The Beat Patrol

A November 1967 Newsday review by Scott Holtzman on the 2nd Elevators album.
Note: towards the end of the review Holtzman makes mention of 2 pictures of Roky Erickson and Tommy Hall that were printed with the review…

 

Just when everyone else is thinking about Thanksgiving and Christmas around the corner, the unpredictable 13^th Floor Elevators come out with a new album Easter Everywhere.

This doesn’t surprise anyone, because there is a musical charisma which follows The Elevators everywhere they go. Everyone knows they have adopted Houston as their headquarters, but does anyone feel that they are from anywhere in particular? Did they rise as Druid spirits from the mists of Stonehenge on some dark All Hallows Eve? Were they conjured up one full moon from the dark swamps of Louisiana by Marie Laveau, the high priestess of voodoo? Or, are they aliens from Planet X offering us mirror-images of something hidden deep within our subconscious?

Witness a lyric from their new LP:

“Higher worlds that you uncover – Light the path you want to roam – You compare there and discover – You don’t need a shell of foam – Twice born Gypsies care and keep – The nowhere of their former home – They slip inside this house as they pass by – Four and twenty birds of Maya – Baked into an Atom you – Polarized into existence – Magnet heart from red and blue – To such extent the realm of dark – Within the picture it seems true – But slip inside this house and then decide.”

That’s from “Slip Inside This House” by Tommy Hall and Roky Erickson and is just a small sample of the lyric content of the album.

The saddest thing about the album is that the presence on the singers is so cloudy that unless you follow the lyric sheet thoughtfully provided with the album, you won’t realize just how well these young men are writing.

“Splash 1” came from their songbag, but it took the slick commerciality of The Clique to make it Number 1 in this area. The funny thing about it is that The Elevators themselves are commercial, but some unknown element hides Roky Erickson’s excellent singing abilities. As a listener, I want the singer to get more personal with me. I don’t want his voice hidden so often behind the musical jug, which has become identified as their sound, but is growing tiresome from over-exposure. When I hear The Elevators’ tapes over giant speakers, I get that personal feeling, but somehow it is lost in the translation from tape to disc on a small machine in the home.

Don’t get me wrong. This album is a must for any Elevator fan. In fact, it is already the fastest rising LP in Houston. It has many songs in it. My favorites are “Dust,” “I Had to Tell You,” “Slide Machine,” and “She Lives in a Time of Her Own.” I don’t know which one will be their new single, but there’ll be several left for you groups (who have no writers) to choose for your own singles as did The Clique.

These pictures of Roky and Tommy are by Bill Metzler and are the first ever released besides those on the back of the new album. It’s amazing a group can become so well-known nationally with no publicity pictures ever released before.

That alone shows how far these boys have come on sheer musical ability. They deserve every bit of it, wherever they came from.  

Scott Holtzman

This in-depth article comes from the August 1974 issue of ZigZag magazine. Rick(y) Nelson was one of the more underrated singers of the early rock & roll era…  

 

Part 1: The Imperial Years 

To write a fully comprehensive article on the life and music of Rick (y) Nelson would take a book, and since this has got to be ready for the next ZigZag, then a book is out of the question.

What’s more, no one has ever asked me to write a book (Cries of “Shame!” from relieved onlookers.) Another problem affecting the fullness of this work is that I don’t have all Nelson’s records by any means. In most other cases, such an admission would preclude me from writing on the chosen subject, but when you consider that he has made, according to my reckoning, twenty-nine albums so far, spanning seventeen years from June 1957 when ‘I’m Walkin”/Teenager’s Romance’ was the first Nelson top ten single, when the man himself was three years and one day older than me, as he always was and always will be, but was probably less sensitive than I about his advancing age, it’s not quite as bad as it sounds. What a dreadful sentence!

Anyway, it’s time, as they say, to begin at the start, so here’s Rick talking about his… 

Early Days

“My mother’s name is Harriet Hilliard, and she was in a Fred Astaire film called Follow the Fleet, which made her a fairly big film star in the thirties. In fact, she started out singing with my dad’s band [Ozzie Nelson], and that’s where they met. As far as I’m aware, my father’s band was a big band dance thing, maybe Glen Millerish, and he and my mother started doing a lot of radio shows, like the Red Skelton Show, where my mother would play red’s mother in a skit, and my dad would get involved.

“That gave dad the idea for a family show, involving himself and my mother, but with other children playing the radio children’s parts, which is how it went on for about the first six years, until a Christmas show, which also featured Bing Crosby, whose kids were going to be on it. When Dave and I heard about it, ‘If their kids are going to be on it…’ and we went on that show. I was about seven and a half at the time, but it went pretty well, because I was kind of uninhibited about the whole thing – it was live, I couldn’t care less, I didn’t know what was going on, but I was having a good time.

“It was a nationally networked radio show, so it was a kind of natural progression to move into television, and for about a year, we did both radio and television shows, which meant a lot of work. The TV show ran from 1952 right through to 1966, and I was in it the whole time.” 

Overture 

“When I was sixteen, I was taking a girl on a date, and she said she was in love with a singer, so I decided to try to make a record. I did the song on the TV show, and that was before anyone knew the power that television has as far as exposure goes. I sang it on the show, and within that week it had sold a million, which was really incredible. I didn’t have to start at the bottom of the music business – quite the reverse, for after one week I had a million-selling record, and I was playing to thousands of people right away.”

Not a great deal of dues-paying there, I reckon, but only those who spent half their lives paying dues would insist on the necessity of same. Now the year, as we’ve said, is 1957, and Ricky was at Hollywood High School, and he was approaching his seventeenth birthday. Making a record seemed a reasonable thing to do, although why Verve should have been chosen is something which has been seemingly lost in the mists of time. He went into the studio with Barney Kessel, a jazz guitarist of the very highest class, who also made, a couple of years before, one of the most blisteringly brilliant records I’ve heard in any field, anytime, titled ‘Julie Is Her Name’ by Julie London, which deserves a reissue.

Ricky and Barney put down three tracks – ‘Teenager’s Romance’, written by one David Gillam; ‘I’m Walkin”, which was peaking in the charts right at that time in the Fats Domino version; and ‘You’re My One and Only Love’, a co-composition by Barney Kessel and someone called Marshall. The first record is a double A side of ‘Teenager’s Romance’ and ‘I’m Walkin” and gets to number 10 on June 24, and sells a million. If you doubt that a record which only made number 10 could sell a million, you should know that in 1957, there were no less than eighty-six million sellers.

“Verve didn’t pay me, so we went through a lawsuit, and they eventually had to pay, but in the meantime, I’d signed with Imperial, and Verve sued me because of that. But they had that third side ‘You’re My One and Only Love’, which they put out with some dumb instrumental on the back. It was recorded as a throwaway, because we had some more time left.”

Verve and Imperial put out Ricky Nelson records at just about the same time, it would seem. Certainly, when ‘Be Bop Baby’, the first Imperial record, was zipping up the charts to number eight at the end of October ‘57, ‘You’re My One And Only Love’ was reaching its own peak of number sixteen and not making gold disc status like its Imperial rival. Maybe that was due to the dumb instrumental, a description I’m unable to improve on. The title was ‘Honey Rock’, and I don’t believe you can buy it anywhere, which is probably just as well. ‘You’re My One and Only Love’ can be found on Carats Volume 3 – MGM Smash Hits, which is still available through Polydor. I had a hand in compiling that album, and had I been invited to continue with the rest of the series, I would have been able to plug a subsequent volume in the Carats series, which would have contained the two titles from that first Verve single. However, ’twas not to be – perhaps Malcolm Jones will oblige on some later golden epic.

A large part of the Nelson myth is the fact that his guitarist for the most successful part of his rock’n'roll time was James Burton. Of course, more about him later, but it wasn’t always Burton on whom Ricky relied…

“When I started to sing on the TV show, there was no James Kirkland, James Burton, Gene Garth or Richie Frost. On the first album, the lead guitarist was a guy called Joe Maphis, but James Burton was playing rhythm guitar. I also played rhythm guitar on those early albums – with four and a half chords!”

Just to amplify a little, Kirkland played bass, and was later replaced (on records anyway), by the ubiquitous Joe Osborn, Gene Garth (sometimes known as Gene Graf, but I think my spelling’s right) was on piano, and Richie Frost played drums. “I first met those guys, who were with me for ten years on the road, just after my very first gig at the Ohio State Fair, which was a very big occasion. The organisers of the Fair said that they would provide me with a band, so I went out there, and literally, it was Salvation Army band, who weren’t at all into what I was doing. This guy was playing his drum marching style, so I thought I’d better get a band together.

“One day, I was up at Imperial, and I heard this music coming from the outer office, backing Bob Luman, and it was James Burton and James Kirkland. When I heard that, I wanted them, because it was exactly what I had in mind, and it worked very well-they went on salary, so that they were always available for recording and going on the road.” 

The First Album 

Now with the first LP by a bloke like Ricky Nelson, there’s almost bound to be a good deal of plagiarism, both in the selection of material and the nicking of arrangements, but in listening to it, I can find a good many points of interest and reference, with which it is my intention to plague you at this point. Actually, I think it helps to put the early career of our man in some kind of perspective. It was called Ricky and was released in 1957. The first track is ‘Honeycomb’, and it’s taken at an easy pace, somewhat slower than either the American hit by Jimmie Rodgers, or the English near-hit cover version by Marty Wilde.

Mention of those two names leads me to inform you that Rodgers wasn’t his real name. In fact, it was Jimmie Rodgers Snow, and he’s the son of the famous Hank Snow, who I recently read had been with RCA for fifty years or something. Jimmie was actually a very good singer, purveying some good rock ‘n’ roll as well as some more straightforward stuff like ‘English Country Garden’, and I’m pleased to have a Best of Jimmie Rodgers album, which came out a couple of years ago on Polydor/Roulette, although it’s now deleted since Roulette went to Pye in Britain. Marty Wilde, on the other hand, seems to have been with Philips or Phonogram or whatever you like for almost as long as Hank Snow was with RCA, and I’ve got his version of ‘Honeycomb’ on a fantastically good value item called Wilde About Marty, which cost 49p and has a lot of his hits on.

(Just to completely confuse you, that’s not the same album as the original (1958) Wilde About Marty, but anyway, I’m sure both are long deleted. If you’re interested in Marty Wilde, the cohorts of the amazing Nigel Grainge at Phonogram have just put out a good twenty-track album called Good Rockin’ – Then and Now, which also contains most of Marty’s hit, although unaccountably it misses out ‘Honeycomb’. Reverting to the subject, Ricky’s version isn’t as good as either Jimmie’s or Marty’s, although the dreadful guitar solo on Marty’s is run close by the equally nauseous male backing vocals on Ricky’s. Finally, to save the inevitable correspondence, Marty Wilde is now on the Magnet label, of Alvin Stardust notoriety.

Second track is ‘Boppin’ the Blues’, of Carl Perkins fame. Ricky’s version is very much an early white rock ‘n’ roll track with classically obvious backing, enlivened by a neat guitar solo, presumably by the aforementioned Mr Maphis, who is, I believe a well known Hollywood session guitarist. That’s where you pause to check out your album sleeves, and then we get on to ‘Be Bop Baby’, which was the hit off this album. According to Joseph Murrell’s Daily Mail Book of Golden Discs (a kind of equally essential early relative of Lillian Roxon’s Encyclopaedia of Rock), ‘Be Bop Baby’ didn’t go gold till 1960. Perhaps it’s because of the woefully bad ending… ‘Have I Told You Lately That I Love You’ is of course of blatant rip-off of the Elvis version, and more fuel for the fire that says that Nelson was a pale clean Presley (a camp to which I don’t subscribe, by the way). It’s probably worth saying that the Elvis version comes from what I would imagine to be a very rare EP, which also has the alternate take of ‘Don’t Leave Me Now’ (different from the ‘Jailhouse Rock’ version), and also Elvis ripping off Fats Domino on ‘Blueberry Hill’ (they were all doing it, weren’t they?).

‘Teenage Doll’ is the sort of song which comes last in the Eurovision Song Contest, and deserves nothing better, but fortunately ‘If You Can’t Rock Me’, written by Little Walter, is pretty good. The words seem a little bit heavy for a seventeen years old to be singing, but perhaps we should be charitable and say that maybe the double-entendres were only single and he took the song at face value. More to the point, the song boasts a guitar solo which must have formed the basis for literally thousands of subsequent guitarists’ efforts, both recorded and amateur. Nice.

The second side kicks off with ‘Whole Lotta Shakin”, and it would be churlish to expect anything other than a pale Jerry Lee imitation. Again, though, you get a great guitar solo, and very useful bass fills – and I suppose that when you consider the raunchiness and general attitude of J.L.L., maybe Ricky was a cleaner, pleasanter rocker who might appeal much more to the ladies whose fellas were adoring Lewis – ‘Baby I’m Sorry’ is a routine song, with a Jordanaires backing vocal sound, and should be categorised as an Elvis reject, while ‘Am I Blue’ is brilliant in its instrumental beginning, though as soon as the vocal enters they turn the guitar down. An early piece of overkill production, almost rescued by some nice handclaps, up to Fats Domino standard.

