Review: The Shadows - The Sound Of The Shadows (1965)
Tracks: 1) Brazil; 2) The Lost City; 3) A Little Bitty Tear; 4) Blue Sky, Blue Sea, Blue Me; 5) Bossa Roo; 6) Five Hundred Miles; 7) Cotton Pickin’; 8) Deep Purple; 9) Santa Ana; 10) The Windjammer; 11) Dean’s Theme; 12) Breakthru’; 13) Let It Be Me; 14) National Provincial Samba.
REVIEW
Probably the only general thing worth noting about The Sound Of The Shadows in mid-’65 is that it hasn’t changed all that much compared to the sound of The Shadows in mid-’64: predictable, perhaps, but still a bit accusatory given how quickly and significantly the overall musical landscape was shifting all around them. For sure, the general guitar band sound had not yet grown all that extra musculature — Hendrix was more than a year away, Jeff Beck had only just joined the Yardbirds, and the influence of everybody from J. S. Bach to Ravi Shankar had not yet permeated the art of cutting-edge artists — but more and more of that instrumental guitar music coming from rhythm & blues artists was perceived as trying to do something a bit more serious and ambitious than just getting a bunch of teens to hop around, and certainly The Shadows, as the UK’s oldest and most revered instrumentalists, could be expected to develop some artistic ambitiousness of their own. Which, ultimately, they never did.
Not that they were totally oblivious to what was going on. Around the same time that Dance With The Shadows re-pledged their allegiance to all those looking for light entertainment, they also got together in the studio to record ‘The Rise And Fall Of Flingel Bunt’, a blues-rock instrumental «dedicated» to the life of an imaginary character that sounded sharper and harsher than any previously released Shadows track. Opening with an aggressive, bass drum-heavy beat and a grim stop-and-start guitar riff, this new composition erased any signs of twangy surf-rock, being rhythmically far more close to Booker T & The MG’s than Duane Eddy or The Surfaris. In the bridge section, the composition also borrows a bit from the Merseybeat (there’s a chuggin’ rhythm pattern that is completely identical with the Beatles’ ‘Thank You Girl’), and Hank’s lead guitar part bends and vibrates along with the most seasoned of bluesmen. It’s true that the overall vibe of the song remains tame and polished — like it did in the blues-themed work of such «cautious» performers as Manfred Mann — but there’s only so much you can ask from a band dressed in bowties. It still packed a mean punch, enough to send it all the way to #5 on the UK charts, despite featuring a sound to which Shadows fans were not at all accustomed.
The band’s next step in this direction was, however, a mistake: the faster-paced, livelier ‘Rhythm And Greens’, released in early 1965, could only be perceived as a joke number — not just because of the title, but also because of the ridiculous vocalizations, consisting mostly of a set of "yeah, baby!"s, "ooh!"s, "aah!"s, and cartoonish whistles. The thing sounded like a mean parody on the loud-and-dirty rock’n’roll sound, completely out of place at a time when it was already obvious that the loud-and-dirty rock’n’roll sound was not a passing fad, but a way to the future, and, most importantly, a pretty dumb choice for an A-side: stick this «Chuck Berry meets Binkie The Clown» ridiculousness in the middle of a filler-choked LP if you wish, but why follow up a perfectly legitimate way to earn your place in the modern musical world with the equivalent of an ignorant old man’s grumble? (at least, that’s what it might feel like even if the band members themselves would probably defend ‘Rhythm And Greens’ as simply being in good fun).
The band was definitely more in its element on such subsequent singles as ‘Genie With The Light Brown Lamp’ (an excerpt from a joint «pantomime album» with Cliff Richard on the adventures of Aladdin), a nice fast-paced number with a good contrast between the sharper, bluesier verse and the poppier, more colorful chorus. After that, ‘Mary Anne’, written by Jerry Lordan (who’d previously given them ‘Apache’ and several other compositions), was a nice change of pace, featuring group harmony singing à la Searchers which, by this time, Hank and the boys could do surprisingly well, but without too much distinctiveness. Finally, in May 1965 it happened: ‘Stingray’ was the first Shadows song to feature a heavy, jarring fuzz effect on the lead guitar, sending out a sign that the old-timers may have caught the young Who at the Marquee once or twice (the tone is more or less the same as Entwistle’s bass on ‘The Ox’, which came out later but must have already been in the band’s repertoire in one form or another by early 1965).
