Review: The Everly Brothers - Instant Party! (1962)

Tracks: 1) Step It Up And Go; 2) Theme From "Carnival" (Love Makes The World Go ’Round); 3) Jezebel; 4) True Love; 5) Bye Bye Blackbird; 6) When It’s Night-Time In Italy It’s Wednesday Over Here; 7) Oh! My Papa (O Mein Papa); 8) Trouble In Mind; 9) Autumn Leaves; 10) Long Lost John; 11) The Party’s Over; 12) Ground Hawg.

REVIEW

As a parting gift from the powers-on-high to the Everly Brothers and, through them, to humanity, in December ’61 we got ‘Crying In The Rain’ — the last of the Everlys’ grand old Top 10 hits, still cherished by the older generations just as strongly as its cover by A-Ha would be revered by the younger ones. (Technically, ‘That’s Old Fashioned’ would be the brothers’ last Top 10 hit, but I am not sure anybody truly remembers that one). The song was unusual in that it was a collaboration between Carole King and lyricist Howard Greenfield, rather than her usual partner Gerry Goffin — and also the only instance of a Carole King song taken on by the Everly Brothers (at least, the only original one). Which is quite a pity: the only thing that could have saved the brothers’ career at the time would have been a tight, long-term collaboration with a prominent songwriter, and a match between Phil, Don, and Carole would seem heavenly — but I guess she had way too many obligations on her back already, being one of the hottest songwriting propositions of 1961–62, and writing songs for fresh newcomers like Bobby Vee paid off better than it did for a couple of old geezers from the Fifties.

Anyway, ‘Crying In The Rain’ is more than fit to be a symbolic «swan song» for the significant part of the Everlys’ career — a tale of personal tragedy, strength of character, and hope for a better future which, although it is technically a love song, must have resonated quite deeply with the brothers in their then-current situation. "I’ll never let you see the way my broken heart is hurting me" — unlike Morten Harket, the brothers actually keep that promise, never falling into the temptation of over-emoting the song’s message. There’s not that much to the tune’s instrumental melody or arrangement, other than the little «weaving» Spanish-style acoustic flourish at the start, but the vocal performance is hard to forget, with the a cappella delivery of the hookline as one of the defining moments of the brothers’ career. The grip of something like "You’ll never see me complain — I’ll do my crying in the rain" comes from the clever inversion of the emotional punch of both lines: first, the harmonies go triumphantly up, and then they get resolved with a harsh downward turn, on the com­paratively cold and quiet final promise. This, by the way, is something that would get completely lost in A-Ha’s version, which feels so massive and operatic next to the original, yet somehow ends up turning most of the drama into mush.

Amusingly, the B-side of the single explored pretty much the same topic, but from a completely different side: ‘I’m Not Angry’, which the brothers wrote themselves and masked with the pseudonym "Jimmy Howard" to throw Acuff-Rose off the scent, starts out with a burly guitar riff that immediately inverts the song’s title, and puts a half-punkish, half-comic spin on the same story of betrayal and abandonment. There’s a bit of Little Richard, a trifle of the Coasters, and a chunk of pop smartness in the song, and although it is obviously way too light to become a classic, at the time it was probably comforting to have it compensate for the emotional heaviness of the A-side — at least it clearly showed the world that the Everly Brothers weren’t really suicidal or anything.

The bad news is that the frivolousness of ‘I’m Not Angry’ turned out to be a foreshadowing of the relatively disastrous LP that was yet to come. First of all, what sort of a title is Instant Party! when the people behind it are Phil and Don Everly? These guys look about as fit to throw us an «instant party» as The Beach Boys would look fit to paint their faces and stroll out on stage singing get up and get your grandma outta here. If the idea was to show the world that everything was right and jolly-ho in the Everlys’ camp, they could have at least focused on the brothers’ real nature — even a picture of them sitting and smiling on the porch of a nice country house would be a superior proposition. Oh well, at the very least we are free from Do The Twist With The Everly Brothers, with a couple obligatory Chubby Checker covers and a bunch of rewrites like ‘Twist On, Little Suzie’, ‘All I Have To Do Is Twist’, and ‘Cathy’s Twist’ — a general rule for all the rock’n’rollin’ has-beens of the Fifties from which The Everly Brothers were happily exempt.