‘I’m Confessin” was later recorded by Frank Ifield, and maybe he listened to this version, because Ricky comes on like a ’50s Val Doonican. The good version of this is by Nino Tempo and April Stevens (whatever happened? etc), and Ricky goes into a very nasty talking bit. At one point the track nearly stops, then unluckily, it restarts. No way. (Nino Tempo, while we’re mentioning him, is one of the more forgettable artists in Rock Around the Clock, but had several very worthwhile hits around the early ’60s.) ‘Your True Love’ isn’t the Jack Scott song (that was ‘My True Love’), but a Carl Perkins thing with a jumping introduction, and then what I think is a terrible guitar solo, although conceivably it might be in the “so bad it’s good” class.

Aficionados of ‘A Child’s Garden Of Grass’ will know what I mean if I mention ‘Myron Floren’ music. Still, this track has a good guitar outro, so maybe we’ll let it pass. The final crowning glory/insult (delete as applicable) is Ricky doing Bing and Grace on ‘True Love’, initially backed by simple (very) acoustic guitar, and what sounds like the Cliff Adams singers of ‘Sing Something Simple’ fame. Oh, Light Programme, where are you now? In all honesty, not a record to rush out and buy – not that you can, because its age alone should guarantee it obscurity – but an interesting curiosity and a yardstick by which to judge some of the glories which followed shortly afterwards. 

Two Through Six 

Which refers to the next five albums Ricky made for Imperial. Around this time, I reread the two transcripts I have of Rick Nelson interviews, and it seems that what he had to say about his early albums was more in general terms than anything specific, so I’ve borrowed several albums from the Nelson museum run by Rocky Prior, an old mate, and we’ll skip through them. After Ricky, you get Ricky Nelson, some kind of progress, I suppose. By this time, the famous band was with our man, yet the album still sounds as if it could have been a Marty Wilde record. From the first album, a single of ‘Be Bop Baby’ and ‘Have I Told You Lately That I Love You’ was released, and then came two singles, in England at least, which weren’t featured on albums at the time, a very strange state of affairs. These were ‘Stood Up’/’Waitin’ in School’ and ‘Believe What You Say’/ My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It’, all but the last of which are available on the Legendary Masters album, which we’ll no doubt get around to later. It was only the fourth single which came from this second album, and in fact that was one of the things for which Ricky is still highly thought-of even now – ‘Poor Little Fool’.

As far as I’m concerned, that track is by far the best thing on the album, and it’s still a classic in my book. Everything works, from Burton and Kirkland being correctly balanced, right through to the Jordanaires impersonators, who just for once are unintrusive. Interesting to note, then, that it was written by Eddie Cochran’s girlfriend, Sharon Sheeley, who nearly got hers when Eddie went to play lead with Buddy Holly. Anyway, rushing through the other tracks, we start with Bobby Lee Trammell’s ‘Shirley Lee’, a wild song with primitive backing and an almost Stan Freberg-like echo on the voice, Burton takes the first of several good solos, although the track is somewhat trebly, but the most interesting thing about it is Bobby Lee, who I believe to have been a kind of wild Screamin’ Jay Hawkins type and a bit freaky.

The only thing of Trammell’s I have is a Sue single called ‘New Dance in France’, and although that’s not terribly wild, I’d be interested to hear some more stuff by him. Next comes the follow-up single to ‘Poor Little Fool’, ‘Someday’, which I’m sure you know is a stable pub song, with boring organists doing their “All together now! ‘Someday, I’ll want you, to want me…” It’s fact that the song could hardly escape, and even Burton plays his solo as straight as he can. Oh well. ‘Good Rockin’ Tonight’, by Elvis out of Roy Brown, is nothing more than a Presley rip-off. Nevertheless, Kirkland’s bass is great, Burton does his usual fine solo, and there’s good syncopated passage. But all told, it’s a bit thin. Perhaps what I feel about ‘I’m Feelin’ Sorry’ applies to this one as well – if you haven’t heard the original (by Jerry Lee Lewis out of Jack Clement), then it’s an ace track. ‘Down the Line’ is at least sung a little differently from the Lewis version. It’s clean, maybe as if Nelson doesn’t quite mean it, but a bit of echo and the inevitable Burton goodie keep it the right side of mediocre. The end of the first side is ‘Unchained Melody’, done, as you know, by everyone from Jimmy Young to the Righteous Bros. Need I say more than that Ricky very nearly finds an exact middle point between the extremes. ‘Everyone Else’s Hits By Ricky’ continues with ‘I’m in Love Again’, which Fats Domino does infinitely better.

Better by far is ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’, which was the flip of ‘Poor Little Fool’ and is one of the few distinctive songs on the album. It was written by Ricky, probably the earliest of his compositions to be recorded, end it’s still good now. Of course, the guitar solo is wonderful, very typical of the sort of stuff on which the legend is based. From this point, the record generally improves, with ‘My Babe’, later the B side of the ‘Lonesome Town’ single, and in my opinion, one of the better versions of an overused song. I’ll pass over ‘I’ll Walk Alone’, a Val Doonican-‘y try at the Elvis ballad technique which falls, and get on to ‘There Goes My Baby’ (not the Drifters’ song), written by Kirkland and Burton. Although derivative, it’s a good rocker, with the writers doing well, and worth investigating. Then it’s ‘Poor Little Fool’, and that’s the end. A typical ’50s album by a single hit-maker – two hit singles, two sides, and a lot of filler. Also, you can detect the mascara on Ricky’s cover photo. Move over, Bowie, and let Ricky take over…

Before we get to Ricky Sings Again! (and can you believe those titles?), a swift word about the non-album singles. Both are double-sided classics, so why aren’t they on this LP? Both ‘Believe What You Say’ and ‘Waitin’ in School’ were written by the Burnette Bros, Dorsey and Johnny. They are dynamite, and so is ‘Stood Up’ particularly. The inclusion of these four tracks could have made the album a solid gem.

Maybe something like that occurred to somebody, because ‘Believe What You Say’ does make it to the third album. It’s joined by another B side, ‘Never Be Anyone Else But You’, and the next two A sides, ‘Lonesome Town’ and ‘It’s Late’, but they missed another one off which should have been on there, ‘I Got a Feeling’, which was the B side of ‘Someday’. Really weird, the way his albums were programmed, and very annoying to find such tracks unavailable now.

There will now be a short intermission while I explain a couple of things that have come up since I wrote the above a couple of days ago. First thing was that I rang up the teenage rave of North Marston, Pete ‘Crazy Legs’ Frame, and expressed the opinion that it was pretty poor that ‘Stood Up’ and ‘Waitin’ in School’ had been missed off the first album. He muttered the usual Swahili curse, and assured me that they were, where upon we locked verbal antlers, and like a bad B movie, with half a screen each, shouted the titles at each other, his sleeve in his hand, mine in mine. We were both right – the English version has those two extra tracks, which are missing on the American version. The next bit of information came from Ray McCarthy, the Wandsworth Warrior, and also President, Chairman and members of the British Curt Boettcher Appreciation Society. Ray keeps showing me super-obscure records, and one of these was an EP titled Ricky Part 4, which consists of ‘Stood Up, ‘Waitin’ in School’, ‘Believe What You Say’ and ‘My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It’. The sleeve, identical to the Ricky album, and the Part 4 seem to indicate something or other, but it’s so confusing. Not improving on the situation is the fact that Ricky Sings Again features an advert for Ricky and Ricky Nelson, and the former doesn’t mention the two extra tracks even though the copy of Sings Again is an English one. So the man at Decca took the trouble to change the numbers on the American artwork, but it didn’t occur to him to check the titles. Oh, this is going on far too long – let’s hope it prevents a few letters anyway.

Now, the third album, and about time too. It’s significantly improved – much better recording level, a chunkier sound, a great record, which is certainly the best so far. ‘It’s Late’, a good song by Dorsey Burnette, should be familiar, and it has a magnificent instrumental sound which makes it a classic. Get it now, if you don’t have it. Also by Dorsey B is One of These Mornings’, which starts off with a great Sun/ Lincoln Carr bass sound, and seemed as if it might have been written for the Burnette Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio. Having checked it out, it wasn’t on either of the two excellent albums which I have of that group, but admires of that genre should listen to this Nelson track. ‘Believe What You Say’ is also ace, and another bit of info from Rocky Prior was that the single version was a different take from that on the album in the manner of being with/without the backing vocals. Both versions have a superb solo. One of the best, in fact, magnificent in its simplicity, and you can really hear the piano, which is nice. ‘Lonesome Town’, written by Baker Knight, and the first of his many song writing credits through the Nelson career, is just beautiful.

Of this album, Rick says: “I was happy with the track I put down for Imperial, but you can’t say they hold up now, because of the improvement in recording techniques. I still like ‘Believe What You Say’ a lot, because it had a certain sound about it, and ‘Lonesome Town’ has never shamed me. It was one of the first songs that just had an acoustic guitar, which I played myself, which was amazing! That’s a good example of trying out a song many different ways, but coming back to the simplest.”

I can still remember the great thrill I had when I discovered the chord sequence to ‘Lonesome Town’. It meant that my Lonnie Donegan repertoire could finally be expanded. I also recall a very good version of the song by Josh White and his son on the TV several hundred years ago. ‘Tryin to Get You’ is a good indication of the way things had changed by the time of this album. Not a straight Elvis copy, but a fairly individual version, with a somewhat Commander Codyish rhythm. (Oh yeah, I’ve seen Cody twice now, and I didn’t think they were that good. Still, I’ll keep trying.) The final and least good track on the first side is ‘Be True to Me’, which is fairly stilly, but rescued by the Burton solo and the better recording quality. ‘Old Enough to Love’ which starts off side two, is also a little below the high standard set by this LP, but it could certainly have been an Everly Bros album track. Then comes ‘Never Be Anyone Else But You’, the other side of ‘It’s Late’, with Burton’s chunka-chunka guitar, which is another classic and part of every party troubadour’s singalong set, until the middle eight, that is. ‘I Can’t Help It’ is OK too, with more Western Swing rhythms, and an interesting solo, to say the least, unconventional, from J.B. ‘You Tear Me Up’ is a very Presley-like rocker with a sizzling intro, and is recommended to Elvis people, while ‘It’s All in the Game’ is a straight cover of Tommy Edwards’ million seller, which was probably a hit when this album was being recorded.

A sideways step here, to talk about the final track, a Johnny Cash song titled ‘Restless Kid’. There was a theory about it – “The story about ‘Restless Kid’ being cut out of Rio Bravo isn’t really correct, because it was never really in the film,” Rick says. “I remember going over to Dimitri Tiomkin’s house, and he had a song that he’d written for the film that I really didn’t care for at all, and I had this song that Johnny Cash had written that I wanted in. The song just came about from talking to Johnny one night. I used to live near him in California, and saw him quite a lot, and when I told him about the story of the film, and that I was having trouble getting a song together, he wrote the song.” In fact, Rio Bravo is an ace film, and the stars are John Wayne, Dean Martin and Ricky. See it if you can – a classic western.

Going back to the song, it’s pretty good, although obviously a Cash song, mostly, due to the Tennessee Two backing sound, and finishes off a very fine album which I would wholeheartedly recommend. It’s taken a long time to get to the fourth album, but I reckon it gets a bit quicker now. This one, Songs by Ricky, isn’t as good as its immediate predecessor. One single, ‘Just a Little Too Much’/’Sweeter Than You’, is excellent, with five other reasonable tracks and five duffers. Of interest are the fact that there are five Dorsey Burnette songs, three of which (‘Just a Little Too Much’, ‘Don’t Leave Me’, and ‘I’ve Been Thinkin’ ) are good, three Baker Knight songs (‘You’ll Never Know What You’re Missing’, ‘One Minute to One’ and ‘Sweater Than You’), all of which are good, plus ‘Half Breed’, not as in Cher, but by John D. Loudermilk. The rest is fairly nasty, but I should note that ‘You’ll Never Know What etc’ was covered here by Emile Ford, whose brother now plays in Medicine Head. Not a totally recommended album.

I expect you’re saying to yourselves, “How can he only spend a few lines on that one, when he spent loads more on the earlier ones?” The answer is fairly simple – in the same way that every artist eventually goes over the top, Ricky was on a downhill side. All the innovation was no longer noticeable in artistic terms. The songs were patchy as far as whole album went, and excitement turned to being routine. Also, I’m finding that the music is less inspirational to me personally.

