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From the chuckling honk of the saxophone intro, 'Return To Sender' marks itself out as a more amiable, looser limbed entry in Presley's canon; Elvis is trying to write to his ex girlfriend to try and make up but the letters keep coming back unopened. Elvis sings the verses with a tone of mischief, as if he doesn't really expect a reply and that it's all part of some wind up ("I gave a letter to the postman, he put it his sack. Bright in early next morning, he brought my letter back"). As a kind of reply, his vocal on the chorus turns to loud indignation, giving voice to (and slightly mocking) his girlfriend's mood - "RETURN TO SEN-DAH, ADD-RESS UN-KNOWN" so that it sounds written in red capital letters with a thumb thick felt pen.
As a piece of theatre, 'Return To Sender' avoids the corn and is actually good fun, but for me it marks the point where Elvis threw off the shackles of his own past and becomes Elvis The Family Entertainer; it's telling that this is taken from the Girls! Girls! Girls! film soundtrack where any attempts at an edge or danger were cast aside in favour of "a light-entertainment formula of beautiful scenery and girls galore". This isn't imitation Elvis anymore so it's pointless to bemoan that it's no 'Mystery Train'. No, this is Elvis Mark 2 (or 3, depending on your viewpoint) and on that level 'Return To Sender' is solid to the point of becoming one of his career signature tunes. Whether that's a good or bad thing I'll leave to your own personal prejudices.
A song made famous by Hank Williams (though he didn't write it), 'Lovesick Blues' is a 1922 showtune custom built for the country makeover and glottal throat tics that Williams gives it. Hank uses his voice to convey an on the verge of a sob vocal, but Ifield fires up his yodel machine to maximum capacity with an overload that threatens to smother the slight song underneath. To compensate, 'Lovesick Blues' comes loaded with a cranked up, big band swing arrangement that's neither lovesick nor blue but instead a hammy slice of sub par cabaret that tries to relocate Vegas at the Grand Ole Opry. That it fails is perhaps unsurprising; Frank's attempt to smear on the sunshine only serves to give the impression that everyone involved was whistling in the dark, and the resulting stew lands firmly on the wrong side of 'bearable'.
In 1983, Brian Eno released 'Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks', a belated soundtrack to accompany the original film footage of the 1969 moon mission. On the album sleeve, Eno explains that as a young man watching the landings live on television, he felt the poor quality of the images and overbearing commentary detracted from the majesty of the proceedings. In a 2009 interview with The Guardian, he confirmed:
"I remember it very, very well. I watched it in the house of my painting tutor at art school, and I remember the very eerie sensation of watching on his little black and white television and then looking up at the moon and being absolutely shocked at the idea of what was happening there at that moment in time. It was one of those strange moments when time closes up on you and something that seems fictional and fantastic suddenly becomes real".
Seven years previously, the launch of the communication satellite Telstar 1 saw the first live public transatlantic television feed. An impressive, multi-national endeavour between France, USA and the UK, it heralded a symbolic bridging of continents in co-operation to create a smaller, more harmonious world to live in. It’s an event that would have fascinated producer Joe Meek, a man with a long held obsession for the space race and the idea of life on other planets who’d already recorded ''I Hear a New World - an Outer Space Music Fantasy' back in 1959. Eno could afford to be sober and sedate in creating his own ambient soundtrack in hindsight but Meek would have felt the excitement of a child on Christmas morning; with the musicians and means at his disposal, he didn't need to wait 16 years to produce his tribute to a new world that everybody would now be able to hear.
Unlike Eno's languid re-imagining, there is nothing majestic or awestruck about Meek's tribute to technology; 'Telstar' opens with electronic discord, a clatter worthy of Stockhausen until a 'Johnny Remember Me' beat gallops through the maelstrom and an ascending countdown paints Meek as mad scientist, throwing sparking switches in his laboratory to give life to his creation before the main theme kicks in with a race to a better future. The excitement is palpable, of a new chapter in humanity playing out over our heads and played out to a tune buzzing from out of a Clavioline (first heard back on 'Runaway') infused with joyous wonder and rousing celebration in a way that sounds as if it was being beamed down from the satellite itself or from somewhere even further afield. Then, just when you think you've heard it all, Meek inserts five quick skips before a simple key change at 2:23 and we're back scraping the sky again.
The Tornados are credited, but it's Joe Meek and his imagination that are the true stars here; 'Telstar' is a bold undertaking created in the most unfuturistic circumstances possible – a very earthbound flat at 304 Holloway Road with his landlady downstairs badgering for the rent and banging on the ceiling with a broom when all things Meek got too loud. Not for nothing was this the first British single to top the American charts; there’s a universal appeal at work that’s not confined to Anglo interests, and if 'Telstar's tone now sounds as quaint and rough and ready as an episode of The Thunderbirds, it still produces a valve warmth of Rediffusion nostalgia for an optimistic age where technology promised a better life for everybody.
