Review: The Everly Brothers - A Date With The Everly Brothers (1960)

Tracks: 1) Made To Love; 2) That’s Just Too Much; 3) Stick With Me Baby; 4) Baby What You Want Me To Do; 5) Sigh, Cry, Almost Die; 6) Always It’s You; 7) Love Hurts; 8) Lucille; 9) So How Come (No One Loves Me); 10) Donna, Donna; 11) A Change Of Heart; 12) Cathy’s Clown.

REVIEW

It is a bit odd that Warner Bros. decided to hold off re-releasing their latest acquisition’s hottest single until their second LP for the label — in fact, what with its humble position at the very end of the record, it’s almost as if ‘Cathy’s Clown’ were included on it at the last minute to fill up space and round the number of songs to the typical 12 tracks on a US LP. But better late than never, and it’s not as if the song felt completely out of place when taken out on A Date With The Everly Brothers. It does have its unique properties, but they would only have made it feel special on any Everly Brothers LP ever released.

The funny thing is, when thinking about the commonly stated influence of ‘Cathy’s Clown’ on the Beatles —  most notably by way of its loud, up-and-down-the-scale double vocal harmonies that were appropriated for ‘Please Please Me’ and then prominently featured in most of the Beatles’ early hit singles — I cannot get rid of the idea of one of those «accidental breakthroughs», like Dave Davies’ bad amp or Tony Iommi’s cut-off fingertips, that sometimes result in new pathways opening up for the development of musical ideas. This is probably because those harmonies as used by the Beatles are typically used to express the most natural kind of emotion — a sort of triumphant exuberance, which becomes totally associated with the song even if the lyrics might suggest a different reading (after all, isn’t ‘Please Please Me’ really about a guy expressing acute concern over his girl hesitating to give him a blowjob?).

But in ‘Cathy’s Clown’, there seems to be a genuine dissonance between intent and result. The song intentionally starts out like a resolute, powerful military march, with the appropriate drum fills and all — the protagonist is determined to make a stand — and then in come the vocals that were probably meant to sound defiant, if not downright menacing, but instead... somehow end up giving out a totally positive, if not downright loving, vibe in the end. Looking at the lyrics, you’d think the song should have been sung in a Lennon-tone à la ‘You Can’t Do That’ ("I’m gonna let you down and leave you flat, BITCH!"), yet Phil and Don, natural-born sissies as they are, simply cannot adress a girl with lead or venom on their minds, so the «stand» against being cheated upon and humiliated in public quickly becomes a submissive plea. In the process, a new style of singing is born — the «rock-anger-turned-pop-exuberance» style. Of course, it’s just one of many different possible takes on what makes the song special, but special it is — as was clearly felt by trans-Atlantic audiences at the time, who sent it to the top of the charts both in the US and in the UK, only the second time the Everlys achieved this after ‘All I Have To Do Is Dream’... and the very last one.

What feels strange to me is that the brothers clearly must have known they were onto something different here. Look at the song’s construction — it’s got a 32-second verse-cum-chorus repeated thrice in the exact same manner, with absolutely no variations or distractions, and only a tiny 16-second long bridge repeated twice in between the choruses. This means they were so thrilled with that harmonic style that they were absolutely sure the public would be just as thrilled with them hammering it down their throats, take after take, and that’s exactly what happened. However, as their recordings both in 1960 and over the following years show, they were quite reluctant to expand with that «triumphant harmony» style — as if patiently waiting for the Beatles to come and take it over, with ‘Please Please Me’ followed by ‘From Me To You’, ‘She Loves You’, ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, etc. etc. Meanwhile, they themselves would decide to hold back and hone the «softer» side of their craft with songs like ‘So Sad’, ‘Walk Right Back’, etc. How often does one break one’s way inside a hidden gold mine, only to pick up a single nugget and walk away, mumbling "oh, I’m no good at gold-digging anyway, I’d rather some younger whippersnapper came along and finished this for me?" With a little extra push, Phil and Don might have been the Beatles... instead, they ended up sort of becoming Cathy’s clowns, as insensitive as that sounds.

Not that this is reason for emotional devastation or anything, because on the whole, A Date With The Everly Brothers is no more or less consistent than their first LP for Warners, and because it is always best to let artists wallow in the groove they feel is naturally best for them. (It is, in fact, quite possible that the brothers intentionally followed ‘Cathy’s Clown’ up with the much more soft and subdued ‘So Sad’ because they were afraid of this new style initiating some sort of «Everly­mania» which they could never have handled as well as the Fab Four).

Despite the changing times, the brothers still persist in trying to put their own stamp on blues-rock and rock’n’roll, as seen from their covers of Jimmy Reed’s ‘Baby What You Want Me To Do’ and Little Richard’s ‘Lucille’ — the former being very much a waste of tape (really, the song only works with Jimmy’s own minimalistic vibe, trying to put a classy Nashville touch on it only spoils the effect), and the latter actually sounding a little weird, as the brothers draw out Little Richard’s short vocal outbursts to near-baroque lengths, attempting to stress the song’s romantically wistful potential. There’s even an almost psychedelic little pause before the instrumental sections, marked only by a desperate "ohhhhhh..." and a distant-thunder-on-the-mountain drum fill, which, for a tiny bit, makes it feel like the song is melting down right before our eyes, though it quickly patches itself up again. It is still a failure on the whole, because ‘Lucille’ is one of those songs that really does not gain anything from any attempts at innovative terraforming, and generally, I suppose, the Everlys just needed to throw a clearly marked bone to their old fans from the rock’n’roll era, but hey, at least it actually gives you something to write about. (I mean, most people don’t even notice that meaningful pause!).

