skip to main |
skip to sidebar
I have to confess to a certain ambivalence to 'Moon River' when taken in its original context. First sung by Audrey Hepburn in Blake Edwards' big screen adaptation of 'Breakfast At Tiffany's', Hepburn's 'Holly Golightly' is a world away from the more hard boiled, borderline prostitute of Truman Capote's novella and I've never appreciated this sanding down of the rough edges to the point where the character could sing something so whimsical. It's not how I imagine Golightly to be anyway, the same way that Liza Minelli is far removed from my imagining of Isherwood's Sally Bowles.
Which I suppose means it's just as well that 'Moon River' has long since broken free of the shackles of that parent film anyway. Just as (to give another example) the movie 'Unchained ' doesn't spring to mind whenever 'Unchained Melody' is played, 'Moon River' is classy enough to stand by itself simply by virtue of being what it is - an evocative American romance of unabashed optimism and hope ("Two drifters, off to see the world, there’s such a lot of world to see" - who wouldn't find that aspirational?) that's become a much covered standard.
If there are any flies in this ointment, then it's that 'my Huckleberry friend' line. Pages have been filled with discussions as to what that means to the extent that the debate overshadows the song,* but to me it's always been plain with the "Two drifters" imagery having obvious parallels with Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and their adventures on the Mississippi; an invocation of a carefree life away from adult cares and responsibilities that's always just "waitin' round the bend" for those with the time to wait.
As an evergreen aspiration refreshingly free of cynicism,** 'Moon River' is a feather quilt of a song for dreamers to wrap themselves in and (to get to the single at hand rather than the song) it's why I prefer Williams Andy's version to this one by Williams Danny. Danny nails the lyric's earthreal tone of wonder, but he takes it slightly too hurriedly for my liking. This is one river that's not going to flow too quickly and Andy's vocal floats over its surface like morning fog on water. Just the way it should. But I'm nitpicking now - Danny knows what he's doing here too and this remains a wonderful recording.
* For example, look at this from one Lawson Stone:
"Huckleberry" was commonly used in the 1800's in conjunction with "persimmon" as a small unit of measure. "I'm a huckleberry over your persimmon" meant "I'm just a bit better than you." As a result, "huckleberry" came to denote idiomatically two things. First, it denoted a small unit of measure, a "tad," as it were, and a person who was a huckleberry could be a small, unimportant person--usually expressed ironically in mock self-depreciation.
The second and more common usage came to mean, in the words of the "Dictionary of American Slang: Second Supplemented Edition" (Crowell, 1975): A man; specif., the exact kind of man needed for a particular purpose. 1936: "Well, I'm your huckleberry, Mr. Haney." Tully, "Bruiser," 37. Since 1880, archaic.
The "Historical Dictionary of American Slang" which is a multivolume work, has about a third of a column of citations documenting this meaning all through the latter 19th century.
So "I'm your huckleberry" means "I'm just the man you're looking for!"
** As point of contrast its portrait in the attic would be Paul Simon's 'America', a tale of another duo who "walked off to look for America" but who wind up as lost souls counting cars on the turnpike until oblivion.
One of my favourite guilty pleasures are the films of Tod Slaughter. For those not in the know, Slaughter was a British film actor who cut his teeth treading the boards in a series of over the top Victorian melodramas before George King committed them to celluloid for posterity in the 1930's. 'Sweeny Todd', 'Maria Marten', 'The Ticket Of Leave Man' - Slaughter nudged and cackled and winked and murdered his way through them all in the grandest of Guignol styles that didn't so much chew up the scenery as take a chainsaw to it. And now, listening to Frankie Vaughan ham his way through 'Tower Of Strength', I'm very much reminded of Slaughter in his pomp.