And so it's bitter to report that all royalties would be held up pending a plagiarism suit from Jean Ledrut which meant Meek never earned a penny from the song during his lifetime. The rent never got paid, desperation took hold, tragedy ensued.
A superior song from what by now feels like the Presley Production Line, 'She's Not You' is no radical departure from the dum dum bounce of 'Good Luck Charm' but it benefits from being co-written by Lieber, Stoller and Doc Pomus. It's a pedigree that ensures that Presley actually has a song he can get to grip with and interpret rather than coast through and, evidently grateful, he delivers the tart and spiteful lyric of settling for second best ("Her hair is soft and her eyes are oh so blue. She's all the things a girl should be, but she's not you") with a sensitivity that it probably doesn't deserve and nary an 'uh-huh' in sight. It's a more than passable offering, but with the knowledge of what Presley once was it can't help but disappoint in its safe dullness. A wild piano solo kicks in midway that sounds like a grafted on leftover from a different session entirely. Maybe it was meant to show that Elvis still had a raucous edge. Maybe. But if that was the case then it's not fooling anyone.
A good example of the type of neat symmetry these charts are wont to produce, 'I Remember You' is a 1941 showtune from 'The Fleet's In' given a country makeover. As sung by Dorothy Lamour in the 1942 film adaptation, 'I Remember You' is a wistful, eyes closed remembrance of the past that uses its sedate pacing as an aid to contemplation. Aussie Ifield jollies it along into a canter until his "I remember yooohooo" yodel becomes an exclamation of surprise at a chance encounter with someone he hasn't seen in ages. Yodelling in song is always a risky business lest the whole thing slip into comedy, but Ifield keeps himself in check and ensures that his memories are conveyed with happiness rather than laced with sadness or regret and in so doing he makes 'I Remember You' a pleasant if inessential listen.
In 1962, Ray Charles released his 'Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music' album. Prior to this, Charles' chosen medium was purely blues/r&b based and a black soul artist crossing over into the world of country music was a provocative act that raised eyebrows. The title of that album is self explanatory; an overwhelmingly white concern, country evolved out of indigenous Appalachian/hillbilly balladry and followed a completely different trajectory to blues and soul to appeal to a niche audience. But rather than don a Stetson and break out the steel guitars, Ray's approach was not to jump both feet into the deep end of the genre but to force it to meet him halfway and on his own musical terms.
For starters, Charles' arrangement applies the brakes to slow down the tune until it's double the length of Don Gibson's original, stressing in music the grinding misery of the lyrics' self inflicted hurt. And he sounds like he's hurting - Gibson sounded relaxed about his life choice but Charles' take is of a man determined to love no other than the one who no longer cares ("So I'll just live my life in dreams of yesterday") but who understands that these blinkers ensure he won't be allowed to see happiness anywhere else for the remainder of his life. Ray was only 32 on this recording yet his throaty croak couldn't sound more aged and hardened if it were coming from one of the mouths carved on Mount Rushmore.
A pitiful stance maybe, but there's dignity here too and it's telling that Charles never actually sings the song's title. Instead, it's handled by a whine of a backing group who in a sense present the outward facing plea for sympathy to the 'you' being addressed while Ray's own vocal plays out as a soliloquy of personal acceptance that does not court sympathy from anybody. And it's this backing vocal that anchors the song in the country genre, providing a mix and match fusion of styles that create a single lake for the two separate genre rivers to empty into in the same way Run DMC and Aerosmith would splice metal and rap on 'Walk This Way' in 1986 to open up a whole new audience for both genres. It's a point of comparison certainly, but one that maybe sells Ray Charles short.
In Peter Guralnick's biography of Sam Cooke 'Dream Boogie', there's a photograph of Sam and a young Aretha Franklin taken outside The Lorraine Motel, Memphis in 1961 shortly after they'd refused to perform to a segregated audience (or as one contemporary headline put it "Singers Say No To Jim Crow Seats"). Whenever I look at it, I'm always conscious that I'm not simply seeing a photograph of two major soul stars but history being made. Cooke and Franklin's defiance marked another breaking down of racial and cultural divisions through simply not accepting them, a stance that made the path to equality of rights between the races that much clearer.
Similarly, whenever I hear Ray Charles' 'I Can't Stop Loving You', I don't just hear a great version of a great song, I also hear the sound of walls collapsing, divisions pushed over by an alchemic mix of musical styles that once stood as separate as oil and water. But not overbearingly so - it's to Ray's genius that the sound of falling brickwork doesn't drown out the song beneath but rumbles away in the background, to be attuned by those on the right wavelength. Music as a engine for social change - you can't ask much more from a number one single than that.