Still, we must press on, with More Songs by Ricky. Four good tracks, one that’s halfway there, and seven of junk. The key is at the top of the titles – ‘Musical Arrangements by JIMMIE HASKELL’, it says. He tries so hard to earn his money that he gave poor old Rick the castration treatment. The good tracks are ‘Ain’t Nothin’ But Love’, and ‘Proving My Love’, both by Baker Knight, ‘Hey Pretty Baby’, by Dorsey Burnette, which is the best track on the record, and ‘Make Believe’, by someone called Marie. The halfway one is also by Baker Knight, and is called ‘I’m All Through With You’, but is taken over by the strings to a certain extent. The rest of it is pure schmaltz, cabaret-club dung, and the best thing about the record, apart from the tracks mentioned, is the sleeve, which has a lot of pix with captions like “Rick, like so many young people, today, an avid camera fan, seldom goes anywhere without his Kodak”; or “The studios refrigerator is always well stocked with Rick’s favorite drink – Coca-Cola.” Finally, “If it has wheels and moves fast, Rick likes it. Here he’s trying out Dave’s motorcycle on the studio lot.”

Now, I sincerely don’t want you to think that I’m mocking or knocking – remember, at the time of this, the fifth LP, he was still only twenty, and I expect he was the victim of every possible manipulation by those making money out of him. Having met the man, I’m sure that he wouldn’t have done all that cabaret stuff if he hadn’t been forced to, and the whole thing stinks of total hype, as if the manipulators were trying to move their boy quickly into the Las Vegas circuit, so that they could afford their second yacht. They’ve damn near disposed of Burton, chopped bits off the male chorus and made them into females, and given Ricky songs his granny might like. The result – no singles from the album, and no success.

The mention of singles provokes a list. The following singles were not released on LP at the time: ‘Mighty Good’/’I Wanna Be Loved’, ‘Young Emotions’/’Right By My Side’, ‘Yes Sir That’s My Baby’/’I’m Not Afraid’, ‘Milk Cow Blues’/’You’re the Only One’, before LP number six, Rick Is 21, which contains ‘Hello Mary Lou’ and ‘Travellin’ Man’. After that, you get ‘A Wonder Like You’/Everlovin”, ‘Young World’, ‘Teenage Idol’/’I’ve Got My Eyes on You’ and ‘It’s Up to You’/’I Need You’. Sort of reminds you of the Roy Wood situation a bit, doesn’t it? Another small curio comes around this time, an EP called Ricky Sings Spirituals. Two songs by Baker Knight, two by Ricky himself (or at least by someone called Nelson), and a very up-front female backing chorus. I’m afraid that neither spiritually or musically is it very inspired – in fact, as soon as it’s finished, you feel you’ll never really want to play it again. Perhaps the motivation is again that Elvis copy thing, which I’m sure Ricky never really subscribed to.

Again, it smells like manipulation, but I’ve got a quote on the subject. “I wasn’t trying at all to be Elvis when he was in the army, and my Spirituals EP wasn’t supposed to be a direct crib from his. There may be a lot of truth in the rumour that I was welcome as a cleaned-up Elvis, because I was a few years youngster, so there was a large group of younger people who were left out of identifying with Elvis. I was on a family show, and people considered us part of their family, with TV coming right into their homes. I never set out to necessarily capitalize on what I was – if anything. I wanted to be a dirty rock ‘n’ roll singer, but I had no choice. It’s people who make up that image – I still go through all that stuff about Ricky and Rick, but I never really cared, and every other article I read about myself starts off, ‘Rick, as he is now known…and I go, Oh Yeah’. My real name is Eric, which should blow a few minds.”

It seems kinda obvious that More Songs by Ricky was a washout when you hear Rick Is 21. It won’t be mentioned again, but this is where the name changed, and the style of the music reverts strongly to the third album, I reckon. The songwriters are interesting – Dorsey Burnette gets the first track, ‘My One Desire’, and Jerry Fuller makes his first appearance as a writer, a significant point when you consider that he wrote ‘(It’s a) Young World’ and ‘It’s Up to You’, as well as ‘Travellin’ Man’, which is on this album, together with a perfectly amazing track called ‘Break My Chain’ which has just has a blistering Burton solo.

Inevitably, there’s some rubbish here, presumably to keep Haskell employed, such as ‘Do You Know What It Means to Miss Orleans’, but much of the stuff here is of a standard above average. Oh, there’s a couple of other interesting songwriters – Dave Burgess, once a member of the Champs, and an up-and-coming young land named Gene Pitney. Hands up, all those who knew that he wrote ‘Hello Mary Lou’, which has perhaps the best-known bit of Burton guitar from this period. Six of the tracks here are good, three so-so, and only three bad, including the aforementioned ‘New Orleans’ and a totally misplaced ‘Stars Fell on Alabama’. A strange LP, but with more good things than bad.

At this point, I’ve just re-read Ed Ward’s sleeve notes on the Legendary Masters album, and he puts this album down as being “comprised largely of seeming leftovers,” with which I can’t really agree, because it’s probably the next best album after the third one.

This marathon is coming to an end, the end of the first era. Before we go any further with the last album, Album Seven, and the compilations, there are a few things Rick said which belong in this period, so here’s a good place to put them in. 

James Burton 

It would be nice to be able to put in a lot about the man who made Ricky’s albums nearly as famous as Ricky did, but life’s not like that, unfortunately. However, Rick isn’t a very loquacious person, and I think he’d agree to that.

“Nobody knew James before he joined me. It was his first time in town from his previous experience on Louisiana Hayride. He had a certain sound, and he was the front runner of a lot of guitar styles, which people don’t even realise now. He was the first one with a Telecaster and the first one to put banjo strings on his guitar. It finally happened that James was making more money playing sessions, and the same went for Joe Osborn (who replaced James Kirkland on bass around 1961). James really got to be a security for me at one time, to the extent where I didn’t know whether I could do a show without him. It got to the point where he wasn’t available to go on the road – if you start playing sessions, and then you leave for a time, they just get someone else. It’s a producer’s clique that you have to get in, and so he just wanted to stay there. Now that James is with Elvis, it’s not really like being on the road, because he normally only plays Las Vegas. It’s a joke between Elvis and me – so you finally got James, then! – although he had Scotty Moore, who was also extremely good. In fact, Scotty almost came with me in those early days when he was with D.J. Fontana and Bill Black.” 

Songwriters 

“Most of the songs I got were by writers I didn’t know, but Baker Knight, who gets a lot of songwriting credits over the years, was a great friend of mine. I always chose my own material. Quite often, James would appear with some record, or someone would send it in. For example, Gene Pitney recorded ‘Hello Mary Lou’ about a year and a half before he gave it to me, when he used to do a lot of demos, for Aaron Schroeder, I guess. It’s not true that I used the name of Jerry Fuller as a songwriting alias. He’s now a producer for Columbia, I think, and he certainly produced the Union Gap. He started off as a vocalist, and had a couple of hits in the states. He took ‘Travellin’ Man’ to Sam Cooke originally, and a while before Sam died, I met him, and he said he was really sorry he hadn’t done that one. It was laying around for a year before anything was done about it.” 

Album Seven 

After several albums where backing musicians were not mentioned, this sleeve lists the Nelson band, which by now had James Burton and Richie Frost from the original group, while Kirkland and Garth were now replaced by Joe Osborn and Ray Johnson. It’s worth nothing that only Nelson and Presley bothered to name-check the lads who were part of their success story, and look what’s happened nowadays… trail-blazing indeed. Even so, there’s an element of déjà vu about this album, which Ed Ward feels was the last genuine album that Rick made for imperial. I don’t know whether that’s true or not because the Legendary Masters mentions one called ‘It’s Up to You’, which conceivably contains some of the ‘Young World’ stuff as well as the title track, but I’m fairly certain that it wasn’t put out here. Still, there’s no way that Album Seven could be described as bad – it’s just the same as before, but with somewhat inferior songs, although one can’t say that about the excellent version of Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’ which is very gripping. Generally, though the songs are of a novelty, banal type, the only other exception being ‘Today’s Teardrops’, which was also the B side of Roy Orbison’s ‘Blue Angel’, my familiarity with that showing where I was at in the autumn of 1960. But as far as England went, that was the end of an era, the last Rick Nelson album to come out on the famous London label. 

Reissues 

Two important ones, one for hard-up folks, and the other a prestige package. The cheapie is The Very Best of Rick Nelson, which is a straight budget price reissue of Million Sellers. You get sixteen of the tracks we’ve mentioned, and all for about a pound. Excellent value, and a very fine introduction to the work of Mr Nelson. For the more ambitious among you, Ricky Nelson, in the Legendary Masters series, is a twenty-six-track double album with even more goodies, split up as follows: from the first album, two tracks, from the second, five; third, eight (excellent!); fourth, two; fifth, none; sixth, three; seventh, none; plus six odd tracks which were singles. At this point, I’d like to point out a small mistake in Ed Ward’s otherwise praiseworthy sleevenote, and that is that the track ‘A Long Vacation’ – the title track of one of the later repackaged albums – was not new and comes from the fourth album. That was one of several cash-in type albums released after Rick had left Imperial for Decca, and the most horrid of these is one called Rick Nelson Sings For You, which was put out at the same time as an album of new material on Decca called Sings For You. Very scrupulous, these record people… 

End of Part One 

We’ll leave the final words of this rambling episode to Rick. “I joined Imperial for five years, and when that time was up, I signed with Decca for twenty years, and as I’m apparently enjoying some kind of revival at the moment it’s not unexpected to see the Legendary Masters. I quite like them, in fact, but I wish they hadn’t split it up into stereo, because really there are basically only three or four instruments most of the time, and they were mostly recorded on one-track machines anyway. I don’t think the Legendary Masters are a big deal in the States but for what it is, it’s done very well, and they guy who wrote the notes was very good. I don’t regard it as competition between my old and new images, because I can’t pretend I didn’t do those things. As long as people put it in the right perspective…”

Hmm. Wonder if I did? Next issue, the middle period, covering the first seven or eight Decca albums. Bye for now. 

Part 2: Brunswick/MCA… Before the Stone Canyon Band 

Before we start, and you take the two-part exam (oral and written) on the content of the first part of this epic, a few little oddments that have come up since then. First concerns Joe Maphis, who was (all together now) ‘the guitarist on the first album’. Right, very good, Peter O’Brien (also known as Omaha Knox) thrust into my hand a Joe Maphis album, a fairly ancient one called Fire on the Strings, which has a magnificent ’50s-type picture on the sleeve. Note the twin-necked Mosrite, with ‘Joe’ on the upper neck, and ‘Maphis’ on the lower, and also note that if you can visualise him without his hat, he looks a little like John McLaughlin’s father might appear, even if he didn’t have a twin-necked thingy.

Don’t rush around looking for the LP, though, because it’s frankly for Arthur Smith fans only, and quite sub-Ventures. Thank you, Peter, for the loan and don’t forget, folks, Omaha Rainbow is where you’ll find all the latest on John Stewart. The second point is that this time we’re going to steam through no less than 11 of Rick’s albums – dauntless readers continue, while others may make paper darts. For Your Sweet Love came out in May 1963. The only real change since what went before is the label. Brunswick in its early days was the American Decca Company’s English outlet, and of course Bill Haley was on it. There is still a Brunswick operating through English Decca, but it seems to be Brunswick/Dakar, a different thing altogether, the label for artists like the Chi-Lites. So when Rick said he’d signed with Decca for twenty years, he didn’t mean the merry lads at Albert Embankment, but in fact the Music Corporation of American, now tied with Universal Studios. All this explains why Alias Smith and Jones has an MCA logo at the end of it.

Now the record. Of the twelve tracks, I made three good, three OK, and the rest below-standard. Dorsey Burnette was by now writing with Joe Osborn, although in fact brother Johnny didn’t die until 1964. I suppose he was too busy performing to continue writing with his brother, and I think his toughness might have helped ‘Gypsy Woman’ and the frantic ‘Every Time I See You Smiling’ to get into the good rather than the OK class. Burton, of course, blesses both songs with fine introductions, but there’s still a bit of something missing. Another stalwart, Jerry Fuller, also contributes an OK track, ‘For Your Sweet Love’, which comes on a bit like ‘Travellin’ Man Part Two’, and there’s also a ‘Poor Little Fool Part Two’ in ‘String Along’, although the writers involved are not the same.

The other two good ones, apart from ‘String Along’, are ‘Let’s Talk the Whole Thing Over’ and ‘I Got a Woman’, the latter of which is not quite the Elvis version, but has a great bass line and a fab solo. Listening to the record, one gets the distinct impression that the subject matter is identical to previous Nelson hits, but the songs generally fail to come through with the same strength, as if the writers were trying to create a specifically Rick Nelson type of song. In fact, three of the tracks mentioned, ‘I Got a Woman’, ‘String Along’ and ‘Gypsy Woman’ were single A sides of the time, although none of them were top ten. Quickies on some of the other tracks – ‘One Boy Too Late’ was written by Tony Powers and Ellie Greenwich, who, with Phil Spector, also wrote ‘Today I Met the Boy I’m Gonna Marry’. ‘What Comes Next?’ has a chorus like the bom-boms which herald I’m a Lumberjack’, and ‘I Will Follow You’ was the male version of Petula Clark’s ‘I Will Follow Him’. Altogether, not exactly a landmark. 

