THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 11, 1994 TAG: 9412090135
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E11 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY RICKEY WRIGHT, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 105 lines
``NAME ME A SONG that everybody knows/I'll bet you it belongs to Acuff-Rose,'' sang Uncle Tupelo's Jeff Tweedy last year. The Everly Brothers could testify to the venerable Nashville song publishers' power. After a falling-out with company head Wesley Rose, the duo was denied the services of writers Boudleaux and Felice Bryant, who had provided them with many of their biggest hits.
But ``Heartaches & Harmonies'' (Rhino), an ambitious four-CD collection of the Kentucky-rooted brothers' work, makes the case that there was much more to their music than the can't-miss numbers that spilled from that husband-and-wife team's pens. Collecting nearly 40 years of performances, the box is the first complete look at the Everly oeuvre.
Don and Phil Everly first hit in 1957 with the Bryants' ``Bye Bye Love.'' The record grafted immaculate harmonies and a Bo Diddley-influenced guitar intro onto the country melody, and immediately established the siblings as important and pivotal artists in rock's first era of mass popularity.
The duo had entered the business long before ``Bye Bye Love'' topped the pop, country and R&B charts. Mainstays of dad Ike and mom Margaret's long-running radio shows, the boys perfected their style over the airwaves. ``Heartaches'' opens with a 1951 performance of ``Don't Let Our Love Die'' from ``The Everly Family Hour.'' It's a much more effective piece of music than the debut Columbia single that follows. That ``Keep A-Lovin' Me'' didn't catch fire in the rapidly changing country-music world of 1956 isn't surprising. Prettily sung but unexciting, it neither rocks nor captures the tear-drenched truths captured on ``Songs Our Daddy Taught Us'' a few years later.
That album, cut to fulfill the Everlys' contract with Cadence Records before their 1960 move to the fledgling Warner Bros. label, was just what the title said. It's represented by three cuts on ``Heartaches,'' notably ``I'm Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail'' - one of the most perfect blends of sheer beauty and maudlin sentiment in the history of recorded sound - and the angry ``Long Time Gone.''
The teenagers who constituted so much of their audience, though, were more impressed with the series of malt-shop/drive-in plaints that filled the Cadence singles and remain a highlight of the late-'50s trend toward slightly softer rock. Like Elvis, the brothers were equally adept at rockers and ballads. Their pledges of undying love, though, are touched with a trembling pureness that can still draw the listener to the verge of tears. Few records are as suffused with the essence of romantic affection as ``Devoted to You,'' as tinged with regret as ``I Wonder If I Care As Much'' and ``Brand New Heartache.''
The early Warners sessions produced many more such gems of jukebox lamentation. ``So Sad (To Watch Good Love Go Bad),'' ``Crying in the Rain,'' ``Sleepless Nights'' and ``Love Hurts'' remain among their most influential tracks. (The latter two songs were covered by Gram Parsons, an Everlys advocate who makes an instrumental appearance late in the box's fourth disc, on ``I'm On My Way Home Again.'')
Rhino's package relies even more heavily on material cut for the company than did Warners' own ``Walk Right Back: The Everly Brothers on Warner Bros. 1960-1969.'' That's fine; some of the richest, most startling things Don and Phil ever put down came after their final U.S. Top Ten placing, the 1962 ``That's Old Fashioned (That's the Way Love Should Be).''
By then, the ``boys'' had been in and out of the Marines, in and out of failed relationships, and in Don's case, into pills (and later, pot). Hearing their trademark harmonies spewed back at them from the likes of the Beatles and Hollies might have rankled; that didn't keep the Everlys from working with the latter on a mid-'60s LP and making hard-edged British Invasion-style sides such as ``The Price of Love,'' ``Gone Gone Gone'' and ``Kiss Your Man Goodbye'' (as good a mid-'60s Stones as anything on ``Paul Revere and the Raiders' Greatest Hits.'')
Also during the commercially fallow period that saw them score only one hit, 1967's chirpy ``Bowling Green,'' the team managed some records every bit as weird as anything the Beatles or the acid-drenched California groups were cutting. ``Man With Money'' is another beat-group stomper, and a melodrama that advocates robbery as an end to achieving true love.
Sonny ``Who can turn the world on with her smile?'' Curtis' ``The Collector'' is a chilling gloss on John Fowles' novel about an obsessive lover. ``Even If I Hold It in My Hand (Hard Luck Story)'' goes even deeper into the pop abyss. Unreleased until now, this is a deceptively calm bit of work whose narrator mourns the breakup of a relationship - and in the last verse, casually mentions the gun he's pointing at his own head.
Then there's ``Lord of the Manor,'' a trippy B-side apparently sung from the point of view of a houseman whose wife is cuckolding him with the owner. The rage seething beneath this track's surface, and the weariness of a second psychedelic-tinged cut, a remake of ``I Wonder If I Care As Much,'' mark a peak - an artistic one, anyway - in the Everlys' career.
The act broke up in 1973, with Phil smashing his guitar on the stage of a Knotts' Berry Farm theater. Don pronounced: ``The Everly Brothers died 10 years ago.'' A decade later, their rift had healed enough to allow them to tour and record again; highlights of their '80s albums for Mercury are included on ``Heartaches,'' notably Paul McCartney's ``On the Wings of a Nightingale'' and a glorious take on Mark Knopler's ``Why Worry.''
The 103rd, and last, tune here is also the first. The boxed set's booklet says the 1990 re-recording of ``Don't Let Our Love Die'' may well be the Everlys' final take ever, even as they continue to play concerts. The thought that these two men, whose work remained vital so long after it stopped prompting teen screams, have reached one end of the line is sad. But the house they built for themselves, and their vision of love, will forever stand. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
WARNER BROS.
Collecting nearly 40 years of performances, the box is the first
complete look at the Everly oeuvre.
by CNB