Review: The Coasters - The Coasters (1957)
Tracks: 1) Searchin’; 2) One Kiss Led To Another; 3) Brazil; 4) Turtle Dovin’; 5) Smokey Joe’s Cafe; 6) Wrap It Up; 7) Riot In Cell Block #9; 8) Young Blood; 9) Loop De Loop; 10) One Kiss; 11) I Must Be Dreamin’; 12) Lola; 13) Framed; 14) Down In Mexico.
REVIEW
Calling the Coasters the first great post-modern band in the world of pop entertainment would be a bit of a stretch — not only because the term and concept themselves did not yet exist in the 1950s, but also because, most likely, neither the Coasters themselves nor the songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, standing behind them all the way through their classic period, had any self-conscious big idea about what it is they were doing. Leiber and Stoller (lovingly) called the band a bunch of clowns, and the band most likely just thought they were delivering comic entertainment for their fans: which they did, for sure, yet the actual music goes seriously beyond pure silly comedy, and the Coasters were not just Atlantic Records’ most openly vaudevillian act — they were one of the most unique R&B groups of the entire period, if not the most unique. Certainly no other vocal band of the time, no matter how gifted, not even the Drifters, has claimed such a large shelf within the space of my own personal memory.
Unfortunate as it is, during their golden years of 1956–59, Atlantic, always placing its trust in the 45" market, only allowed them the release of one self-titled LP — a crime if there ever was one, for if such a measure is notably understandable for a lot of their regular clients, the quality of Leiber-Stoller material on this album is so stellar that one can only guess how many potential LPs of similar quality we have missed to the decisions of record executives; instead, today everything has to be scrambled together from well-known A-sides and obscure B-sides, stuck on God knows where.
Anyway, technically the record should have been credited to the Coasters and the Robins — exactly half of the songs on here are taken from singles released by the band in 1954–55 when they were still located on the West Coast and called the Robins, while the other half post-dates the fateful split in October 1955, when half of the band, namely, lead tenor Carl Gardner and bass vocalist Bobby Nunn, agreed to make the move to the East Coast (hence «the Coasters»). What keeps both of these halves together is the creativity of Leiber and Stoller, who wrote all the songs on the album with the exception of ‘Brazil’, and the overall comical-satirical tone of all of them.
Although the introduction of vaudeville elements into R&B began earlier (most notably by the Clovers, with songs like ‘One Mint Julep’ and ‘Lovey Dovey’), it really took the Robins / Clovers to fully merge their R&B and «drama» in a truly Wagnerian vision of the unity between music and theater. Theirs is a deeply personal tale, with almost every song presented from the 1st person perspective and introducing the protagonist as — usually — a bumbling but loveable fool, the proverbial little man who somehow finds the resources to stay alive in this mad, crazy world. The stories that Leiber and Stoller give them are nothing particularly special, but they do combine humor, vivaciousness, and just a small touch of the risqué, enough to titillate sensitive souls back in the 1950s and cause a small chuckle even in the 21st century.
Arguably the most common trope exploited by Leiber and Stoller is that of coitus interruptus, or, okay, maybe not quite, but the idea of a burgeoning romance blocked by an unforeseen obstacle is certainly one of their chief sources of laughs. This can be just the factor of time (‘One Kiss Led To Another’, in which the clock chiming midnight separates the hero from his babysitting lover — though the song itself is mostly notable for featuring enough sounds of kissing to make any loyal adept of the Hays code to explode in disgust); more commonly, it is the factor of the Third Guy disrupting the idyll, be it the owner of ‘Smokey Joe’s Cafe’ or the deep bass-voiced father of ‘Young Blood’ spooking the hero away. Getting the girl is not an option in these blood-curdlin’ tales — the best you can hope for is to get out of this mess alive.
In the early days of the Robins, though, Leiber and Stoller allowed themselves to dip deeper into the pool of social relevance, as their «little man» tended to get in trouble with the law: ‘Framed’, in particular, rings a solid bell with the theme of social (and racial, given the Robins’ skin color) injustice, beginning with what looks like comedy and ending with what might just pass for a local chronicle ("when the judge came down, poured whiskey on my head, turned around to the jury and said ‘convict this man he’s drunk’ what could I do?"). Given that the song’s main riff is lifted directly from ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’ with its cocky theme of empowerment, ‘Framed’ is a short piece of pretty bitter satire — something that was well understood by the struggling bitter soul of Alex Harvey when, fifteen years later, he took the song and made it into a centerpiece of his own stage show.