Frankie's woman has done his wrong and like Lear on the heath, he rages he will do such things that will be the terror of the earth if only he had the guts to carry them out. Oh yes, if he were a stronger man then no way would this woman get away with taking him for a fool and he'd tell her straight - "I don't want you, I don't need you, I don't love you any more". But Frankie is too weak for any of that and his bug eyed rage at his own impotence ( "But a tower of strength is a something...I'LL NEVER BE!!!") even overshadows his hate for his ex.
It's an astonishing performance, as over the top as they come with Vaughan sounding nuttier than a shithouse dog in summer and all the while backed up by a brassy backing that blares up a storm of its own. Whether Frankie thought plugging everything directly into the mains then hitting the overload switch was the best way to sound relevant to a rocking generation turned off by the sophistication of his usual top hat and tails persona I don't know, but if it was then this is a major misfire. Yet in shooting wide he still manages to hit the bullseye of a different target altogether - by creating an Armageddon sized statement of camp intent (no I don't care how sincere Frankie is trying to be, this is camp with a capital 'C') he not only invents Tom Jones three years early, but effectively trumps him before he even set foot in a recording studio. 'Tower Of Strength' is not for the feint hearted, but there's a hell of a ride here for anyone willing to be carried along. I bet Slaughter would have loved it.
Two sides from the pen of Pomus and Shuman, 'Little Sister' is pure rock and roll with a four on the floor backbeat and a stop start structure that's Led Zeppelin in microcosm. It's loud and raucous yet for all it's energy it already sounds more pastiche than the genuine article in 1961. Like a thieving magpie there's a bit of this ('Hound Dog's paws are all over Presley's vocal) and a bit of that (I can't help but hear Joe Moretti's guitar lines from 'Shakin' All Over' chiming away behind it all) but none of it gels into a fully satisfying statement of a song that particularly needed to be recorded. A famed version by Ry Cooder from 1979 trimmed the fat to show the lean quality of the song underneath, but everybody here, Elvis included, sound like they're trying a bit too hard to do something they once made sound so effortless.
'His Latest Flame' was originally recorded by Del Shannon as a discordant clang that aimed for intensity but instead collapsed in on itself under the weight of everything turned up to eleven, including Shannon's histrionic vocal. This time it's the turn of Presley to cut to the chase by stripping it down to its heartbeat of a shuffling Bo Diddley rockabilly rhythm that's so much grist to the Presley mill. Elvis doesn't need to break sweat to lasso this into submission so he doesn't bother, and the hammering beat belies the fact this is Presley's most laidback vocal in quite a while. Not that he's coasting, far from it; the bemused disbelief in his voice (a mile away from Shannon's angst) suits both the song's subject ("Would you believe that yesterday this girl was in my arms and swore to me, she'd be mine eternally") and the incredulity that such a thing could be happening to 'The King' at all. For us mortals, must have been heartening to know that even Elvis gets two timed sometimes.
'His Latest Flame' is one of my all time favourite Presley recordings, but the bottom line here is that there's nothing new going on in any of above. Both songs are derivative all the way, but as a boat steadying exercise after some scattershot singles that gave no clear indication of just where Presley was heading, it's just what was needed at this point in his career, a call back to his roots and the music that made him famous in the first place. And in that it's just fine.
I
commented back on 'You Don't Know' on how Shapiro was a fish out of water in 1961 with her undoubted talent squandered on inappropriate songs. And so it goes on 'Walkin' Back To Happiness' - the polar opposite of the drab balladry of the former song, 'Walking' is nonsense pop to the point of bubblegum and in singing it Shapiro sounds a good fathom out of her depth, but only in the way that if you've got Maradonna in your team, behind the goal is not necessarily the best position to play him in.