Now there's a title; because of my age, 'The Young Ones' for me will forever be linked to the eighties TV show that took it's name, so much so I was convinced Cliff's song opened with the 'Once in every lifetime' middle eight too. But it doesn't - 'The Young Ones' kicks off on a soft shoe shuffle and stays there for the duration. And despite that title, 'The Young Ones' seems aimed less at the younger generation proper than at their parents, a middle of the road bomb defusing exercise designed to reassure them that those darn rockin' kids aren't all about the flick knives and leather jackets. It's a safety net for those grown ups too, a song that allows them a little nostalgic wallow of their own while giving reassurance that, despite the sea changes going on in the world around them, their own values were right all along.
"I need you and you need me, oh my darling can't you see, young dreams should be dreamed together" - this isn't a shriek of 'you don't understand' frustration; Cliff's young ones were born middle aged and complete with a fully formed awareness of what true and everlasting love is when they see it. Because despite the song's call for "And young ones shouldn't be afraid. To live, love While the flame is strong", all Cliff wants his beaux to do is to recognise that they were meant for each other forever with the living and loving enjoyed in the context of settling down and having young ones of their own. Not that I'd expect him to drool a fruity tale of young lust with a teenage sex machine * - Cliff, after all, has never pretended to be Iggy Pop, but neither would you expect his initial flame of rebellion to wind up forging something so bloody mindedly square before burning out completely. Hank Marvin again tries to inject a little rocket fuel with a chime of a guitar riff, but Cliff's vocal is an all smothering wet blanket that puts a stop to any nonsense by defiantly ignoring any tune that The Shadows are actually playing, in the blink of an eye going from Britain's answer to Elvis to our very own Pat Boone.
Ah, but is preaching these core family values really such an awful thing? Well no, but just as certain elements get into a lather about Harry Potter indoctrinating the young into the satanic dark side, I call foul at a popular tune that promises much from its title but then presents a paean to youth that's one of the most conservative statements of status quo maintenance you're ever likely to hear. And besides that, it's boring as hell too.
* Sorry, writing this put me in mind of 'Teenage Head' by The Flaming Groovies:
"Got a woman, she's my hopped up high school queen.
She's my woman, she's a teenage love machine.
She knows how to turn me on and get me high and get it on and on."
Now that's my idea of how any young ones worth their salt should be behaving.
'Come Outside' is a would be comedy song wherein Mike has been 'jiving all night long' with his 'little doll' (Wendy Richard, starting out on her career as a professional cockney) but he's worried that the night is getting on and as he's in the mood for a little 'romancing' before he goes home and so he tries his damndest to get her to 'come outside' with him for a bit of slap and tickle.
Sarne would go on to pull this trick again on 'Will I What', employing the same level of ruthless persistence to get Billie Davis to go on a date with him ("Just how much can a poor bloke do, when he wants to know a bird like you") only to get cold feet and make his excuses when she started talking about marriage. Two different songs maybe, but to my mind they're inseparable in painting a picture of Sarne as a borderline sex pest - even Sid James knew when to knock it on the head. Sarne has no such compunction - he wants to get his 'little doll' outside for some how's your father and he's going to keep on and on and on, completely ignoring the protestations of Wendy until the Stockholm Syndrome kicks in and he wears her down into acquiescence. This type of humour may be typical of the times but such contextualising doesn't make it any less creepy - that cover picture says it all really; smarmy Sarne grinning like a letch as he drags an obviously unwilling female outside with both hands. The fact that Wendy was only 15 at the time doesn't add any class.
A comedy song that's not funny isn't that unusual, but this one kind of makes me wish that the B side was called 'Once Outside' and that it involved Wendy's older brothers lying in wait to give Sarne a good kicking.
My first encounter with 'Nut Rocker' came via the final track encore on Emerson, Lake and Palmer's 1971 'Pictures At An Exhibition' album. As a pretentious teen I was always keen to put distance between myself and my Duran Duran loving peers and so listening to classical music as played by prog rockers seemed to fit the bill nicely and put me on a higher plain of awareness than the common herd. In my own mind anyway. But for all that I was always wary of 'Nut Rocker'; the fact that the credit read 'Fowley' and not 'Mussorgsky' was a black mark at the outset, but the headshot was a tune too lively and - 'gasp' - danceable for me to stroke the chin on my po-face to.
The joke was on me though, and in more ways than one; 'Nut Rocker' is based on Tchaikovsky's "March of the Wooden Soldiers" from 'The Nutcracker', albeit in a rocking arrangement by Kim Fowley that rolled over old Pyotr courtesy of B Bumble and the band, the collective name of a gang of session musicians with agenda of recording pieces of classical music in a rock and roll style. And rock and roll it does - Al Hazan gets all Jerry Lee Lewis on the piano intro, pounding the keys as if his fingers were mallets over a piston straight drum rhythm.
