Review: Wanda Jackson - Wanda Jackson (1958)
Tracks: 1) Day Dreaming; 2) I Wanna Waltz; 3) Heartbreak Ahead; 4) Making Believe; 5) Here We Are Again; 6) Long Tall Sally; 7) Just Call Me Lonesome; 8) Let Me Go Lover; 9) Money, Honey; 10) I Can’t Make My Dreams Understand; 11) Happy, Happy Birthday; 12) Let’s Have A Party; 13*) Half As Good A Girl; 14*) Silver Threads And Golden Needles; 15*) Cryin’ Through The Night; 16*) Let Me Explain; 17*) No Wedding Bells For Joe; 18*) Just A Queen For A Day.
REVIEW
Perhaps by chance, perhaps by spurious intention Wanda Jackson’s first self-titled LP for Capitol Records was released on exactly the same day (July 21) as her very first «crossover» single from country to rockabilly, ‘I Gotta Know’, two years earlier (July 21, 1956). And yet, this connection is quite feebly reinforced on the LP, only four of whose tracks can be decisively identified as rockabilly. The irony of the whole matter is in that, although it was unquestionably Wanda’s «Queen of Rockabilly» image that made her so interesting and iconic for subsequent generations, most of those rockabilly singles did not chart or sell all that well — and while some of Wanda’s Southern male colleagues such as Carl Perkins or Jerry Lee Lewis swore full allegiance to the god of rock’n’roll, retaining their country careers as an auxiliary mechanism of staying alive through tough times, for Wanda Jackson it was rather the reverse. It is hard to tell whether she actually enjoyed pure country more than rock’n’roll, or vice versa (more likely, she did not care to distinctly separate between the two), but it is quite clear that in those conservative years, people would generally look with more benevolence and less moral judgement on a country-western girl than on a rockabilly girl — so, from that point of view, Capitol’s split of her material into 2/3rds country, 1/3rd rock’n’roll is a perfectly understandable business decision.
The lamentable side effects of it are that almost none of Wanda’s classic 1956–58 rockabilly singles, such as ‘Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad’, ‘Cool Love’, or the immortal ‘Fujiyama Mama’, are included here; to get them all on one LP, fans would have to wait until 1960’s Rockin’ With Wanda (a retro-compilation which works perfectly well as a stand-alone LP, so we will get to it later). The decision to keep her finest A-sides off the LP means that the fast-paced material they did include is mostly second-rate rather than first-rate. Thus, ‘I Wanna Waltz’ on its own is a funny concatenation of seductive rockabilly with mournful waltz — but in the overall context, it is just another collaboration with songwriter Thelma Blackmon, intent on recreating the vibe of the earlier and fresher ‘I Gotta Know’. Wanda’s cover of ‘Long Tall Sally’, expectedly following in the steps of Elvis’ version rather than Little Richard’s, is fun, but perfunctory and predictable.
‘Money Honey’, probably also borrowed from Elvis rather than the Drifters, is at least curious in that, for the first time (I think), the song is played at a fast tempo — though I half-suspect the main reason for this was to somewhat blur out the necessary changes in the lyrics ("the men they come and the men they go"), which do begin to look outrageously risqué in the pre-sexual revolution era. Chalk one up for bravery and feminism, but from a purely musical standpoint, speeding up the song made it lose its face in the sea of ‘Rip It Up’s and ‘Ready Teddy’s rather than get a more expressive one (and the slick, note-perfect, and personality-free country guitar solo seals the deal on mediocrity).
The album does end on a perfect note with ‘Let’s Have A Party’, the only time here when Jackson genuinely improves upon a Presley original — which was simply titled ‘Party’ and included in the soundtrack to Loving You in a shorter, looser, genuinely party-friendly version. Wanda’s band gives the number a full-on rock’n’roll treatment, as if rather taking their inspiration from a ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’, with some wild guitar / piano interplay; most importantly, Wanda’s croaky, defiantly stand-and-deliver performance just hits the spot perfectly. I have never understood the enigmatic verse about never having kissed a bear or a goon (a goo? apparently Paul McCartney never knew either when he covered the song late in his career), but it is all most certainly about going wild and crazy, and this is one of those few Wanda Jackson classics whose delivery is perfectly adequate to the intention. Silly record executives only understood to release it as a single two years later, upon which it became Wanda’s biggest ever international hit and biggest ever US rockabilly hit (she did score higher with some of her country recordings, though).
And what of the pure country material? Well, I am not much of a country guy, and I typically treat generic country the same way I treat generic Broadway show tunes — it all depends on the performer rather than on the strength of the original melody. The instrumental arrangements and performance level of Wanda’s backing band is more or less what you would expect of Nashville-reared professionals: tight, honest, and relatively faceless. However, when it comes to her vocal expressiveness, I must confess that, given the necessity of choice, I would rather listen to her than to, say, Patsy Cline: that husky, croaky, sandpaper-ish style she imposes on everything she sings, in my opinion, conveys more personality than the textbookishly immaculate feminine beauty of Patsy’s vocals. On some of the more broken-hearted numbers like ‘Just Call Me Lonesome’, she almost sounds like the female equivalent of Hank Williams — and maybe you’d even believe me if she had died at age 30 from heart insufficiency, but, fortunately for her as a person and unfortunately for her as a legend, Mother Nature decided to be more benevolent in this case.
It is true that Wanda’s natural overtones, or her willingness to keep her vocal cords tensely vibrating for almost the entire duration of her singing parts, may eventually become grating (a good example is the bonus track ‘Half As Good A Girl’, the original B-side to ‘I Gotta Know’, on which she delights in extending and knife-sharpening pretty much every vowel of the slow-moving performance); her country balladeering, when you come to think of it, shows just as little restraint as her rockabilly romps, and this lack of subtlety may quickly wear you down or at least generate an atmosphere of relative monotonousness and «one-trick-poniness». But then, stylistic versatility is hardly the thing commonly associated with country performers in the first place — and the best remedy is to simply take this stuff in small doses, rather than subjecting yourself to the entire LP (plus six more bonus tracks culled from various B-sides) in one go. And while Wanda Jackson is by no means a great album, and its best tracks may all easily be found on various representative compilations, at least its balanced ratio of country and rockabilly seems to present a fairly authentic picture of Wanda Jackson, the Country Girl Who Dared Make That Extra Step, in the prime of her artistic powers.
Only Solitaire: Wanda Jackson reviews