In the whole of her interpretation, Shapiro never quite manages to let go and let the tune carry her with its exuberance. Inexperience in this medium sees her always trying to do the 'right thing' by the song but her attempt to impose order only serves to let the air out of a bouncy castle that's just there to be bounced on. And with no bounce, Shapiro's smoky phrasing renders the punctuating "woopah oh yeah yeah"'s more sarcastic than jubilant as they thud awkwardly against the shrill music backing and blinkered/naive optimism of the lyric like tennis balls served against a matress: "I shouldn't have gone away so I'm coming back today, walking back to happiness I threw away" - well just as long as her ex isn't of Eden Kane's mindset. None of this is Shaprio's fault; all she's doing is applying the tools she has to the job in hand, but in listening to this and 'You Don't Know' back to back, all I can hear is the sound of missed opportunity and wasted talent.
A staple of campfire sing songs and turgid school assemblies performed by a US vocal group from the less radical side of the (then) burgeoning sixties folk scene - there's not much to whet the appetite there, and the crushing sense of potential anti-climax carries over into the recording itself. Fair enough, it's professionally arranged and presented in a style that goes some way to scrape off the taint of generations of over enthusiastic RE teachers who knew enough chords on a guitar to urge Michael to row that boat ashore, but The Highwaymen themselves are no less smugly worthy in their earnestness and try as I might, I simply cannot listen to it without bringing Mulligan and O'Hare* to mind and breaking out into a grin. Which I'm guessing isn't what The Highwaymen had in mind, though 1961 audiences of course would have no such problem.
* A Vic Reeves/Bob Mortimer creation, I'll let Wikipedia do the honours: "An unsettling and bizarre folk duo, possibly spoofing the style of Foster & Allen. Mulligan (Vic) has breasts, presumably due to an incident with hormone replacement pills, while O'Hare (Bob) has a big beard and a very short temper. Mulligan and O'Hare first met at an African style picnic in 1963. They sing songs such as "Frustrated By Weeds" and "My Rose Has Left Me," the latter about O'Hare's ex-wife Rose, a bald woman who went "to Kenya with the bloke from Allied carpets." They have released ground breaking albums, such as The Onion Ring, Moods, Coffee Break, Pancake Day and Tittybiscuits and are well known for their instrumental cover versions of popular songs."
Belatedly tapping into the vein of exotica that so enthused 1950's America, ('Kon-Tiki' was the name of the raft used by Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl in his 1947 Pacific expedition), The Shadows put further distance between their own output and their meat and potatoes backing for Cliff Richard. But while 'Apache' successfully captured the ominous mystery of the reservation, this is less of a winner; 'Kon-Tiki' never once manages to put me in mind of some Polynesian paradise or conjure up the zest of the ocean in getting there, something which I think is a fair requirement for a tune that specifically namechecks Heyerdahl's South Sea exploits. Marvin does his best and 'Kon-Tiki' does breeze along on a pleasant enough twang, but it's one that's unmistakeably home-grown and resolutely functional. And with a tune too slight and choppy to settle into anything comfortable, it's a struggle to remember how to whistle it's main theme mere minutes after it's finished.
A double A side from Bassey with two songs linked by a common theme of striving upwards for something. Given her own rags to riches story then there's scope here for Bassey to invest large chunks of her own fire but alas, 'Reach For The Stars' is a drab swirl of a recording with a honk of a vocal that never scales the heights it aspires to before fizzling out like a cheap firework with a dud fuse. 'Climb Ev'ry Mountain' is a little more enjoyable thanks to its Rogers and Hammerstein pedigree, but Bassey barks that title like a command rather than an aspiration and it makes me feel more cowed than inspired - had she sung this in the film she'd have stopped those Nazi's dead in their tracks. Both songs have volume in spades but a dearth of subtlety or emotion, making this pretty much disposable.
A death song (perhaps) from home, 'Johnny Remember Me' is a product of the 304 Holloway Road London address where Joe Meek based his home studio. Unlike the death songs to date, writer Geoff Goddard gives us no set up story leading to Leyton's fate - that much detail is in the past and Meek controls the tension with aplomb. Leyton rides the song's horse gallop like a Frankie Laine with the lid on, providing an earthy grip that ensures the drama doesn't come prefixed with a 'melo' (which the gothic schlock of "When the mist's a-rising and the rain is falling" could easily have lapsed into) as he remembers an unnamed girl he "loved and lost a year ago".