The rest of the tracks are more or less equally divided into those self-penned by Phil and Don and those contributed by the Bryants (only one other track, ‘Stick With Me Baby’, was contributed by Mel Tillis, at that time more of a songwriter for country artists than a hitmaker for himself — and there’s really nothing special about it, either). Not surprisingly, the Bryants still win: other than the lucky fluke of ‘Cathy’s Clown’ (for which Don eventually took all the credit after a series of legal battles in the 2010s), the Everly originals on Side A of the LP are stylistically pleasant rather than hooky — the only exception is the opening number, ‘Made To Love’, which you might remember — or take my advice and memorize — for the proto-Mötley Crüe chorus of "Girls! Girls! Girls!", except that the action does not take place in a strip bar, but rather in a plain old-fashioned household where the Everlys’ father is taking them aside for a little birds-and-bees talk. It’s really just a funny trifle, with a Buddy Holly-style chorus married to a more surf-like verse style, possibly more suited to the likes of Jan & Dean than a «mature» duo like the Everlys, but it’s kinda funny how the album begins with ‘Made To Love’, introducing the protagonist to his upcoming struggles with the opposite sex, and ends with ‘Cathy’s Clown’, showing how easy it is to fuck things up with "that special girl who’ll sweep you off your feet". Perhaps the «trifle» is strategically placed, after all — A Date With The Everly Brothers is hardly what we’d call a concept album, but it does run the full gamut of all conceivable emotional states that have to do with male-female relationships, at least up until the age of 20 or so.

The songs that people will recognize more easily, or at least identify with more easily, are, I think, mostly on the second side of the album. This is where you will find the catchy pop nugget ‘So How Come (No One Loves Me)’, which the Beatles would later take with them to their BBC sessions, although their harmonies did not really stand a chance against the cleaner, more delicate and expressive Phil-and-Don duo — definitely not in a spontaneous live environment, at least. My only problem with the song is that its depressive lyrics, with which I’m quite liable to identify at times ("if you wonder who the loneliest creatures in the world can be / they’re the ugly duckling, the little black sheep and me" is pure Bryant Brilliance!), do not form a perfect match with the sprightly tempo; without the lyrics, this is just a quirky, catchy little pop-rock number, childlishly seductive in atmosphere rather than properly melancholic.

Another song that may have subconsciously influenced the Beatles is ‘Always It’s You’, the B-side to ‘Cathy’s Clown’; I think it is possible to directly trace Paul’s "it’s you... you, you you" chorus in ‘Hold Me Tight’ to the "it’s you, always it’s you" chorus here, although, much to the Beatles’ honor, their melodic connections to the Everlys, like most of their other influences as well, were in terms of chord-borrowing rather than outright melody-stealing. Of course, the main difference is that the Everlys lay down their vocal melodies subtly, with thin, delicate brush strokes, compared to the Beatles’ broad, pushier approach (I think it wasn’t until ‘Here, There And Everywhere’ that Paul finally mastered that gentle-sensitive touch) — which, for the good of us all, places them in what we could call complementary emotional distribution.

Sometimes, though, «thin and delicate» definitely works better for me than any kind of embellishment, and I am, of course, speaking of ‘Love Hurts’, the ballad that the Everlys, for technical reasons, could not release as a single and had to tolerate their (anti-)thunder stolen first by Roy Orbison, and then, more than a decade later, by Nazareth. With all due love and respect for Roy’s golden timbre, and only slightly less so for the recently departed Dan McCafferty, I think that it is the quiet, minimalistic delivery of the Everlys that shall forever remain the «default» version of the song for me. The reason is that both Roy and Dan want to show me explicitly just how much "love hurts" — Roy gallantly putting his heart on his sleeve like a medieval court minstrel and Dan ripping it out like a hyper-emotional Italian opera singer. Meanwhile, the Everlys hit all the right notes without overstating their case. That thin, wavery vibrato running through their voices during the verses is really all it takes for me to get the tragic message of the song. (And I don’t much care for the cheesy strings on the Roy Orbison version — although, admittedly, I wouldn’t mind an exquisite guitar solo like Manny Charlton’s on top of Phil and Don’s vocal delivery; I think that it captured the true spirit of the song better in the Nazareth version than McCafferty’s overblown vocals).

Overall, now that I look back at the track listing, ‘Cathy’s Clown’ and ‘Love Hurts’ are the only clear stand-outs, but of the remaining selection, it is only the Jimmy Reed cover that I find impossible to enjoy. Even those tracks which completely conform to the definition of «filler» — ‘A Change Of Heart’, for instance, a 100% generic Hank Williams imitation if there ever was one — have their atmospheric charm, with tasteful guitars, colorful pianos, and beautiful harmonies. It would have been the simplest of things to spoil the classic Everly Brothers sound in 1960, turning their art into orchestrated pap for easy listening, but, fortunately, nobody had the bad taste to spoil a good formula... not yet, at least.

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