But even before ‘Framed’, that exact same riff was also recycled for ‘Riot In Cell Block #9’, a song probably inspired by Don Siegel’s Riot In Cell Block 11 and itself the source of inspiration for quite a few things to come, including (probably) the title of a famous album by Sly & The Family Stone. With the lyrics sounding almost like a transcript of an inmate’s evidence, and with the chorus sounding like a cross between a doo-wop chant and a working song, this is the most serious-looking, gritty-feeling number on this LP, and it is somewhat telling that Leiber and Stoller stopped writing this kind of material after their clients moved on to Atlantic Records (‘Riot’, like other contemporary Robins songs, was originally released on Leiber and Stoller’s own Spark Record Co. label). Certainly ‘Jailhouse Rock’ sounds like Humpty-Dumpty in comparison to "on the forty-seventh hour the tear gas got our men...".
Still, the combination of Leiber and Stoller’s composing talent, the Coasters’ theatrical vocal skills, and Atlantic Records’ professional musicianship can result in a masterpiece through sheer power of impression — even without a comical narrative twist or a biting bit of social commentary. Case in point is ‘Down In Mexico’, the first «proper» Coasters (not Robins) hit single after the East Coast move — a song about nothing in particular, other than a vivid description of the proverbial Coaster suddenly finding himself in a wild’n’sleazy Mexican bar. Gil Bernal’s moody, but aggressive sax attack, Barney Kessel’s gunslingin’ guitar twangs, and Carl Gardner’s ecstatically excited tenor are just about perfect spiritual conductors into the dangerous world of temptation (something that Quentin Tarantino knew all too well when he chose the song to accompany the lap dance scene in Death Proof, though he used the much later re-recorded and obviously inferior version from 1973). Again, what other R&B number sounded that hot and sleazy in 1956?
A different example of how great the band could be is ‘Searchin’, one of Paul McCartney’s favorite songs of all time: the Beatles recorded it for their Decca audition, among other things, and the Hollies had an early hit with it as well, but nobody ever really outdid the original version, with Billy Guy on lead vocals. The idea is simple, but stern: take the "searching high and low for your love" trope and push it, lyrically and musically, as far as it can go — with the band members endlessly nagging out "searchin’, searchin’... gonna find her, gonna find her", the lead vocalist straining like he could burst at any time, the lyrics referencing everybody from Sherlock Holmes to Charlie Chan, and the melody frankly more reminiscent of Berlin cabaret than good old jump blues: it effectively transferred the Coasters from the limited-coverage R&B charts to nationwide and worldwide pop charts (even reaching #30 in the UK!) and made them a household name.
Looking at the 14-song selection on the LP as a whole, it is clear that there are «great» and merely «good» numbers here, but essentially there is no filler — each song is an individual creation in its own right, with its own story to tell and its own hook to deliver, be it a strictly musical hook or more of a theatrical one. Even allegedly standard fare love songs such as ‘Wrap It Up’ focus on original metaphors, and even a standard tale of picking up a lady at a Tennessee dancehall has rarely been delivered with that much starry-eyed idiot excitement (‘I Must Be Dreamin’ — "life never been this good to me, oh oh oh oh!"). No other forty minutes of 1950s’ music, stacked on top of each other, will make you smile and giggle more often than these ones — and, mind you, this is before the age of King Curtis’ sax, ‘Yakety Yak’, and ‘Charlie Brown’ which would push the Coasters into even more explicitly clownish territory (which may or may not have been a good thing). And if we think long and hard enough, we might even come to the conclusion that this is precisely where lie the roots of so much satirical «meta-rock» from the ensuing decades. After all, is not ‘Rubber Bullets’, 10cc’s entry into the world of popular music, largely an expansion of ‘Riot In Cell Block #9’, albeit with a Beach Boy strain thrown in? Would there even be a 10cc without the Coasters? or a Sparks? or the Turtles?..
Then again, you can just disregard the influence discussion and simply enjoy the songs for what they are. I like high quality R&B as much as the next guy (actually, much more than the next guy), but even I often get bored with the never ending love serenades and twist-and-shout invitations; in the middle of all that, the Coasters give you a unique and refreshing take that pokes gentle fun at all these things without invalidating them. Look all of these songs up whenever you get the chance: the Robins / Coasters truly deserve much more from you than just familiarity with the half a dozen hits that ended up on all of Atlantic’s multi-artist compilations.
Only Solitaire: The Coasters review page