This much is standard for the genre, but what makes the song is the repeated ghostly refrain of the title (voiced by Lissa Gray), "singing in the sighing of the wind" and delivered as both a command and an entreat that's unwavering in its message. In tone it sounds as much a voice from beyond the grave as Kate Bush would adopt for Cathy on 'Wuthering Heights', but that may be too simplistic - I qualified my opening 'death song' comment with a 'perhaps' because nowhere does the song conclusively state that this girl is dead; Johnny has 'loved and lost' her meaning that her wails could simply be the voice of his conscience rather than anything supernatural.
Treatise on the power of undying love or a rumination on guilt and psychological obsession? Well you can take your pick but I don't think it matters all that much; it all goes into the pot to add depth to the song for sure, but Leyton is a haunted man regardless, fated never to find peace in this life ("But as long as I live I know I'll hear her singing in the sighing of the wind" because of a one time dalliance that won't let go. That's the power of a woman for you, and all the more powerful in that Meek and Goddard managed to wrap it all up in two and a half minutes. A marvellous single.
Helen Shapiro was (and remains) the youngest female solo artist to have a UK number one. I don't know how hard the 'she's only fourteen' angle was pushed in 1961, but to my mind it's an impressive fact on paper but rather less so on the ears. That Shapiro can belt out a tune there can be no doubt and this would have slayed them on whatever would have passed for The X Factor in 1961, but she attacks the lyric with a would be sophistication that it doesn't deserve. In style, 'You Don't Know' is a throwback to the 'grown up' pre-pop of the fifties, a big, string laden ballad about loving from afar. What say Shapiro had in the songs she was given to sing, again, I don't know, but she doesn't sound like she's enjoying any of this.
Granted, with the song being what it is she's not meant to, but neither does she sound convincing in her apparent heartache: "You don't know just how I feel, for my love I daren't reveal. I am so, I'm so afraid, you might not care" - as an expression of teenage angst it would have worked better rubbed in the dirt of some Shangri-Las low life melodrama, but Shapiro's 14 going on 40 delivery ill suits such expression of an adolescent crush and the syrupy string arrangement completes the little girl dressed in her mother's ball gown aura of the song - it's fancy dress and not much more. Shapiro's only fault was perhaps arriving on the scene a few years too early; with writers and producers more attuned to the pop sensibility she could have had a career with legs. 1961 did not seem to know what to do with her though and in a few short years she'd be all washed up, leaving those Sandie's and Dusty's to steal all her thunder.
'Well I Ask You' - with such a quintessentially English phrase for a title I'm tempted to see this as an aborted comedy vehicle that had the likes of Bernard Bresslaw or Mike Sarne in mind but which was then given to Kane to play a straight bat with when they realised it wasn't funny. Kane (or Richard Sarstedt* as his mother knows him) was a Brit with a stage name that aspired to an American teen idol persona (check out the Primark Presley look on the cover) with a side order of tough guy, but while the song chugs along amiably enough with only a sole gear change, it sounds like so much stodgy gristle and more than a bit dull with the proper Americana of 'Temptation' or 'Runaway' lying in such close proximity. There's simply not much going on here and what does go on repeats endlessly - Kane's girl has left, but now she wants back and Eden isn't playing ball until she begs in tears at his feet. Well, I ask you indeed! But Kane's would be tough nut vocal doesn't endear and for all his bluster (those other songs on the single leave me wondering if he would benefit from some anger management) he sounds like he's fishing for sympathy from the listener and I'm always rooting for the girl to kick this loser into touch once and for all.
* His brother Peter would go on to have his own number one with 'Where Do You Go To My Lovely' in 1969. A third bother Robin would only manage a sole number 3 placing with 'My Resistance Is Low' in 1976, making him Ann when compared to the Charlotte and Emily of his brothers. Ahem.