For You 

If it’s for me, I don’t mind, because it’s an improvement on the last one. Eight goods and three OKs only leaves the fairly unpleasant ‘You’re Free to Go’, the sequel to ‘He’ll Have to Stay’, which was of course, the sequel to ‘He’ll Have to Go’. These songwriters certainly keep plugging away with original ideas, don’t they?

Good old Jerry Fuller pops up again, with ‘Hey There Little Miss Tease’ (good) and ‘Just Take A Moment’ (OK), the latter co-written with one Cissi Wilson. Dave Burgess, the ex Champ, turns up again with ‘Hello Mister Happiness’, which has very good guitar-playing but a rather odd end (nevertheless good), and the three singles were ‘Down Home’, ‘For You’ and ‘That’s All She Wrote’ (good, OK, and good respectively). The first of those were written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, and Rick’s treatment is very straight, nicely enhancing the undoubted strength of the song, and another fine writer, Don Gibson, about whom Briggles threatens to write an article shortly, is represented by ‘A Legend in My Time’. ‘Fools Rush In’ (you know, where angels fear to tread) is on this album too, and James Burton plays a solo which he also played later when Elvis did the song, and even again when his (Burton’s) solo album came out; more of that later.

The final track of the record is interesting in 1974, because it’s ‘The Nearness of You’ and what with Bryan Ferry murdering ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, and Gary Shearston bruce-ing ‘I Get a Kick Out of You’, it’s pretty nice to hear an ordinary version of a good song. In fact, the singing is a bit suspect at times, but Burton’s guitar work is exceptional, as opposed to outstanding. Yes, a nice album, and one to get if you can find it.

There will now be a short intermission while I quote from the sleevenotes of Rick’s first two albums under his new contract. First: “For Your Sweet Love is the first album to be released by Rick Nelson under the Brunswick label. Deftly performed by this talented young artist, his highly personal style and amazing versatility have never been shown to greater advantage. Each of the twelve sides has a different quality and feeling yet each bears the unmistakable sound that is uniquely Rick Nelson; his voice and his music.”

Second – “The amazing versatility of Rick Nelson was never more evident than on this, his latest release for the Brunswick label. Any one of the twelve selections could be a smash hit single on its own. This tremendously talented young artist handles all types of songs with equal ease and facility, without at any time losing his own personalised style. His distinctive and tasteful phrasing and vocal quality make it immediately evident that it is a Rick Nelson rendition.”

Notice the odd similarity? In all fairness, and changing the subject, I should note here that Jimmie Haskell, who was to my ears heavy-handed on the later Imperial albums as arranger and orchestra leader, reached on For You a near perfect balance with the backing group of Burton, Osborn, Frost and Johnson. The function of orchestras in rock ‘n’ roll seems to me to be necessarily non-intrusive, and this album contains no battles. So well done, Mr H. 

The Very Thought of You 

The very thought of me makes you yawn – what kind of welcome is that for a lad like me? Four good and one OK out of twelve takes us right back to the first album in this section. Listen to the sleevenote – ‘With The Very Thought Of You, Rick Nelson in a sense achieves the impossible… he tops himself. This is a great album, one of the best in the fabulous career of a young man admired the world over for his distinctive singing style and superb phrasing. His amazing versatility is once more in evidence as he presents a wide variety of exciting and interesting songs.” That makes three versatilities so far – is that a record? No, but what we’re discussing is, and you might call it the Ray Noble album, for that gent (a much-respected name in easy-listening circles) provided two of the songs, the title track, which is nasty, with a cha-cha treatment that Joe Loss might approve of, and ‘Love Is the Sweetest Thing’, which is OK, because it can withstand any sort of treatment.

Then there’s Dave Burgess again, with ‘The Loneliest Sound’ (good) and an also –ran called ‘I Love You More Than You Know’, which smacks of writing too many songs without enough good ideas. Charlie Rich comes into the picture with a good one called ‘Just A Little Bit Sweet’, and Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil’s ‘I Don’t Wanna Love You’ is also good, with a lovely guitar line. The other good one, which is again good Burton, is ‘I’ll Get You Yet’. Among the rest is ‘Be My Love’, yes, that which Mario Lanza sang in 1950 in Toast of New Orleans. Did you know that Mario’s real name was Alfred Arnold Cocozza? I thought not. Rick’s go at the song is sheer catastrophe, and his slow version of ‘Dinah’, with very dubious low notes and cocktail lounge piano is almost as bad as Joe Brown’s version is good. The Piano in fact gets very irritating by the instrumental break, and I wondered whether Burton was ill for his track… Finally, there’s something called ‘I Wonder (If Your Love Will Ever Belong to Me’), which was written apparently by five people. You would have thought that that many people could have come up with something, however meager… 

Spotlight on Rick 

This is the first one of this lot that Rocky Prior, who lent them all to me, had in stereo, and the sound is surely different, if primitive. This is a slight improvement on the previous one, even if the sleeve note says: “The spotlight will grow ever brighter on this outstanding young man, for with his marvelous versatility, charm, good looks, and vitality, the future holds more and more promise.” Maybe that’s a bit better too.

Right. Here we have ‘I’m Talking About You’, that Chuck Berry masterpiece, done here a la Ronnie Hawkins and therefore good. In fact, the track has all the depth of sound that some of Berry’s recordings seemed to lack even if Chuck’s problems were down to recording quality more than any thing else. Baker Knight returns to the writing scene with two good ones, ‘Yesterday’s Love’, which seems to be the ultimate B-side, and ‘Just Relax’, a very appropriate Nelson song, which could have been a hit had it been released as a single. Sonny Curtis’ ‘Don’t Breathe A Word’ would have been more appropriate for Bobby Vee, but it’s OK here; Jerry Fuller’s ‘I Tried’ is good, and there’s a ‘Just a Little Too Much’ Part 2 in ‘That’s Why I Love You Like I Do’, which you probably know is a line from the earlier song. Other notables are ‘I’m a Fool’, which sounds like the Everly Brothers singing ‘Game of Love’, and ‘A Happy Guy’, one of whose co-writers was Kenny Rankin. Wonder if it was THE Kenny Rankin? On the whole, an average LP. 

Best Always 

Burning through them now, aren’t we? This one won’t take long, because it’s basically a list of notable songwriters having their wares performed in a bland manner, and I don’t mean Bobby. Familiar songs are ‘You Don’t Know Me’ by Ray Charles out of Eddy Arnold, ‘I Know a Place’ by Petula Clark (again!) out of Tony Hatch, and ‘Since I Don’t Have You’ by, with and from the Skyliners. What cay you say about them? Respectively, nothing; the follow-up to the excellent ‘Downtown’; and a good song with near painful falsetto. Perhaps I should have included ‘My Blue Heaven’ in the familiar category, but it’s dreadful, with only Burton surviving. The drummer seems to have escaped from the Dave Clark drum school. I don’t think I’ll even mention the other writers – I don’t expect they remember their work with any great enthusiasm, and I feel the same about this album. 

Love and Kisses 

A curious sleeve picture on this one. Seemingly the album which goes with a film called Love And Kisses – two tracks from the film, with ten others. Here there are two very good things, next to each other on side two. First is ‘More’, the familiar song, but with a brilliant intro, a double-time instrumental break, and a lunatic drummer who sounds as if he might be speeded up. Then there’s ‘Raincoat In The River’, which is just a very interesting song, well-performed. Apart from that, the title track is a ‘Good Timin’’ rip-off, a good Burton solo on ‘Love Is Where You Find It’, an average version of a beautiful song in ‘Try To Remember’ (the kind of September), plus a lot of very average stuff that’s not worth much space and therefore won’t be getting any.

But we haven’t had a quote from Rick yet in this instalment, so here goes – on the subject of his film career, which started in 1952, with Here Come the Nelsons. “That was a film we did the year before the TV show, and from that film came the idea for the series,” he says. “The next year I had a small part in The Story of Three Loves, with Leslie Caron, But Rio Bravo was the most successful film I did, followed by The Wackiest Ship in the Army, with Jack Lemmon. Love and Kisses was a film that had been a Broadway show, a situation comedy. It was fairly successful in the States, but not totally. That was in my robot period, when I didn’t know what I was doing. You know, wind me up, and… the album from that film lacked direction and everything else, because I didn’t know what I wanted to do at all during that period.” Yeah. 

Improvement 

You may have noticed that the six albums so far discussed have been some what tatty – good points from time to time, but just as many bad ones. Well, maybe that thought occurred to our Rick too, because it’s about here that his “robot” period ended, and from this point on, despite the odd blind alley, everything improves.

The first of the albums in this section is called Bright Lights and Country Music (1966) and while the cover photo still leans back towards those “versatility” days, the music is generally infinitely better. It’s difficult to imagine a better song to start with than Terry Fell’s ‘Truck Drivin’ Man’. Burton is quite unbelievable on dobro, and Rick and everyone else sound so much happier. Really makes me beam to hear it, and it’s the kind of song that could be investigated with benefit by some of our better British country rock bands. In fact, one of the first of those, the much missed plainsong, were fans of Terry Fell, and said as much on one of the occasions I saw them playing.

Now on a record with a title like that, you wouldn’t expect to find a Nelson original, but the next one, ‘You Just Can’t Quit’ is just that, and it’s by no means put in the shade by the great country compositions surrounding it. A taste, perhaps, of the goodies to come in the last part of this saga, and again, you can hear Burton’s wild enthusiasm showing through. ‘Louisiana Man’ is next. I’ve never been an avid Doug Kershaw fan, although I can see the benefit of the song when it has a treatment like the one here; Even Jim Reeves can’t spoil this, but ‘Welcome to My World’ comes over as a bit bland – keep smiling though, because ‘Kentucky Means Paradise’ (probably not the restaurants, I suspect) is great again, beating ‘Louisiana Man’ at its own game.

The final track on a good side is ‘Here I Am’ which was written by Glen Campbell, and sounds like an Elvis song, especially when you read that the backing vocals are by the Jordanaires. Over we go, and ‘Bright Lights and Country Music’ is from the same league as ‘Truck Drivin’ Man’, and therefore ace. Willie Nelson’s ‘Hello Walls’ is next, and it’s a familiar song, as is ‘No Vacancy’, a Merle Travis thing. More Jim Reeves next, with ‘I’m a Fool to Care’, then another Willie Nelson, ‘Congratulations’, which is somewhat in the country corn bracket, but quite a good crying in the beer song. It has become fashionable to like Willie Nelson this year, which is fine and good, but Atlantic, who I believe have his contract, don’t seem to release anything here. Twelve Eddie Harris albums, perhaps, but no Willie Nelson? Anyway, Rick’s album sends up with ‘Night Train to Memphis’, a fantastic song with great picking, making altogether a superb track. 

On the Flip Side 

This is the album we don’t have anywhere. Rocky, to whom most of these records belong, has even advertised for this one, but without success. Does anyone out there have one, either to sell or lend? We’d be grateful enough to offer you a night out with Michael Wale, or Jim McGuire, or both, or even neither…We asked Rick about it – “Some of the tracks are ‘Moonshine’, ‘Your Kind of Lovin”, ‘Take a Broken Heart’, and ‘They Don’t Give Medals to Yesterday’s Heroes’, which came from a special I did, for which Burt Bacharach wrote the music. It was almost like music from a play, and I’m not on all the tracks. Joanie Somers was in it, and we do a duet…It was interesting to do a special, and the music was good, but Bacharach’s songs are very difficult to sing. Trying to learn them is really a trip, because I don’t read music, and they were really far out.” 

Country Fever 

Yes, some more of the goodies! Gib Gilbeau, yet, starts it off with ‘Take a City Bride’, and Rick sings the first verse in French, or maybe Cajun, man, while Burton’s dobro is making me run fast out of superlatives. ‘Funny How Time Slips Away’ was written by Willie Nelson again but the most famous version was by Joe Hinton. Rick’s version is almost as good, while ‘The Bridge Washed Out’ is a terrific song, but I’ve never heard of the writers. Again there’s a personal Rick song, ‘Alone’, and again it doesn’t produce a drop in quality, although perhaps ‘Big Chief Buffalo Nickel’ does, because it seems to be nonsense. ‘Mystery Train’ is the end of side one, and the backing is dynamite, less economical than Presley’s but with a superb Burton solo. Side two is even better. The songs are well chosen, singing and playing are well up to standard, and it’s a veritable peach. What do you say, Rick?

“When I made those two country LPs, they were reasonably successful, but I never got around to going out live on the country circuits. I didn’t want to get totally involved with that music, because it can be very confining, and all of a sudden, you can get to be know as strictly country. However, I always feel tremendously flattered that I’ve been accepted in that field, because it’s a very hard one to get into, if that’s you aim. Country rock has always been the most natural thing for me, and at that time, I didn’t know what kind of music I wanted to play, and had no direction musically, so I got the idea of going back to where I started from, with a basic band of very good musicians. It was a lot easier and simpler than all those arranged things I’d got into.”