It’s not any sort of tremendous progress, given the overall cautiousness of the recording, but it does signify that at least in theory, The Shadows were open to reform; the one thing that they were not open to is loosening their collars, meaning that both the singles and the LPs continued to be tightly disciplined, glossy and «polite» — and, consequently, less commercially successful in an era when the people were more hungry for ‘Satisfaction’ than the likes of ‘Stingray’. The Sound Of The Shadows, released on the heels of ‘Stingray’, was anything but not diverse — with folk, blues, Latin, and even occasional proto-psychedelic motives, one could never accuse the band of slacking in their creativity — yet the quintessential «stiffness» of The Shadows was firmly in place. The album still made it into the Top 5 on the UK charts, but this was probably due more to the overall UK LP market being generally underfed compared to its US equivalent; certainly there was no such thing as downplaying The Shadows’ singles while waiting for a Shadows’ LP, especially since, according to the standard UK custom, the singles and the albums rarely, if ever, overlapped.
The most curious thing about the record is that there are three vocal numbers this time, and none of them are Merseybeat-style pop-rockers like last time around: instead, continuing the line of ‘Mary Anne’, The Shadows take an even heavier interest in folk, country, and folk-pop music, recording Hank Cochran’s ‘A Little Bitty Tear’, Hedy West’s ‘Five Hundred Miles’, and the Everlys’ ‘Let It Be Me’ — all three numbers featuring soft acoustic arrangements and joint harmonizing from both guitarists and the bass player. It’s all done in good taste, and it’s nice to know that the band had its own hobby, but in all honesty, with Dylan going electric and with the actual folksters beginning to look into a more «baroque» representation of their material, this chosen style feels about two years out-of-date and totally superfluous.
What does not feel superfluous are their idiosyncratic takes on the folk idiom: a track such as John Rostill’s ‘Windjammer’, despite the somewhat excessive orchestration, features a beautiful «guitar lead vocal» with an expressive tone that nobody except for Hank Marvin could produce even as late as 1965. His sustain control, coupled with a honey-like timbre of the guitar, turns what could have been a completely passable and generic slow folk instrumental into a near-psychedelic delight for the senses. The same goes for the faster-paced ‘Lost City’, contributed for the band by Russ Ballard (later of Argent fame) — sort of a thematic sequel to ‘Atlantis’, but with a more Western feel to it, although when Hank starts using weird proto-wah-wah effects on the guitar, he still somehow puts the whole thing underwater for a while.
These might be two of the best instrumental numbers here, but the overall quality of the remaining non-vocal tracks is still pretty high: with the exception of the rather jokey ‘National Provincial Samba’ and the rather sleepy and melodically retrograde ballad ‘Blue Sky, Blue Sea, Blue Me’, I sincerely enjoy just about everything, from the opening cover of Ary Barroso’s ‘Brazil’ (playful, tasteful, and romantically expressive) to the oh-so-Shadowey take on ye olde time banjo musicke (‘Cotton Pickin’) to the upbeat pop-rock rearrangement of the old standard ‘Deep Purple’ to the tongue-in-cheek vaudeville blues of ‘Dean’s Theme’ to the straightforward power-chord based rocking of ‘Breakthru’ (with the most energetic drumming part on the album) — have I forgotten anything of importance? Probably not. Even so, it’s difficult to pretend being particularly excited about this kind of material. In the context of all the other things going on in the spring and summer of 1965, The Sound Of The Shadows would hardly even expect you to get excited. It might not be an old man’s sound, but it is the sound of somebody who, let’s put it this way, is content to give an occasional tip of the hat to «counter-culture» without ever truly embracing the counter-culture as such.
Then again, what else could we hope to get from The Shadows? To me, it’s just curious — if not exactly «fascinating» — how they exploit all those new guitar tones, fast rhythms, and stylistic trends in their own gentlemanly fashion (much like The Ventures overseas, though The Shadows have never had such an encyclopedic collective mind as their spiritual brethren from Tacoma) while still somehow creating the impression of time standing still. That’s what The Sound Of The Shadows is all about: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Perhaps you do need The Shadows, after all, standing behind the backs of all those hyperactive, trend-setting, rule-changing heroes of the Sixties, if only to cut back on all the brouhaha from time to time and remember that, after all, it’s just entertainment.
Only Solitaire reviews: The Shadows