After The Marcels reconstruction of 'Blue Moon' comes this no less radical cover from The Everly Brothers. 'Temptation' was first recorded by Bing Crosby in 1933, but put his croon up against this then you'd be hard pressed to peg them as the same song. From the drum beat of intent and the opening "Yay yay yay yeah"'s, the Everly's present a tightly wound cacophony of sound that makes the "You were born to be kissed, I can't resist, you are temptation" lyric drip with a force and violence that would have Bing choking on his pipe while a female chorus howl their approval in the background. This is temptation in the raw, Spector's 'wall of sound' two years early and a short, sharp burst of lust fuelled energy that burns itself out after just two minutes; if it was any longer then the brothers would surely have snapped themselves in two with the tension.
'Runaway' kick-starts with a strum before wandering into a cowboy ballad of Shannon walking along wondering what went wrong with his relationship as a hail of a mutant piano runs give sound to the rain he's walking in until a shift into a chunky riffed higher gear sees Del wishing she was with him to end his misery as his voice jumps from an apologetic mumble on the intro into a gutsy yell as he wah wah wah wonders why she ever left at all before a squealing Musitron solo flies in from god knows where to call an end to the proceedings.
Yes, 'Runaway' has one hell of an opening, one that leaves me as breathless as reading that opening sentence out loud, and after such a densely plotted build up of an introduction it comes almost as a disappointment that the rest of 'Runaway' plays out by recycling what's gone before. But no matter - by then Shannon has already done enough and the repetition of the themes accords well with his 'still wondering' as to why she went away at the end of the song - 'Runaway' has no answers, only questions that Shannon can either front up to or crumble under their weight.
There's something of the future about 'Runaway', an off kilter imagination at work that in many respects is a forbearer of the studio inventiveness that The Beatles, The Beach Boys et al would exploit later this decade with their own move away from the standard verse/chorus/verse song structure and their arbitrary use of unlikely instruments (The Beatles themselves would use a Musitron on their own later recordings) to create pop music. Because though 'Runaway' undoubtedly has one eye on tomorrow, the other never loses sight of the classic pop template that sits at its core and provides the spine that gives it a timeless appeal.
It's back to Latin climes for Presley here - 'Surrender' is a Pomus/Shuman arrangement of an Italian ballad called "Torna a Surriento" (which loosely translates as "Come Back to Sorrento", which itself sounds loosely like 'Return To Sender'. Spooky eh?). Presley takes this as his cue to wheel out his 'It's Now Or Never' persona to bust a lung at the heavy drama of it all. Only this time, neither the tune nor its arrangement lends itself very well to such showboating and Presley's cod operatics steamroller the song into submission, winning the battle but leaving the poor listener the loser with the "So, my darling, please surrender" lyric dripping with an oily smarm that's as false as a silicone tit. But as Elvis's stock was at such a high at this point, I doubt anybody really noticed. Lazy.
Proving that it's never too soon to go retro, The Temperance Seven forged a career out of playing a style of trad jazz first heard in a time well before these charts began ('You're Driving Me Crazy' hails from 1930). At this remove, I'm never certain what to make of it; the music is warm and faithful (thanks to George Martin's production) but Paul MacDowell's vocal has the taint of the too English to convince, a Viv Stanshall-like parody that's more sipping tea with a little finger raised than swilling bootleg hooch in a speakeasy. As a long term Bonzo Dog Band fan, I may be filtering it through my love of their output,* but whatever way you take it there's an undoubted 'look at me' element of novelty about recording in this genre. Yes there was a trad jazz revival of sorts in the UK during the late 1950's/early 1960's, but this by itself can't explain the even bigger element of mystery as to why the general public should take this particular offering to their hearts in this way. I guess you just had to be there.