Now both these two country albums are deleted, here and in the States, BUT you can still get them! About mid-1973, they were repackaged as a double album, unfortunately only available on import so far, called Rick Nelson Country (MCA 2-4004). You should have it, really. The best thing is if we all write to MCA at 84 Baker Street, and ask them nicely to put it out. It won’t take long, and it could save you a couple of quid, or even more. All right?

Anyway, was the double album your idea Rick? “Yeah, it was, they came to me, you know. It was my idea to do the country albums originally, about five or six years ago, and I recorded my favorite country songs of the time, and did them as country as I could, so that there wasn’t any copout with strings and all that stuff. I liked the way they came out at the time. Glen Campbell’s on there, playing bass, I think, and singing harmony and stuff, and James is playing dobro. It was a lot of fun recording those, and I’m glad they’re re-packaged. In fact, it wasn’t done to fill a gap between albums, but both those records had been deleted, so they were brought out again, as a double package. It’s the kind of thing that I don’t think gets dated, although I’ll probably be proved wrong eventually.”

No, Rick, dead right. They’re just great, and all you ZigZaglanders better get your pens and paper out… 

Another Side of Rick

More like another manipulation, although perhaps that’s being a little harsh. After those two excellent country albums, Rick took up with a couple of brothers called Boylan, John and Terry. They in their turn were mixed up with Koppelman and Rubin, about whom John Sebastian had words to say which we didn’t really like to mention in print. Now the latter two gents were tied up with several artists at the time, for example Tim Hardin, John Sebastian and John and Terry Boylan. So, Another Side of Rick has three Tim Hardin songs, one by John Sebastian, four by John Boylan and one by Terry Boylan, as well as a John Boylan collaboration with Rick Nelson. Do you begin to get the publishing picture?

Musically, the record doesn’t seem to make it. I can’t put my finger on it, but I reckon that basically it doesn’t sound like a Rick Nelson album. The Tim Hardin songs are just irrelevant versions to my ears, and most of the Boylan songs come over as twee. Being constructive about it, there is one excellent song by John Boylan, called ‘I Wonder If Louise Is Home’, and there’s something nice about ‘Promenade in Green’, the co-composition, that perhaps being the fact that Rick’s twin sons, Gunnar and Mathew, get name-checks in it. I won’t go into a lot more detail about the record, but an example of the bad vibes can be heard in ‘Georgia on My Mind’, which starts off quite slowly, pleasantly relaxed, until some loony gets in there and over-produces it with saxophones and Las Vegas orchestras and it dies miserably.

Not unconnected with all this is a record called Playback by the Appletree Theatre, which was out briefly on MGM, but is more than likely now deleted. I really couldn’t tell you what it’s all about, but maybe it’s a rock opera? This is 1967, you know, before Tommy, but around the same time as Simon Simopath, with which you should all be familiar (by Nirvana, you know). Playback seems to consist of a bunch of basically disconnected songs, talking bits and so on (stereophonic footprints and all that stuff), with odd amusing bits punctuated by long confusing bits. In fact, there are three songs on Another Side of Rick from Playback: the one I mentioned before (‘I Wonder If Louise is Home’), which is recited by someone who sounds like the comic detective in Macmillan and Wife (no, not Rock Hudson, he’s not supposed to be funny), and ‘Don’t Blame It on Your Wife’ and ‘Barefoot Boy’. The only other thing of interest to me about the Appletree Theatre is that their list of helpers included Larry Coryell, Joe Butler, Michael Equine, Chuck Rainey and Rick Nelson. Can’t hear the latter, though. To sum it all up, the Boylan songs don’t suit Nelson’s album, while the Theatre LP is so fragmented that, without explanation – which might have been given in an American fold-out sleeve – I just don’t know what it’s all about, Alfie. Ray McCarthy, mind you, who lent me the Nelson album, thinks both the albums are pretty neat and he has the kind of taste with which I don’t care to argue, as you’ll see when he starts writing in this mag soon.

Rick: “At one time I was involved with John and Terry Boylan, and apart from getting me into the Appletree Theatre record, John produced an album of mine called Perspective, and was also involved in Another Side of Rick. They were involved with Koppelman and Rubin, in that John was the liaison man, while Terry is a really good writer. The album with Hardin and Sebastian songs was done because I really liked the songwriting, and I didn’t know whether I could sign that sort of stuff. Actually, John Boylan was very influential on me doing those songs, as were Koppelman and Rubin, who were music publishers for Hardin and Sebastian. So I was introduced to them in that way, but I’m a big fan of both writers – I’m not sorry I did those things because, if anything, it made up my mind as to the way I wanted to go. Jack Nitzsche arranged ‘Don’t Make Promises’ and although it’s a very good arrangement, it doesn’t work for me. Perspective, with the Randy Newman songs was a total experiment, and those Steve Miller-type sound effects between the tracks were my idea.” 

Perspective 

The last album of Rick’s that we’ll be dealing with in this section. Again, the Boylans, or rather John Boylan, are involved in production and songwriting, but there are some very good songs on this one by writers like Nilsson (‘Without Her’), Paul Simon (‘For Emily Wherever I May Find Her’), Richie Havens, and – dominating the whole thing – Randy Newman, several of whose greatest hits are performed. With a bit more meat here, and a lot less wispiness in the production, this is really rather good, which makes it all the more surprising that it was never released here. There’s even a painting on the back by Mrs Nelson, Kristin and those sound effects referred to are pleasantish Hawkwind sort of noises, which so connect most of side two.

But it’s the Newman songs that dominate the album. ‘Wait Till Next Year’ has a lot of nattering people behind, while ‘Love Story’, which is one of the most amazing songs I’ve ever heard, is introduced by some one stereophonically sploshing about in some water. After that, a car drives away, then an aeroplane does the same, and ‘So Long Dad’ starts, and that’s another superb song. A bit of kids’ noise, and then a bit more of ‘Love Story’, then a thunderstorm heralding – well, what would you think? Yes, ‘I Think It’s Gonna Rain Today’, and while I don’t really approve of Rick’s phrasing, particularly with regard to the title line, this is a song that couldn’t be ruined, even by Bryan Ferry, if you see what I mean. A fine album, and fitting way to end this part of the story, on an up. 

One More Thing 

Yes, James Burton, who has featured fairly heavily thus far in the story, and with good reason. As Rick said in the previous part of this, “James really got to be a security for me at one time, to the extent where I didn’t know whether I could do a show without him.” Now anyone that reads this, and many more besides, like Mick Grabham, have the utmost respect for the man’s guitar playing – he’s among the top three guitarists there are, and he has been since 1957 or so, which is quite a time. So when a James Burton solo album came out a couple of years ago on A&M, a lot of us were holding our breaths. Unfortunately I don’t think it makes it as the scorcher I would have liked and expected, but Rick was more philosophical.

“I haven’t heard James’ solo album, but I can imagine it might not sound too good, because you can get trapped in doing sessions all the time,” he says. “That’s why I think it’s important to get out and play live, because sessions are very confining. He’s got into a thing of playing what’s needed to be played rather than creating. He’s such a talented musician, it’s a shame.” All I can really say about the Burton solo album is that it’s a repeat of many of the riffs that he created in the past behind various signers, and I suppose it goes to prove something that I’ve so far neglected to say – Rick Nelson and James Burton complemented each other quite perfectly, and without Rick’s voice, James seems kind of lost.

Undoubtedly, at this point in Rick’s career, that is, up to Another Side of Rick, his records would have been measurably worse without James, while without Rick, there might be no James Burton legend with quite the same strength the name holds today. And that’s all for this time, the middle (and least interesting) period being finished. Next time, up to date with Rick and the Stone Canyon Band. 

Part 3: The Stone Canyon Band 

The perceptive interviewer will very likely have noticed a certain reluctance on the part of the interviewee to speak about he past. This reluctance, which is sometimes an inability – more than a conscious desire – to speak about the past, increases exponentially (I believe the word is) the further back into the mists of time the interviewer attempts to travel. Which is a posh way of saying that there’s rather more actual interview in this final part of the Rick Nelson marathon than you’ve been used to.

Last time, we left Rick with an artistically, if not commercially, acceptable album called Perspective, and at yet another crossroads in his career. What should he do next? The teenage idol of the fifties and early ’60s was an amusing memory, and in all honesty, there wasn’t much happening in the way of anything. 

Formation: 

“Then I decided: I wanted to sing, but I couldn’t go back and record the same type of songs. I wanted to grow, to create and perform on my own without big studio arrangements; and for that I needed my own group again. We started to rehearse four and five days a week in a building my dad owns in Burbank. We improvised and experimented and listened to other people’s work, people like Randy Newman and Tim Hardin. Then one day I heard Nashville Skyline by Bob Dylan, and I knew where I wanted to go. I listened to that album for days – the songs were so simple, yet cryptic at times. I wanted to sing songs like that, and, if possible, also write like that. So for a year and a halt that’s all I did. We’d rehearse during the day, and I’d write at night.

“Our first major appearance was at the Troubadour in Hollywood, and the audiences were very enthusiastic. After that we appeared in small clubs throughout the country, and recorded our first album. We also had a single on the charts, Dylan’s ‘She Belongs To Me’. That was very encouraging. I guess that’s the only thing I miss about those days – to have a single released, and to hear it two days later on all the stations. Yeah, I guess I’d like that again.”

The above was part of a feature by Shaun Considine in the New York Times of Jan. 23, 1972, and it seems to encapsulate nicely a little of this period’s history. The first thing was that single Rick mentioned, ‘She Belongs to Me’/'Promises’, and so far this particular session is not immortalised on an album, although both the songs are differently recorded on the first album we’ll be talking about. ‘She Belongs to Me’ was a million seller, although in all honesty I’m not sure why. It’s not that it’s bad, but it just seems a little ordinary vocally. Mind you, the instrumental side of things is fine, and equally ‘Promises’, which is one of Rick’s own songs, has good playing. Unfortunately, there’s a rather predominant chorus of backing vocalists on the top side. But we’re digressing, and we will a little more with Rick using ‘She Belongs to Me’ to illustrate a point.

“When I first went with MCA, it was Decca, and there was like a new regime every four months. It was really frightening when I went there. But with ‘She Belongs to Me’, I went in and recorded that without them knowing, because I got pre-empted out of the studios over there. I said, ‘Well, this isn’t a hobby to me, you know, this is what I do for a living,’ so I just went in a recorded it, and they all got mad because I said, ‘Just put it out,’ you know, ‘Here’s the single, just put if out.’ It’s just a complete new company now, and it used to be that I was embarrassed to say I was with Decca. But now, if I went to sign with a record company, I’d want to sign with MCA.” 

ZZ: We saw a Stone Canyon – it’s the other end of Sunset, isn’t it?
RN: Well, it’s right down here, it’s off Ventura. I was trying to think of a name…
ZZ: It’s a good name – it’s very Californian!
RN: Yeah, got ‘Canyon’ in there…

Now, all the above is one version of how the Stone Canyon came to be formed. Now a slightly different version, from my first interview with Rick:

“The way it came about was that I was supposed to do a date at the Troubadour in LA, and I was really looking around for a band. I got to know Randy Meisner through going down to the Troubadour and seeing him play with Poco there, and we struck up a casual acquaintance. Then I heard he was looking round to do something else – he had just left Poco, I don’t know really why – he wasn’t very happy with them for some reason. He was living with a drummer, Pat Shanagan, and Allen Kemp, a lead guitarist. He knew Pat and Allen because they had all played together in a group called, at various times, The Poor and the Soul Survivors, up in Denver, Colorado. They had a couple of hit records in Denver as The Poor, but I don’t know which label there were on. Anyway, it happened that they were all available to play at that time, and it worked out real well.

“Then I wanted to use a steel player. On the first date at the Troubadour, Tom Brumley wasn’t with us, and I used Sneaky Pete Kleinow. At that time, he was still with the Burrito Brothers, and he could only do that one date, so I used Buddy Emmons for a couple of nights. I’d never tried a steel guitarist before that date, and I only had three or four days to rehearse using one although I had a feeling it would be OK, because many of my early songs had been country influenced. But Tom is great, I was really lucky to get him. After we’d played that first date, I was going to record a live album, so it was actually our second date there and by that time, I’d got together with Tom, who really hadn’t been playing for about a year, because he was manufacturing steel guitars.”

There will be more on the subject of Mr Brumley a little later in this piece, but at the moment I can’t find the particular article from which I want to quote. Concerning the rest of the original members of the Stone Canyon Band, you can find out more about them, and especially about Randy Meisner, from ZZ24 (Poco article and tree) and ZZ29 (Eagles article and tree). 

