to buy LPs — but «serious» LPs, oriented at adults with fatter checkbooks, have to pander to the musical tastes of yesterday and re-promote the glory of classic Tin Pan Alley. And no satire and irony! Grown-ups are easily offended by satire and irony. After all, they did not win the war for us through satire and irony, did they?
Three listens into the album (which I probably could not see myself even imagining getting into twenty years ago... but now I’m sort of a grown-up myself, you know, though I wear this crown of thorns with shame and regret), I was still not sure what exactly I could write about it, so I turned to other reviews for inspiration — somebody called «j. poet» on the All-Music Guide, for instance, as well as others — and most of them seemed to be trying way too hard to extol the virtues and wonders of The Coasters’ take on these twelve classic tunes. Not doing too good of a job on it, though. For instance: "Bass singer Will Jones croons ‘But Beautiful’ to the backing of celesta, vibes, and swooning strings" — uh, well, yes, he does. Perhaps the implication is that everything sounds better with celesta. Or: "The arrangement of ‘Gee Baby, Ain’t I Good To You’ is pure pop, but Billy Guy sings it with an anguished bluesy feeling". Well, duh, it’s sort of a blues song anyway, and many people sang it with an anguished feeling — Ray Charles, for instance, to whose interpretation Billy Guy finds little to add.
The underlying feeling for all those assessments is probably that we have to take a stance here and find it in our hearts to defend the natural right of The Coasters to (a) produce «serious» music and (b) lay their own Coaster claim to the legacy of Americana; also, (c) it is always a healthy thing to line up at the old shooting range and take down some of those musty prejudices like «clowns will be clowns, it’s stupid for a clown to take off his makeup and pretend he’s a normal human being». But it is just as healthy to admit there is a good reason why, after all these years, many people still hold fond memories of ‘Searchin’, ‘Yakety Yak’, and ‘Along Came Jones’ while One By One is completely forgotten — and no amount of retrospective admiration is ever going to properly restore that extra artistic dimension to our mental image of The Coasters and what they did for the sake of our entertainment.
It’s pretty simple — the voices are splendid, the arrangements are complex and professional, but in the end, this is just generic, unimaginative, old-fashioned pop, and Carl Gardner, Cornell Gunter, Billy Guy, and Will Jones can do no more with it than could Sam Cooke with his own Hits Of The 50’s and other similar albums. They may have set out to «prove» to the world that they were «serious» artists, but the only thing this album proves is that, for all their seriousness, they had no idea of how to add a whiff of true «creative progress» to songs that had already been interpreted in millions of ways by everybody from Frank Sinatra to Billie Holiday to Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald.
Additionally, the gesture somewhat demeans everything the Coasters did prior to this effort — yes, much of what they did could be formally classified as «novelty», but those were intelligently written, satirical novelty numbers, with serious messages underlying lightweight surfaces. The very existence of One By One would somehow imply that when the Coasters sing ‘Autumn Leaves’ or ‘Willow Weep For Me’, they are somehow being «deeper» than when they sing yakety-yak, don’t talk back, but this is a logically improper implication that puts an equality sign between statements such as «tragedy tends to be more noble than comedy» (which could be argued for) and «any tragedy is inherently superior to any comedy» (which is obviously incorrect). We love classic Coasters in the same way we love classic Marx Brothers, or Seinfeld, or Catch-22, and while I would be the last person to ever use mainstream public taste as a prime measure of quality, in this particular case the fact that ‘Yakety-Yak’ sold and One By One did not can hardly be used as incriminating evidence. If you already have Sinatra in that niche, why bother overpopulating it with The Coasters, of all people?
In the end, the only pragmatic use this album might hold for anyone is a demonstration of why a successful cover of a classic Coasters song is not the easiest thing in the world to do. For sure, it is easy to learn to play and sing most of them, but not at all easy to get four such vocally talented people to assemble in one room and give them such a musically and dramatically coherent and entertaining makeover. One By One discloses to us the individual bits of magic that come together in such a great whole; one by one, each of those is not particularly ground-shaking, but you can actually see just how well-versed in the art of singing they all are — which is one of the big reasons why the «silliness» of the classic records penetrates so deeply into our hearts. As one of the keys to a better understanding of why we feel so good from listening to ‘Yakety-Yak’, One By One certainly has its use. But if I’m ever in the mood for a fresh take on ‘Moonlight In Vermont’, One By One is hardly likely to appear on the radar.
Only Solitaire reviews: The Coasters