* I'm definitely filtering it though fond memories of hearing 'I Never Go Out In The Rain' by Hudson Ford's 'High Society' on Terry Wogan's Radio 2 Breakfast Show before I went to school most mornings in the early eighties. Now that was a parody. Wasn't it?
What is it with the UK and piano-based instrumentals? Winifred Atwell and Russ Conway had already bagged a brace of number ones apiece and now here's Floyd Cramer with another. 'On The Rebound' was his only UK chart topper though as s session player par excellence, Cramer's famed 'finger slipping' piano rolls had already graced 'Poetry In Motion' and 'Are You Lonesome Tonight?' 'On The Rebound' tinkles a light melody that loops around itself but has the good sense to break out into a jazzy, handclapping middle eight that keeps it fresh. But not fresh enough to break it out of the light entertainment box marked up as 'pleasant' rather than anything more substantial.
Written in 1934, Rodgers and Hammerstein's 'Blue Moon' has become a much covered standard (Elvis had cut a bleached to the bone version at Sun that was a desolate howl to the moon looking down at him), though it's fair to say that none sound anything like the makeover The Marcels gave it.
A Pennsylvanian doo-wop act, The Marcels made a career out of putting American standards through the wringer ('Summertime' and 'You Are My Sunshine' would get similar treatment), yet none were quite so radical as the bass voiced "bomp-baba-bomp dip-da-dip" that opens this onetime ballad. The basic still melody lurks behind it, but it's buried in a 100mph avalanche of voices that change the "And then there suddenly appeared before me, the only one my arms will ever hold" into a teenage celebration of togetherness that claims the song back from the adult sophistication peddled elsewhere. It's a neat subversion of expectation, but bottom line for me is that 'Blue Moon' by The Marcels is more a song to be admired than enjoyed. I admire it's inventiveness, it's audacity and its in your face joie de vivre, but at heart I like my 'Blue Moon' to be blue and to not give off as much light as the sun.
"Treat me nice, treat me good, treat me like you really should. 'Cause I'm not made of wood and I don't have a wooden heart" - so trills The King in a prissy tone over a stereotypical Bavarian oompah beat, pausing only to repeat it all again in German. Well while I sharpen my knives, I'll adopt the Scholastic philosophical method and build as strong a case for the defence as I'm able.
1. 'Wooden Heart' is based on a nineteenth century German folk song (catchily titled the untranslatable "Muss i denn, muss i denn zum Städtele hinaus"), a fact that at a stroke explains the Teutonic overtones.
2.'Wooden Heart' is taken from the soundtrack of 'GI Blues', a film loosely based on Presley's own army years based in Germany. This was where he first heard the tune and it explains his interest in recording it.
3. In 'GI Blues', Elvis sings 'Wooden Heart' to a wooden female puppet in front of an audience of appreciative German children, which explains the lyrics quoted above of the lyric and the nursery rhyme tune.
Well that explains 'Wooden Heart' anyway, but it neither justifies nor excuses it - although I'm one of that rare breed of people who would willingly jump to Paul McCartney's defence for 'Rupert & The Frog Chorus' (c'mon, it's for the kids), I'm not at all inclined to cut Elvis any such slack for this misdemeanour. Why? Well McCartney's ditty can stand on its own two feet as a decent kids song outside of its animated backing; 'Wooden Heart' can't. It works ok-ish in the context of 'GI Blues' as a novelty interlude for those German kids to laugh along at as Elvis mugs it up with the puppet, but the film itself wasn't aimed at a kindergarten audience. 'GI Blues' is an Elvis film for Elvis fans and taken outside this contextualising framework, it doesn't work on any level. There's no hard wired demography it will appeal to save the fanatically and deluded fanbase, and while it might please those kids in the film, the humour in Presley's voice does not breach the fourth wall to grow legs of its own.