In Concert 

And that’s the title of the first album from this latest outburst. You’ll have gathered from what has gone before, and from the title of the album that it’s live, and a highly biased source, the by now famous Rocky Prior, tells me that Rolling Stone described the album as the best live one in several years. In fact, I’m not about to disagree with that, because it’s certainly no strain to play it frequently. It was done at the Troubadour in LA, just like the man said, and Rick had a few words to say about that establishment.

“What I started doing is playing the Palomino, and for one thing, you get paid. At the Troubadour, it ends up costing you to play there. They pay the minimum to everybody, and it’s used as a kind of a springboard for people. It works with a lot of people, but I ended up – I did it three or four times and it becomes as if you’re kind of expected: ‘Well, when are you gonna play the Troubadour again?’ So it’s nothing new.”

Pete [Frame] and I went to the Troubadour a couple of times, and it was pretty nice. the tequilas flowed freely, and the place wasn’t so crowded that it was difficult. We saw Loudon Wainwright, Bonnie Raitt, Wendy Waldman and somebody else – quite an impressive bunch, really, particularly when you consider that the Roxy and the Whisky are very close at hand. London, in that way, you don’t make it. Someone said to me in Hollywood that the Troubadour was only able to remain open because of the booking policy and the occasional live album which was made there, but I really don’t know the truth of that. Anyway, it makes the Speakeasy look like a dungheap.

Ah yes, the record. An announcement, some applause, and straight into a ‘hello’ song, ‘Come on In’, written by Rick. Straightaway, the instrumental power of the band is demonstrated, with some dinky little solos from Brumley and Kemp, and some really tasty harmonies. Rick sings at the bottom, Kemp a step up, and Meisner positively excels at the top. A good track, and immediately into ‘Hello, Mary Lou’, which inevitably has a somewhat different treatment, but no less good for that. Brumley’s fills are beautiful, and Kemp, whose guitar playing I found rather suspect when I saw the band on their British tour, holds his own.

Rick introduces ‘Violets of Dawn’ as being by ‘a good friend’, Eric Andersen. Nevertheless, Eric’s surname suffers the usual mis-spelling on his songwriter credit, even though he writes the appreciative sleeve note inside, and makes it clear that it’s an ‘e’ and not an ‘o’ at the end of his name. (Just to make up for that, let me plug a double album in Vanguard’s fine Best Of/Greatest Hits series. The Best of Eric Andersen, which contains the original of this excellent song.) A kind of medley, composed of ‘Who Cares About tomorrow’ and ‘Promises’ (the B side of ‘She Belongs to Me’, but in studio form on the single) follows, then ‘She Belongs to Me’ again, but with rather superior harmonizes and so on, when compared to the studio cut. Up to this point it’s all very fine stuff, and only the choice of ‘If You Gotta Go, Go Now’ mars this side of the album. It’s a bit too much of hackneyed number for my money, and Brumley plays what becomes a rather irritating lick during the verses. Still, a very good start. (Before I forget, the mention of a sleevenote by Eric Andersen may have confused a few of you, who are even now searching their copies of the album. Unfortunately, you’ve been the helpless victims of British cheapo-cheapo, and you should think about replacing your copy with an American cut out, which is how I know about the fold-out sleeve.)

Side two starts off with a gentle percussion beat, then Rick goes into ‘I’m Walkin” to a scream of delight from the audience, which you will find becomes fully justified by the time you get into the track, which is quite beautiful. Then there’s a hark-back to that Tim Hardin-influenced album, and we get ‘Red Balloon’, which works better in this band contact than in the highly orchestrated versions of Tim’s other songs by Rick. When you’re this far through the album, and you’re digging it like I am, it doesn’t matter that the next track is ‘Louisiana Man’, and certainly he version of ‘Believe What You Say’ is great, with a driving beat and those reliable Brumley fills. In fact, by this time one is beginning to get the picture that Tom Brumley is the James Burton of the Stone Canyon Band, if you see what I mean.

The audience, presumably composed of the very young, didn’t seem to recognise ‘Believe What You Say’, and greeted its announcement without a murmur, as also occurred with ‘Easy to Be Free’, which is another of Rick’s own songs, but after both well-deserved outbursts of cheering could be detected. Not surprising, because ‘Easy To Be Free’ is a fabulous song and stands up with all the other ace songs on the record, including the one which ends it all, ‘I Shall Be Released’. All in all, a very fine album indeed, and one which you, yes, I mean you, should have. A compete recommendation, for despite the one or two points I’ve mentioned, this is a better album in every way (recording, playing, singing, production, material), than almost anything that I’ve heard in 1974. Now, follow that…. 

Rick Sings Nelson 

And he did, too. In September of the same year, 1970, whose January had produced In Concert came Rick Sings Nelson and if you thought my comments on the sleeve of In Concert were a little scathing, just wait because this later album’s sleeve is absolutely crucified in comparison to the American original. The cover concept was brilliant – externally, a plain buff sleeve, with, in the centre of the front, a label sized hole, just like a 78 sleeve, really. Through this circle could be seen the record label, which is a specially designed effort, multi-coloured, but not in a psychedelic way, more like a cowboy leather belt or bad design. A picture or Rick at the top, the album’s title, a few credits including the song titles, and right at the bottom, very small, the American Decca logo. Inside, there’s a loose poster of Rick in a monochrome brown, which nearly smells of horses and is big too, nearly three feet by two. When you open the sleeve, you find that the poster is a blown up details of a picture of the band, idling in some Texan ghost town, and really looking ready for some kind of action, like maybe the posse, or is it the bad guys, come galloping into town. It’s a little like something from A Fistful of Dollars, and that’s high praise indeed from me.

So what did the English company do? Well, it’s a bit predictable, isn’t it? First off, the poster goes, and I suppose that’s not too unreasonable. Then the fold-out sleeve goes, for which I suppose there might be an excuse, but when they decide that the hole in the middle is going to cost too much, everything starts falling apart, So it’s no hole, and may be that wouldn’t have been too bad, if they hadn’t made the most appallingly poor copy of the beautiful label, and slapped it on the front of the sleeve! It looks positively horrendous. Now we all know that disasters happen from time to time, but this one would win gold vases, and nearly equal the Titanic. In fact, since MCA have moved from Decca to EMI, I think they may have altered the sleeve a bit – to its original splendour, of course, but to something which resembles the end of the world a little less. On the MCA advertisement in ZZ45, which accompanies the first part of this Charlton Heston work, the sleeve looks rather better than when I saw it previously. If so, well done. If not, change it, before it begins its Gorgon act of turning people to stone.

Anyway, enough of the sleeve, and on to the contents. Reasonably enough, after that title, all the songs are Rick’s own compositions. A quote from one of his biographies:

“Not too long ago, Rick made an important discovery for himself: songwriting. ‘I had been sort of lost and unhappy, but you either have to quit completely, or get hold of yourself and make a total commitment. That’s when I decided to get into writing. I wrote songs back in the ’50s as well, but never really pushed it. It’s a very personal thing, and takes a lot of courage to perform and record your own songs, because you’re always wide open to any criticism. You just have to forget that aspect of it, and go out and do it.”

Since the previous album, the fist of the personnel changes had occurred. In the Stone Canyon Band, it was always the bass players who caused the trouble in the early days. “Randy left, and Tim Cetera joined. He’s the brother of Pete Cetera, who’s in Chicago. Tim is a really talented guy, a good bass player, but the thing I wanted to have going was vocal harmonies – Allen’s voice is the next step up from mine, and he does a lot of harmony parts, and Randy had a kind of folky high voice – and it had worked out very well, but although Tim had no problems as a bass player, it was too high for him to make it vocally. He left to form a group of his own, had he’s also doing session work.” (Oh yes, and a final word about the English sleeve before I forget – the style of writing on the American sleeve had to be looked at fairly carefully before it was transposed to it inferior British counterpart, and poor old Cetera changed his name from Tim to Jim according to the UK sleeve.)

Oh, yes, silly me – the record. Well, with the exception of one track, in fact the last track, this seems to me to be one of the great country/rock albums, in the same league as the first Eagles LP, or A Good Feelin’ to Know – you know the sort of thing. It’s difficult to be critical at all, apart from that one track, because it’s a very even, well thought out, and essentially melodic record of very high quality songs, performed with a feeling and love which comes as a surprise after much of the stuff we hear today. Oh shut up – you’ll never lose that ‘Died in 1967′ epithet if you carry on like that – sorry, squire, I sold the record. But seriously, let’s get down to that nasty track. It’s called ‘My Woman’, and it starts off with tasty chunky guitar chords, and all’s very well until the intrusion of a Dixieland band, and not a tasteful one at that – more like the kind of stuff that such as Sid Phillips might have played, although that’s not supposed to be a personal slur. It’s just that he comes to mind as typifying Light programme ‘Music While You Work’ trad. Anyway, this bunch take over, particularly the trombonist, who apparently had brought his tailgate with him, and it’s only the entry on to the scene of a ferocious hound, who’s upset by the noise, and determines to make his own barking type noise, that drives the loony traddies away. Good for the dog, I say. That’s that out of the way, and now to pick out a few highlights. The day I’m writing this, or rather the night, is that of October 28th, and on this night last year, I was trying to get to sleep, knowing that on October 29th I’d be in California.

Am I missing that now! So I’m bound to like a song which starts off, “I’m going to California, and I’ll be there in a week” and goes on about living in a canyon. In fact ‘California’ is the title of the song, and maybe it’s not quite as good a song as it looks. I mean, the place is like being on another planet. If you’ve never been, then start saving right now. California is paradise, but paradise lost, and a visit, if not emigration, is just essential.

The rest or the songs are just fine, and I like them all, with special reference to ‘How Long’, which is a little melancholy, but still great. In general, the business about Cetera not having the right choice can be appreciated, and in fact at times it sounds like they’ve employed some lady back-up singers. Brumley is, at worst, neat and tasteful, and at best, as on ‘The Dolphin’, positively brilliant. There’s also a percussion instrument on that track, perhaps maracas, which sounds enormously like a dog scratching microbes from beneath its armpit. Most effective. Also Rick himself plays piano on ‘The Reason Why’, doing very well, and if it’s him doing that “hit them 88″s electric piano solo on the same track, he’s really got the instrument under control. Anyway, enough of this trivia – this is a record you should have, just like the last one, and I suppose that this was the album that finally, once and for all, proved that Rick was his own man, and not an ageing ’50s rocker still trying to earn a living on the strength of a bunch of golden oldies. Buy this one – OK? 

Rudy the Fifth 

Why not Rick the Twenty Seventh? Well, it’s not so catchy, is it? In fact, this seems to be the twenty-seventh album by Rick Nelson, which is some achievement. Wait until David Bowie or Brian Ferry etc… Rudy the Fifth, whatever it may mean, is an album that continually makes me think of other great albums I’m very fond of. In fact, it’s also the record that justifies the length of this piece.

There’s nothing bad here at all – perhaps the odd track which verges on the ordinary, like ‘Love Minus Zero (No Limit)’, which is an irreproachable song, of course, but is here sung in rather a routine manner. But we’re moving too fast again, because the record starts off the way it means to continue with Tom Brumley doing a very lifelike take-off of a train getting up steam. The track is titled ‘This Train’, and although it may sound a little hackneyed, it all works a treat. A bit of phased drumming some great bass playing from Randy Meisner, who had by now returned to the group, and even some good piano. Next comes ‘Just Like a Woman’, with some more exemplary steel playing from Tom Brumley, and here we have a good version. I imagine that some might consider it unnecessary, but I believe that it’s only as unnecessary as anyone doing a first-class song – even Bowie and Ferry etc, etc.

‘Sing Me a Song’, like ‘This Train’ is one of Rick’s own songs, and it’s a little reminiscent of ‘You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere’, which is a good excuse to mention the very wonderful Starry Eyed and Laughing, who play a pretty neat version of the song themselves. On ‘Sing Me a Song’, there’s a good example of the way Brumley has taken over the lead playing – Kemp does a few notes, then the steel guitar picks it up and plays a glorious solo. Very much the same happens on the next track, ‘The Last Time Around’, where Brumley’s solo is positively ludicrous. When the track starts, you just know what you’re going to hear a good song, and you sure do. It’s a little like some of the things on Terry Melcher’s album, which I rate very highly indeed. Also the orchestration is well done, as usual by Jimmie Haskell, and that seems a good cue for a quote from Rick on the subject of arrangements.

“In those early days, arrangements weren’t formalised. They just slipped into place, because we rehearsed a lot. Just like the band I have now – we were always playing together, and that’s the best atmosphere in which arrangements can evolve. We recorded by just sitting around and playing until something came out that we liked. There’s a certain amount of freedom in that approach, and it gives everyone the chance to try different things. However, Jimmie Haskell has done all the other arrangements, on and off, right from the start up to Rudy the Fifth. He writes beautiful string scores, and he’s really good.’ Next comes the first of two tracks which are in fact the same song, ‘Song for Kristin’. The lady is Rick’s Mrs, of course, and the tributes to her are instrumental. On the first side, there’s a classical guitar-based piece. It’s nice, if a little out of context with the rest of the record – however, it’s the correct length, which is short. The version on the other side is guitar, but with a string section, and is probably marginally preferable.