They did try to kick up a «party spirit», though, which is immediately obvious on the opening track — a dynamic, pop-rockin’ arrangement of the traditional dance-blues number ‘Step It Up And Go’ (also known as ‘Bottle Up And Go’ and recorded in a million different variations in the pre-war era). On the surface, it seems like a decent enough update of the old sound, but deep down inside, there is a bit of an empty feeling — almost as if the singers and players alike are attempting to force that sound out of themselves, rather than enjoy it. Above all, if you’re singing comic verses like "two old maids, sittin’ in the sand, each one wishin’ that the other was a man", you have to somehow make the humor come through, but the brothers aren’t laughing — it’s more like they are struggling to remember all the lyrics so as to deliver them at the proper breakneck speed. Whoever is responsible for electric guitar keeps trying to raise up a ruckus with sharp, speedy blues-rock licks, but they do not mesh well with the harmonies, either. All in all, a pretty inauspicious start to the «party»: by choosing such a blatant oldie from the 1930s, the brothers come across as novelty-oriented revivalists.

Technically, it’s not much of a departure from the opening double-punch of ‘My Mammy’ and ‘Muskrat’ on the previous album, but there is a serious difference — those two songs carried an aura of either instrumental heaviness (‘Mammy’) or swampy danger (‘Muskrat’), recorded as truly modern-day numbers constructed around old chords and words. ‘Step It Up And Go’, in comparison, feels devoid of any vocal or instrumental emotion, even including humor, which is truly a killing blow for such a lightweight number. And things hardly improve with the fact that it is immediately followed by ‘Love Makes The World Go Round’ (‘Theme From Carnival’), a Broadway number from a poorly remembered musical that just happened to be making the rounds in 1961. A symbolic enough juxtaposition of the old and the new, for sure; but when the old is handled so clumsily and the new selected in such poor taste (it is a very generic look-at-me-je-suis-si-Parisien carnival waltz), the symbolism ends up wasted.

Alas, it simply does not get better, mainly because the track list is so generally terrible: about 80% showtunes and 20% of old country/folk standards, with «professionalism» as more or less the only redeemable quality about the recordings — meaning that if you are in desperate love with the brothers’ harmonies, you will forgive them anyway. My love does not go quite that far; I think that the Everlys lacked the kind of artistic freedom and quirky inventiveness that sometimes allows a great artist to make even the proverbial phonebook come to life — and when they do try to embellish an old blues tune like ‘Trouble In Mind’ with melismatic harmonies at the end of each verse, the emotional meaning of this gesture escapes me. The closest analogy is probably something like Jimmie Rodgers’ yodeling, but that trick had an easily decodable and instantly effective emotional message — adding a light and optimistic joie-de-vivre to all of Jimmie’s recordings, even including the most depressed and tragic ones. The Everlys’ reading of ‘Trouble In Mind’, on the other hand, feels stiff and unbelievable, and the acrobatic harmonies signing off those verses are just empty ornaments. It’s all the more strange considering that the brothers may have very easily identified with the message of ‘Trouble In Mind’ at the time — but this dreary arrangement just does not seem to have the strength to carry that message across.

Nor do they succeed in taming the world of showtunes; for some reason, their idea of interpreting ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’ and ‘Autumn Leaves’ is to transform both into slow, draggy, tender ballads — well, okay, ‘Autumn Leaves’ is a slow, draggy, tender ballad by definition, and ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’ was also done as one by Peggy Lee and others, but the Everlys’ slowness and dragginess feels very mechanic and predictable. This is where their harmonies become more of an impediment than an advantage: they spend more effort on singing on key and in unison than on finding some particular moving way to intone particular musical phrases. The songs just roll on quietly, with hardly any serious impact.

Curiously, the album ends much the same way it began, with another humorous old folk tune which, despite similarity of the title (‘Ground Hawg’), has none of the bite that ‘Muskrat’ had on the previous album. You can dance to it, it’s got a lively Depression-era campfire fiddle solo and everything, but in the end it’s all so perfunctory that I still cannot for the life of me think of Instant Party! as anything more than a contractual obligation. I certainly do not envy any artist locked in the jaws of Warner Bros. right at the very moment when their publishing agency ties their hands behind their back.

With a little more effort — if they’d only managed to procure one or two masterful songwriters on the level of Carole King on a more permanent basis — the Everlys might have survived. But apparently they had no strength left to do that, and chose the easy way out, which was also the most dispassionate one, even if their overall spirit was by no means spent, as proven by the relative genius of ‘Crying In The Rain’, or even by the single that bookmarks Instant Party! on the other side: ‘That’s Old Fashioned’, submitted by the Baum/Giant/Kaye songwriting team of Elvis, is a refreshingly fun pop song, while Gerry Goffin’s B-side ‘How Can I Meet Her?’ is almost a throwback to the exuberance of the Everlys’ «teenage drama hits» from the earliest days. Why couldn’t there be more of such songs on Instant Party?

• Only Solitaire reviews: The Everly Brothers