Shorn of the background detail of my points one, two and three, 'Wooden Heart' is a terrible song. It isn't the worst thing he'd put his name to in the sixties, far from it,** but coming from Elvis there's a crushing feeling of disappointment, at being let down badly by someone you excepted more from and terrible too to see the Memphis Flash's wings being clipped ever shorter by him acting the fool for mass consumption and simpering like a simpleton where once he roared.*
* The great silent film star Louise Brooks may have achieved great acclaim working in Europe during the 1920's, but in so doing she pissed off her American studios to such an extent that the only role she could land on returning home was playing third fiddle on the 'Overland Stage Raisers' bill after a young John Wayne and a ventriloquist's dummy called Elmer. Brooks promptly told them where they could stick such films and retired into obscurity for over thirty years. Presley had no such principles and would go on to plough this furrow to ever diminishing returns for years before coming to his senses toward the end of the decade. If only he had some of Brooksie's guts.....
** Worse examples include: "There's No Room To Rhumba In A Sports Car", "Yoga Is & Yoga Does", "Song Of The Shrimp", "The Fort Lauderdale Chamber Of Commerce", "He's Your Uncle Not Your Dad", "Dominic The lmpotent Bull" and "Queenie Wahine's Papaya". All of which have been usefully collated on the 'Elvis' Greatest Shit' bootleg from Dog Vomit Records.
An unintended double A side - 'Ebony Eyes' was the original lead song but listeners in the UK flipped it over and found they liked the other side a whole lot better. It's not difficult to see why; 'Ebony Eyes' is another death ballad in which a serviceman on a weekend's leave has his girlfriend fly in on Flight 1203 so they can get married before he goes back to barracks, but the plane crashes en route and so that's the end of that.
And that's all there is to the song too. It's a more credible tale than 'Tell Laura I Love Her' but it's no less cynical in its sombre and outright mawkish sentimentality. There's a lengthy spoken interlude that's there to ramp up the tear factor ("And then came the announcement over the loudspeaker: 'Would those having relatives or friends on flight number 12-03 please report to the chapel across the street at once'"), but Don's 'ham actor reciting Shakespeare in a village hall production' attempt to wring an extra drop of pathos out of the soldier's plight only succeeds in strangling it dead in its bed. 'Ebony Eyes' is less a song than a lurid Mills and Boon paperback set to music and by god it leaves me cold.
In comparison, 'Walk Right Back' throws open the shutters to let some fresh air into the room, but it's only by comparison. Over on this side, the brothers are happy to lie back and let the swing of the tune carry them in its slipstream, which it might have done had the music managed to muster up some enthusiasm. But it doesn't, and the restraint bogs the vocals until they're wading through treacle, making it too sluggish to really engage with. The stomp of the chorus could have thrown it a lifeline, but even this sabotages its own catchiness with indifference from the brothers who barely change key to milk it. The Honeycombs would shortly re-write the song as 'Have I The Right' and made sure to add all the right bright sparks; compared to that, 'Walk Right Back' is a dead battery.
'Sailor' begins not as a shanty but with a wistful clip clop of Clark calling for her man to return home from the sea before erupting from nowhere into a cowpoke, campfire singalong of a chorus that namechecks a roll call of ports most sailors wouldn't be in too much of a hurry to leave. 'Capri', 'Amsterdam', 'Honolulu', 'Siam' - a guy could have a pretty good time in any of those places and Clark's prim delivery isn't exactly a siren call to lure them away. She's never less than game, but this is no 'Downtown' and 'Sailor' has the whiff of a song out of time, like a Japanese soldier on a South Sea island who still doesn't know the war is over and it's no surprise to note that Ann Shelton was back at number ten with her own version. Like Shelton, Petula's roots as a World War Two troops entertainer show through on a song that provides illustration enough as to why she was never quite part of the sixties clique of the Cilla's, Dusty's and Sandy's.