The end of the first side is ‘Honky Tonk Women’, which has some more good bass playing, as well as fine drumming from Shanahan, and some quite outstanding steel licks (again). The song is played in a rather more staccato fashion than in its original by the Strolling Ones (thank you, Benny Hill). Altogether, an excellent side, and there’s no letup on side two, which starts with another remake, this time of Johnny ‘Running Bear’ Preston’s ‘Feel So Fine’, and again with piano either by Rick or by Andy Belling, of whom I know nothing else. The song fades into a joke ending, hardly the right herald for one of Rick’s most excellent songwriting and vocal performances, ‘Life’. The only word for this song is one of the many panegyrics I’ve used before (thanx, Al Clark), and with the syncopated backing, the sympathetic orchestration and the cymbal snaps coming from the right hand speaker (left, if mine are wrongly wired again), this is a goodie indeed. ‘Thank You Lord’ is a pseudo-religious song, which starts slowly, then develops into a Southern gospel type rave-up. I wrote in my notes that again it reminded me of Terry Melcher, although I’m not altogether sure why as I sit here tripping. We’ve already dealt with the second version of ‘Song for Kristin’ and ‘Love Minus Zero’, so it’s up to the final track, ‘Gypsy Pilot’, which is a raver of the ‘Fortune Teller’ persuasion, both lyrically and musically, and having been written by Rick, is fairly autobiographical to boot. It’s fairly good, too, but after ‘Life’, it doesn’t have a chance, even with its Hawkwind type ending.

There’s one little coda to Rudy the Fifth, in the form of a single, which was released here on April 16th, 1971, of ‘Life’ – a different version without the strings you hear on the album version, and ‘California’, which is from the album. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who doesn’t require their copy, or has a duplicate – the number is MCA MU1135 Ta. 

Garden Party 

Ah, you know a little bit about this one don’t you? Let’s do

a bit of quoting before we get on to the record. First from a biography: “Not to forget the new album’s namesake ‘Garden Party’, which was the result of his not-so-welcome reception at a Madison Square Garden rock revival concert. The song says goodbye to the people who booed him there, those who wanted to hear the songs of an era long gone. ‘I never believe in rock and roll revivals,’ says Rick. ‘They’re people trying to recapture something that can’t be brought back, but I talked myself into it by thinking that performing for such a large audience was definitely worthwhile. I didn’t know anything about these shows or what people expected. They kept looking at me and my long hair as if they couldn’t believe I was the same person. The evening was a depressing one, but in a way it was good – for it renewed my belief in myself and what I should be doing.” From the first interview, before the song had been heard – “I was talked into doing the Richard Nader thing, but playing at Madison Square Garden was the clincher. I didn’t want it to be called a rock ‘n’ roll revival show, but it was. People were there just to see artists coming out of like closets or something from the ’50s, do their thing, and then go back. We had to re-learn all the old songs, but when I walked on the stage, I don’t think they recognised me without the braces on my teeth.”

From another biography – “Scattered throughout the crowd at Madison Square Garden, there are always few easily detectable cases of premature senility. At Volume VII in October 1971, the symptoms were most in evidence. Special guest star billing on that occasion went to Rick Nelson and the Stone Canyon Band. Now granted, Rick Nelson no more belongs at a Rock Revival than Paul McCartney. One tends to forget that Rick has matured into one of Country Rock’s most accomplished performers, equal certainly to Poco and the Burritos, and perhaps better than the currently popular Eagles. Listen to how much better Rick’s original of ‘Hello Mary Lou’ is compared to the recent revivals by Creedence and the New Riders. There seems to be, however, some lingering prejudice against Rick because of his teen idol days. Perhaps that’s why his latest work remains obscure, except to an enlightened few. Did anyone bother to report that George Harrison was on his way to see Rick perform in England recently, when he and Patti had their car accident? Anyway, Rick came on that night and reminded a few people that it was the 1970s and they didn’t like him for it. He offered the most impressive set of the entire evening, and they booed him. They couldn’t cope with it. Rick didn’t play the game. He didn’t pretend that Madison Square Garden was the biggest malt shop in the world, and that he was a jukebox that hadn’t been tampered with since 1961.”

Heavy stuff, squire? By this time, another bass player change had occurred, Randy Meisner having finally left for the Eyrie, and been replaced by Steve Love. This seems a good time to back track a little on the various members of the Stone Canyon Band up to this point. I won’t bother with Meisner, because his story seems to be well-documented, and I don’t know anything other than what has already been said on the subject of Tim Cetera. Pat Shanahan, apart from being in The Poor and so on, seems to have been one of the Curt Boettcher/Gary Usher people because he appears on the legendary Millennium album, and also on a Together Records double obscurity called Birth Announcement by one Danny Cox. If anyone knows anything, please let me know. Allen Kemp is shrouded in obscurity – the only other credit I have for him is as part of the live backing band for a rather obscure bunch known as Dalton and Dubarri, who Pete and I saw on our second night in LA. If any of you are really into obscuresville, would it be of interest to know that Dalton and Dubarri is a reincarnation of another never-heard-of-them group called Boone’s Farm? Thought not.

Then we come on to Tom Brumley. (My friend Tony Byworth, who is so knowledgeable as to make me feel an imbecile on the subject of country rock –shut up at the back there! – has photocopied for this article the May 1972 issue of Country Music People, which deals at some length with the steel guitar and the players thereof. So thank, Tony, and thanks C.M.P. for the information which follows.) The first thing which strikes me as interesting is that Tom’s father, Albert E. Brumley, wrote ‘I’ll Fly Away’ and ‘Turn Your Radio On’. Did you know that? Apparently, Tom and Albert are going to make an album of the latter’s songs, including those two, so look out for it. Tom’s main claim to fame before joining Rick Nelson was that he was with Buck Owens and the Buckaroos from December ‘63 until February 1969, at which point he became fed up with the constant traveling (Buck Owens is huge in the States). Tom then became manager of a company which built steel guitars, called ZeeBee. The name comes from one Zane Beck who started the company, and Tom stayed with them, not playing at all, for a year, before joining the Stone Canyon Band. He has also played on sessions with the Hagers (now on Asylum), Susan Raye, the Bakersfield Brass and Rose Maddox, about most of whom I know nothing, and is also doing a steel album, which should be complete by now, with Gene Moles, about whom etc.

Rick talked a little about his faithful steel player. “He told me that he really did want to play – he’d been on the road with Buck Owens for so long that it was driving him crazy. He’s still involved with ZeeBee guitars, and I think he owns part of the company, still kind of oversees it a little. Tom’s really good – it’s a really versatile instrument, but people are so quick to just put it in one category, because that’s all they’ve ever heard as the way it’s been played. You can get al sorts of sounds out of it, and you can do it without making it a mechanical type sound too, without making it sound like it’s coming through a Leslie speaker or something. I’ve never really believed in that, you know – a steel guitar should sound like a steel guitar, and to an organ. Anyway, Tom’s a really super person, and we get along real well, and think the same way about a lot of things.”

Does he ever write songs? “Yeah, as a matter of fact he wrote a song that was a big instrumental hit for Buck Owens, but I can’t remember the name of it. It’s hard for someone who thinks instrumentally to write, I imagine, because he’s never really thought about writing words. That’s why it’s much easier for someone who plays the guitar, because you’re always sitting thinking in terms of vocals and music at the same time. But he has a lot of good instrumental ideas.”

All I can say is that Tom Brumley’s playing on the Stone Canyon Band albums is practically faultless. OK? And now on to Steve Love. Of course you all know that he was the bass player in Roger McGuinn’s band that came over this summer and delighted Hyde Park, but before that and before the Stone Canyon Band, I had thought that he was in the excellent and much under-rated New York band, Stories, a band which also featured the talents of Michael Brown, an ordinary name, but an extraordinary talent when you figure that he wrote ‘Walk Away Renee’ and ‘Pretty Ballerina’, and was leader of the legendary and fabulous Left Banke. Rick didn’t think that Steve was in Stories, but I’ve found a picture of them, and the guy with the moustache in the front there looks pretty much like the same Steve Love, but on a cold and windy day. Anyone with any more definite information, please let me know, and you should check out the Left Banke (on Philips) and Stories (on Kama Sutra).

Now the record. I thought it might be a nice idea to ring up the mysterious Rocky Prior, and ask him which tracks were his favourites on these last two albums, and I’ve incorporated his comments with mine. ‘Let It Bring You Along’ was written by Steve Love, and there doesn’t seem to be any Tom Brumley in evidence, unless the dual-lead guitar thing at the end has a steel as one of its parts. The song is average but hots up a lot when the guitar solo comes in. It’s as if someone shoved a red-hot poker up A. Kemp. Then there’s the title track, which should have been a hit single here, but just failed to make the top thirty, despite almost ceaseless radio play for several weeks. The song should be well known to all, but I’d like to point out the very direct mention of Chuck Berry, looking and playing just about the same as he did fifteen years before. Is this progress, I ask myself?

Much of the rest of the album consists of good but undistinguished songs, with the instrumental side of things making more waves than the singing, which isn’t bad, but doesn’t have a lot to work with. ‘So Long Mama’, for instance, has some good steel, as usual, ‘I Wanna Be With You’, written by Kemp and the now-departed Meisner, is all right, but no more and ‘Are You Really Real?’ has wood flute, whatever that is, played by Don Nelson, who may be a relation, but then again, may not. Rocky noted that Rick uses what he called ‘John Lennon echo’ on his voice, and that’s right. Very odd. Side two begins with ‘I’m Talkin’ About You’ from that very same C. Berry and you’ll recall that the same song, but in a different version, was on Spotlight on Rick, which we discussed in the last issue. This time, it’s a long song, and it’s played rather like The Who might do it, which I’m sure you’ll agree can’t be bad. Oh, but the drumming’s not too much like that nice Mr Moon. In fact, it’s a rather impressive track, and the next one, ‘Nighttime Lady’, a Nelson composition, ends up somewhat the same way, although it’s a bit ordinary for a start. After that ‘A Flower Opens Gently By’ and ‘Don’t Let Your Goodbye Stand’, which are both enormously unwieldy and unlikely titles, don’t really get one leaping about, and ‘Palace Guard’, the follow-up single to ‘Garden Party’, makes it as an album track, but is about as commercial as Michael Nesmith, if you see what I mean. And ‘Don’t Let Your Goodbye Stand’ was written by Richard Stekol, who rocky thinks is an obscure American poet. Rocky also feels that this album, coming as it did off a big single, at least in the States, was rather an anti-climax, and I think he’s very probably right there. Back to Rick, talking about the gap between the ‘Garden Party’ single and the album which eventually emerged.

“It really was a long time – I got caught in a trap almost, because ‘Garden Party’ really took off before I expected it to. When the album did come out, it was like an old album, because it was so long after the single (album released late 1972). And then the old group decided to leave. They had been talking about it, and they wanted to form their own group, all except Tom. Tom was very happy with what we were playing. I’ve always let them do what they want to do, and it was mutual agreement kind of thing, no hard feelings or anything. It happened just before the album came out, and it could have been very difficult to promote the album, but I got together the new band in about three days. It was incredible! Just super musicians, and signers – that was my main worry, that I’d fail to vocally be able to match was was going on.

“What happened with the old group, was that they started a group, and they split up within a matter of weeks. I can’t blame them for wanting to start one, but it’s a difficult thing to keep everybody together and happy. I guess they were feeling neglected. They reached a point where they couldn’t really go any farther, and they weren’t that happy with what we were playing. It was actually a thing that I could feel was happening, and I was about at the stage of expecting a split. But things always work out for the better, and I’m much happier musically, and everyone’s really into what we’re playing. The old group went as far as we could go, and all of a sudden that was it. The only thing that worried me was that they left when they knew there were some gigs, coming up in ten days, but they put it to me on the basis that they would try to work around their dates if I couldn’t find anybody… so I just found somebody.” 

Windfall 

And now we’re as up to date as we’re going to get. Windfall was released in the States in late 1973, and here about last April or May. It features an almost totally new Stone Canyon Band, Tom Brumley being the only one, apart form Rick himself, to stay. So the first thing to talk about is the band. Rick: “I just really lucked out this time. It started with Dennis Larden, the guitar player, who is really inventive and really a good songwriter. The bass player is Jay White (J. DeWitt White) and Ty Grimes is the drummer. They’re not from anywhere specific, but they knew each other and had played together before, on club dates and stuff. What usually happens is that you meet one guy, and he’ll know a couple of other people that are friends of his, that he’s played with. So that’s what happened. We were playing a date at the Houston Astrodome. It’s kinda frightening anyway, just to drive by there. It’s so huge… I mean, everybody’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s really big,’ but you can’t believe it – you’re like a little speck. So that was the next date, and we just had to get it together. We had a week and a half between that and trying to get the band together, so it was kind of thrown together, but everybody really came through.

