Illustration by Felix Lorioux from Le Buffon des Enfants II: Les Insectes de chez Nous, 1946
I've been listening to the early Beatles albums lately (in glorious mono!), and something occurred to me. A lot of what I like in the early Beatles sound is the poppy melodicism that comes directly from two acts of the late '50s, Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers. I've had trouble really getting into any '50s music up to this point (the early Motown singles turned out to be more of a mixed bag than I expected), but maybe Buddy Holly and the Everlys' stuff (I've only been familiar with the well-known singles) would be my gateway to an earlier era of pop music. So I went out and got decent collections of the work of Buddy Holly and the early Everly Brothers. Both 2-disc sets turned out to be quite good, with a disc and a half of really great music each, but I think the Complete Cadence Recordings of the Everly Brothers may be my favorite of the two.
Don and Phil Everly were still teens when they came to Nashville to get a record deal. After a run of bad luck, the boys got signed by Cadence Recordings - their luck turned around pretty quick when they were given the song "Bye Bye Love" for their very first single. The writers of that song, husband and wife team Boudleaux and Felice Bryant, wrote a string of great songs for the Everlys over the next three years, including "Wake Up Little Susie", "Bird Dog", "Devoted to You", and "Take a Message to Mary". Because they had such strong singles from day one, this collection contains an amazing run of great songs from the start. The brothers were writing their own material during this time as well, and I was really surprised how great some of their previously-unreleased rough demos are (Don's "Give Me a Future" and Phil's "Sally Sunshine" are among my favorites in this collection).
The second disc of Complete Cadence Recordings suffers a bit, though, from having the Everlys' second Cadence LP on it. Titled Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, the album was (unsurprisingly) a collection of traditional songs from their childhood. The songs are primarily maudlin ballads about dying children and murderers - they drag on too long (each song runs about twice as long as the Everlys' big singles from this period) and become really monotonous. I don't know what the Everlys were thinking, releasing this at the peak of their big pop success. The second half of the second disc comes back strong with the brothers' last singles for Cadence, one of the best being "('Til) I Kissed You"/"Oh What a Feeling" - this single featured two love songs Don Everly wrote about a girl he fell for on tour in Australia. When Don and Phil left Cadence in 1960, the label predicted that they'd never make it on their own. The Everlys proved them wrong pretty quick, releasing "Cathy's Clown" for Warner Bros. later that year - it sold eight million copies and became their biggest hit.
"Oh, What a Feeling" by the Everly Brothers
0 comments:
Post a Comment