First opera and now Shakespeare - Presley was certainly ramping up the cultural references since his Army discharge. Not that Shakespeare wrote 'Are You Lonesome Tonight?' of course (that was Lou Handman and Roy Turk in 1926), but he did provide inspiration for soliloquy that Elvis muses over mid way through it ("You know someone said that the world's a stage, and each must play a part.")*
Told from the first person, 'Are You Lonesome Tonight' is all about the hurting. A relationship has broken up and Elvis is left wondering if their former partner is feeling as miserable as they are. To emphasise the mood, the arrangement is sparse to the point of ambient; a lightly strummed guitar, The Jordanaires behind him barely there and Presley's vocal itself delivered with the intense solemnity of a hymn. .
Here, Presley manages to sound like a man on a slow burning fuse that could lead to internal or external explosion, a barely suppressed rage that dares the other to tell him she's happy enough on her own. Even the spoken interlude, something that could have been a banana skin to upend it all, becomes the sound of a confiding friend ("Honey, you lied when you said you loved me"), that makes you listen without questioning.
Again, it's impossible not to draw attention to his innate versatility through a direct comparison between this and the mambo Italiano of 'It's Now Or Never', particularly his interpretive skill on the closing couplet where he stands up to be counted on the "Is your heart filled with pain, shall I come back again?" as a man begrudging a favour before crashing back down with the closing with the questioning "Tell me dear, are you lonesome tonight?" in a hushed whisper that's too scared to receive an answer in case it's the one he doesn't want to hear. And at the risk of shooting my arrow wide into the field of pretension, it's a coda that always reminds me of the rage and humility that closes George Herbert's poem 'The Collar':
"But as I rav’d and grew more fierce and wilde
At every word,
Me thoughts I heard one calling, Childe:
And I reply’d, My Lord".
Presley's output at this time gives the impression of a man who's lost his way with the variety of styles he adopts appearing as the scattershot of a blunderbuss. And yet despite this, at this stage they still manage to hit more targets than they miss; Presley wasn't the first or last to record this song, but in portraying the lyric of love as something akin to religious devotion he created a gem of a single that couldn't be more closely identified with him if he'd written it himself. There's an infamous live version of this where he laughs like a fool throughout before ending with "That's it, man, fourteen years right down the drain...boy, I'll tell ya." Well not quite, but it would be nine years hence (with 'In The Ghetto') before he'd produce a single as good as this again.
* "All the world's a stage, and all men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts." from 'As You Like It'.
Despite being the work of a stellar cast of country players (including Floyd Cramer, Boots Randolph and producer Bill Porter), 'Poetry In Motion' is less the sound of the farm and more the sound of American pop of yesteryear tarted up with a go faster rock & roll beat. Allegedly inspired by the sight of schoolgirls walking home from class every day, 'Poetry In Motion' opens with a slow, scene setting prologue that it never quite manages to live up to.
Despite the thick layering of a yakking saxophone, swooning backing vocals and an almost Mariachi beat of a middle eight, it's not enough to disguise the fact that 'Poetry In Motion' is over reliantly on the hook of the title which Tillotson returns to time and again. Yet despite it's dubious origins, the song is more a respectful celebratory of the female form ("Poetry in motion, see her gentle sway. A wave out on the ocean, could never move that way") than anything sleazy or voyeuristic. It's a lot more subtle than "I see you baby, shakin' that ass" anyway, and though it's obviously a song from another time, the simile of that title is a good one and it more than papers over some of its other shortcomings to sell the song to me.
I have to confess to a certain ambivalence to 'Moon River' when taken in its original context. First sung by Audrey Hepburn in Blake Edwards' big screen adaptation of 'Breakfast At Tiffany's', Hepburn's 'Holly Golightly' is a world away from the more hard boiled, borderline prostitute of Truman Capote's novella and I've never appreciated this sanding down of the rough edges to the point where the character could sing something so whimsical. It's not how I imagine Golightly to be anyway, the same way that Liza Minelli is far removed from my imagining of Isherwood's Sally Bowles.