“I met Dennis through a fellow named Michael Sherman, who is now a freelance writer, although he was working at MCA at the time. He’d heard Dennis playing a couple of sessions. So Dennis and I got together, and then we talked about these other people. Tom Brumley, though is a very important part of the whole thing. If Tom had left, I would have really been in trouble. What’s happened now is that these guys are musically so good, and Tom helps Dennis a lot, and Dennis helps Tom a lot, and it’s really a good working thing. Tom was very country-oriented, and on this new album, we’ve kind of taken it a step further, because the steel is so versatile that it doesn’t have to be relegated to country. I’m really happy with it, and it’s really helped Tom’s playing a lot, listening to Dennis. They worked out a lot of things together. And what’s really great is that everybody’s working for the same thing now. It’s not a question of one guy wants to do this, the other wants to do that – they’re really happy playing what we’re playing.”

The gripe about this album is that in its American version, the words were on the back of the sleeve in the lovely Mrs Nelson’s tasty writing. For no good reason that I’m aware of, we didn’t get them here, but otherwise, the sleeve is pretty nice. And the record – well, it sure isn’t another Rudy the Fifth, unfortunately, but it’s quite acceptable. The band seem more together than their predecessors, said Rocky, and it does show through. What we have here is patchy material, but very well played. Dennis Larden, as well as being a good guitarist, is also a songwriter, and while it would be wrong to call him a great writer at this point, he did in fact write five and a half songs of the ten on the album, including the best two, or even three, which are ‘Legacy’ ‘Don’t Leave Me Here’ and ‘One Night Stand’. Is he taking over from you in the songwriting field, Rick? “He wrote the majority, but for me it wasn’t a question of taking over. I think in the long run it’s going to be an addition, and it has relieved me of the pressure of having to come up with ten songs, which I like, and it leads to more variety, which is a good thing.”

‘Legacy’ is actually brilliant. Rocky reckons it’s one of the very best songs Nelson has ever recorded, feeling that this kind of easy-going, chug along song is what Rick does best, a sentiment with which I totally agree. Notice also the lovely falling passage played on the steel guitar. Indeed a goodie. ‘Someone to Love’ demonstrates that Rick isn’t quite so good on a boogie, and the whole track, complete with fuzz guitar and fuzz steel is a bit over-heavy. ‘How Many Times’ is Jay White’s song, and in all honesty, it gets a bit tedious by the end. ‘Evil Woman Child’ is one where Tom Brumley plays lead, although it sounds like a regular guitar. It’s a Latinish track, which Rick felt was something like ‘Hello Mary Lou’, but unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be in the same league to me. Much better is the majestic beauty of ‘Don’t Leave Me Here’, and when you turn the record over, ‘Wild Nights in Tulsa’ is also good. A travel song, written by Don Burns and Ricky Wildflower, which might have been off those famed country albums.

The single from this album was ‘Lifestream’, which Rocky feels was a mistake. It’s not bad, very pleasant, typical mainstream country rock, and other epithets of that nature, but it really isn’t a single, and the only reason it became a single was because it was one of the first of the tracks to be completed. ‘One Night Stand’ is again very good, and again could have been on the country albums, but ‘I Don’t Want to Be Lonely Tonight’, which is Baker Knight’s return to writing for Rick, is unfortunately not really up to his best. Finally, the title track, ‘Windfall’, isn’t that hot either. It’s a track with all sorts of percussion instruments, which sounds as though it could have come off that previously mentioned Millennium album, where there’s a very similar track called ‘The Island’. And all that adds up to a somewhat unsatisfactory, but nevertheless reasonable album. 

Bits 

Just before we wind this all up, a few more things that came out of the interviews. Let’s start with acting. Rick has made appearances in The Streets of San Francisco, as a murderer, in Marshall as a rapist, in McCloud as a murderer/rock ‘n’ roll signer (they also played ‘Garden Party’ in that one, which may have assisted in the song’s success), and he wants to do some more acting, although he’s not actively searching for it. On ‘Hello Mary Lou’: – “It’s good not to feel that I necessarily have to play that to walk out of the building.” On the changes since he started out: ‘What’s happened is that there are so many better musicians now. When I started, there were four or five lead guitar players that you could name that were contributing anything, and now there’s just so many really great musicians. It’s very easy to end up on the outside of that, rather then really dive into it. Because that’s who the competition is – I’m in competition with everybody. To get to the point of it, I have to at least come up to that standard of playing, and I can’t afford to fall back on the old songs if I want to progress.” 

End 

All right, that’s it, I’ve finished. Just before I go, thanks to the following:

Peter Robinson and Geoff Thorn of MCA in England. Bill Yaryan of MCA in Los Angeles, or wherever he is now. Sandy Friedman of Rogers, Cowan and Brenner, in Beverly Hills. Rocky Prior or lending me his records, giving me his opinions, and badgering me into doing the interviews. Willie Nelson (Rick’s cousin and manager). Ray McCarthy for the loan of his records. And of course, to Rick Nelson. 

P.S. Latest news is that Ty Grimes left the Stone Canyon Band to join the Captain in the Magic Band, and was replaced by Richie Hayward when it was thought that Little Feat were on the way out. Now that Lowell and the boys are getting to be stars, Rick probably doesn’t have him any more. Additionally, there hasn’t been anything else released since Windfall. It would be nice to think that this article might at least indicate that someone somewhere cares. 

John Tobler

This article from the Salon website (under their “Brilliant Careers” series of articles) comes from Nov. 10, 1998, and was of course written before Phil Spector’s murder of actress Lana Clarkson in 2003. Yes, it is hard to think of Spector now as anything but a monster, but despite it all, the man did create dozens of brilliant, timeless hits. He was one of the greatest producers in music history, and though that doesn’t excuse his horrendous behavior and acts, it’s just a simple truth…

 

Love, as anybody who’s ever been in it knows, can make you sick with feeling. But nobody ever expressed the dizzying fever of romance quite the way Phil Spector did.

In the early ’60s, while Berry Gordy was taking the rhythm of youth and giving it Motown’s bright, sophisticated sheen, Spector was grabbing up the same elements and pitching them down a black hole of raw emotion and supersaturated orchestration. What spun out the other end was pop music all right, complete with harmonizing vocals, ardent lyrics and lush instrumentation. But it had a new form – one that replaced the bounce of innocence with the throb of desire.

Spector became a musical artist because he was on fire to express himself, and he became a record producer because he wanted to express himself exactly his way. He first learned about creative control as a teenage member of the 1950s one-hit wonders the Teddy Bears, writing and producing for the band as well as playing in it. The song that put him on the map, a hypnotic lullaby called “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” might have sounded like an ode to teen romance. In fact, the song was inspired by Spector’s father, a man so driven by his own demons that he committed suicide when his son was only 8. The title of the song came from the epitaph on his grave. “To Know Him” set the tone for Spector’s unique brand of hit-making – taking tunes suffused with great tenderness and injecting them with a blast of utter torment.

Though Spector liked being a musician, he loathed having anyone – especially industry suits – tell him what to do. So after the Teddy Bears broke up and he had honed his gifts with a stint at New York’s legendary pop factory, the Brill Building, Spector co-founded his own label, Philles. It was there he began to find his groove. Spector continued to play and write, but quickly discovered his real talent was as a musical architect, putting the elements of song together in new and deeply affecting ways.

By the time he was 21, Spector was a millionaire. Within a mere three years, he had produced more than 20 hit singles and given birth to a style bombastically christened “the Wall of Sound.” The Jewish kid whose first love was jazz, this reedy little dynamo from the Bronx, had created a noise that was very, very big.

The Wall of Sound was a musical mind-slam; it overloaded the auditory nerves with such sweepingly complex arrangements and such a barrage of instruments that it rendered the individual parts of the whole unrecognizable. Spector called his singles “little symphonies for the kids,” but they were closer to opera – full of romantic Sturm und Drang and more than occasional dips into absolute madness. The Wall was the sound of young love distilled into the three-minute opus – beautiful and horrible and sweet and suffocating.

To his towering layers of melody Spector piled on lyrics just a little more insistently than anybody else; he added singers whose voices could careen from radio-ready fluff to an anguished wail on the turn of a note. And during the powder-keg tension of the early civil rights era, he had the chutzpah to be colorblind, creating music that refused to be identified by the races of the artists who performed it. It was for his stars the Righteous Brothers (Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield) that the term “blue-eyed soul” was coined, as if the idea of white singers making truly soulful music had not been possible before. But if his music wasn’t black or white, neither were the feelings it depicted. Nothing was ever simple in a Phil Spector song.

Because Spector produced as a young man, his music had an authentically vulnerable young sound. It was simultaneously rough and elaborate; it beckoned with a finger snap and thumped like a heartbeat. And it laid bare Spector’s own private and painful bêtes noire – his hyperkinetic, insomniac energy; his doomed love affairs; his family’s legacy of mental illness.

Spector knew the tumult and the masochism of love, how a blow can seem like a caress when you haven’t yet learned the difference between the two. The shocking power of “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss),” which was banned by some radio stations because of its lyrics, has only increased over time; it’s brutal proof of Spector’s unflinching understanding that not all relationships are chaste, “Walking in the Sand” affairs. His music reflected the intensity of first love and first sex, when one’s newfound capacity for pleasure can be so desperately good it crosses over into torment.

Spector had a gift for expressing that raw emotion from a female as well as male perspective. Two of the primary vehicles for his recording studio passions, the Crystals and Ronettes, were the first girl groups to be frankly carnal and unabashed about stating their needs; their voices howled above tsunamis of melody. The heroines of “Then He Kissed Me,” for example, were so blown away at being “kissed in a way that I’d never been kissed before” that the music could only thunder along in knee-buckling amazement at the erotic sensation. Ronettes’ lead singer Ronnie Bennett – Spector’s lover and later wife – didn’t stop at simply asking to “be my little baby,” she demanded that you “be my baby now” with a gorgeously scary urgency. On the painfully majestic “River Deep-Mountain High,” his ultimate metaphor for the soaring, sinking nature of love, Spector reduced Tina Turner to trembling, practically choking sobs, as she moaned, “Do I love you, my oh my?” And then, to show men also could be passion’s victims, he had the Righteous Brothers throw themselves from the cliffs in such instant pop masterpieces as “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” (“You never close your eyes anymore when I kiss your lips/There’s no tenderness like before in your fingertips”).

But one can only feel so much for so long. By 1966, propelled by the commercial failure of “River Deep-Mountain High,” he had begun his disgusted retreat away from the music world and into seclusion. He continued to work sporadically, notably on the Beatles’ final group and early solo projects. It was he who put the final touches on the Let It Be album, and he who gave Lennon’s “Instant Karma” its transcendent edge. The song was one of his last real hits, which may be why it sounds like a supernova, an outburst whose finality only adds to its luster.

The “tycoon of teen” was burned out well before he even hit 30, in 1970. In later years Spector traded his vibrancy for eccentricity. By the time he produced the Ramones’ 1980 End of the Century, he was as famous for being a show business kook as he’d ever been for being a producer. The punk heroes did a cover of “Baby I Love You” that creaked with irony.

Gothic stories of drugs and vicious guard dogs and bodyguards spilled out from his Hollywood mansion. Spector took to wearing a gun on his hip and, for a while, a gigantic cross around his neck. He could waste entire days listening to the same track over and over and over again. Guests at his mansion found themselves subjected to capricious lock-ins; his children and ex-wives would claim Spector abused them. The brilliant, beautiful romantic couldn’t die like a Romeo or waste away like a Keats; he settled instead for a dementia-tinged exile. Today Spector still works now and then, but mostly, the man who built the Wall of Sound has erected around himself a wall of silence. And if there are still intoxicating melodies playing in his head, he’s no longer terribly interested in unleashing them on the world.

Spector was the first producer as star, the first behind-the-scenes recording wizard who was bigger than any of his artists. His 1963 Yuletide compilation, A Christmas Gift to You, is still better known as Phil Spector’s Christmas album, as if the collective talents of its formidable contributors are small potatoes next to the creative firepower of its maestro. He was the man who gave the American Bandstand generation a darker and more sexual edge, the prodigy who inspired everyone from the Beach Boys to the Rolling Stones to Bruce Springsteen. He was the first punk, the visionary who fused the pathos of jazz with the vitality of rock ‘n’ roll. He was and remains the classic 20th century pop-genius madman.

Spector was voted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989. But with his masterpieces dumped into the uneven pile of Oldies “classics,” it’s easy nowadays to overlook Spector’s contribution. And that’s a shame. Because Spector’s greatest songs can still make you feel again – not in a cloyingly nostalgic way, but in a brazenly real one – what it is to confront the world with a young and pliant soul. And they can remind you that while hearts are broken all the time by pain and loneliness, those in love can be wrecked just as easily by pure, astonishing joy.

Mary Elizabeth Williams