It's fast and it's furious but in truth it's nothing Winifred Atwell couldn't have barrelhoused out ten years previous - it takes the late diversion of a guitar solo and some decidedly unclassical boogie woogie to fill out the sound and raise it higher than the novelty spectacle of rockers tinkering with the classics. Which isn't to say that it's not a novelty single, because it is. Very much so. But its rolling jollity and vivacious relentlessness marks it out as one of the better ones.
The end of my weekends as a boy were generally marked by the theme music to the worthily dull BBC consumerist programme 'That's Life' that aired late in the evening on a Sunday. A stultifying hodge podge of time share exposes, cowboy builders, terminally ill children and suggestively shaped vegetables, I'd watch it on borrowed time, grim with the knowledge that as soon as that brass band end theme struck up then the day had nothing more to offer and it was time for bed.
A recurring obsession on the show was the Trimphone telephone and it's electronic 'ring' tone. Scarcely a week would go by without some glakey member of the public demonstrating their party piece of imitating its sound. The hilarity reached a peak/nadir with an onscreen competition for the best imitator in which a real Trimphone was entered without the knowledge of the blindfolded judges who failed to award it first prize. How they laughed.
'Good Luck Charm' kind of reminds me of all this carry on. Compared to the bright, wake up ring of Presley's early career, 'Good Luck Charm' sounds akin to the flat, dull fart of a Trimphone, lacking the urgency to get to wherever the endlessly repeating melody resolutely fails to carry it. It's not rock and roll, but then neither is it much of anything else - there's a vague barbershop quartet sheen to the tune, but 'Good Luck Charm' is the sound of Elvis coasting in neutral, foot off the gas and seat fully reclined - if this was entered into a 1962 Elvis Presley soundalike competition then I doubt it would have taken first place either. Time for bed Mr Presley.
Two songs from Presley's (then) latest film 'Blue Hawaii', 'Rock-a-Hula Baby' is a dervish of a tune that burns up an awful lot of calories through running on the spot and getting precisely nowhere. 'Rock-a-hula, rock rock-a-hula' moans Elvis over ever ascending bars of music garnished with steel guitar flourishes to confirm we're not in Kansas anymore and are holidaying by a lagoon, but no amount of embellishment or that ludicrously showboating finale can create anything of substance out of the flim flam of a song its moulded around.
Undoubtedly the big brother of the two, 'Can't Help Falling In Love' is a return to the slow solemnity of 'Are You Lonesome Tonight?', only this time the furrowed brow intensity applies itself less well to a song about falling in love than it does to one about falling out of it. "Take my hand, take my whole life too" - Elvis doesn't sound too enthused at the prospect and his deadpanning on the tag line "For I can't help falling in love with you" makes it sound more like a chore than a pleasure. There's a better song here than is evidenced on this; for example, the 1986 folked up version by Lick The Tins nicely captured the wide eyed wonder of irresistible attraction. I'm afraid Presley's half speed, somnambulistic take falls flat in comparison.
Second number one for The Shadows that was penned by Jerry Lordan, and following his 'Apache' it seems natural to regard 'Wonderful Land' as a homage to the United States. Certainly, America must have seemed the land of opportunity in 1962, promising a Kennedy and consumerist, pop culture based future that finally started painting the century with some colour.
The tune is a strong one regardless, but it's useful to compare this with Mike Oldfield's more tightly wrapped 1980 version that vacuum packs the melody at the expense of all atmosphere. The Shadows' cut opens the packaging, giving it acres of space to breathe until you can almost see Marvin's guitar lines snaking across the Great Plains or echoing through the Grand Canyon; 'Wonderful Land' could be the main theme from an eponymous Western that never got made, a soundtrack to an opening Cinemascope and Technicolour scene of Gregory Peck riding to Barbara Stanwyck's ranch to deliver some good news about her missing son she thought was dead. That he turned out to be an outlaw who would end up dead in the dirt at Peck's hands by the closing credits is irrelevant at this point - for the time being it is indeed a wonderful land and there's a marvellously open ended optimism for the future. There's no need to spoil that here.
From the chuckling honk of the saxophone intro, 'Return To Sender' marks itself out as a more amiable, looser limbed entry in Presley's canon; Elvis is trying to write to his ex girlfriend to try and make up but the letters keep coming back unopened. Elvis sings the verses with a tone of mischief, as if he doesn't really expect a reply and that it's all part of some wind up ("I gave a letter to the postman, he put it his sack. Bright in early next morning, he brought my letter back"). As a kind of reply, his vocal on the chorus turns to loud indignation, giving voice to (and slightly mocking) his girlfriend's mood - "RETURN TO SEN-DAH, ADD-RESS UN-KNOWN" so that it sounds written in red capital letters with a thumb thick felt pen.
