Sole survivors of the 60s, modern music would have sounded very different without the Everly Brothers
• Phil Everly – a life in pictures
• The Everly Brothers: an inspiration for a generation
• Phil Everly obituary
The first wave of rock'n'roll heroes were almost all out of the picture by the turn of the 60s. The army had knocked the stuffing out of Elvis, the media (and his marriage to an underage cousin) did the same for Jerry Lee Lewis; God got to Little Richard, the bottle got to Gene Vincent. Chuck Berry was in jail. People wonder what marvels Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran might have come up with in the 60s had they lived.
So what about the Everly Brothers? They were pretty much the sole survivors of this carnage and yet, in spite of a string of innovative, thoroughly modern, and often dazzling singles and albums right up to their 1972 break-up, they are terribly overlooked. Phil Everly's death at the weekend was mourned by multiple plays for Bye Bye Love and Wake Up Little Susie – tremendous records, of course, but they were the Everlys' first two hits, from right at the start of a recording career that lasted three decades.
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Given their run of hits – oldies radio staples like All I Have To Do Is Dream, Cathy's Clown and When Will I Be Loved – it seems weird to think of them as underrated. I'd go as far as to say they are the single most underrated act in modern pop history. Take Cathy's Clown, for a start. It was written by the brothers, Don coming up with the martial beat of the chorus, the sound of the condemned man walking off into a blazing sunset, while Phil wrote the counterpoint barstool mumbling on the verse. The brothers also produced the record. "Musically, I loved (Ferde Grofe's) Grand Canyon Suite at that point," Don told writer Andrew Sandoval, "and I wanted to do something that sounded like it." This wasn't standard teenage fare in 1960, a year that also gave us My Old Man's a Dustman, Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport and Mr Custer. They re-invented Little Richard's Lucille for the follow-up to Cathy's Clown, with their voices in bi-plane drone unison backed by multiple guitarists – every available session guitarist in Nashville played on Lucille, as Don wanted to give it a heavier fuller sound. This was 1960, remember. Joe Meek's major breakthrough, Johnny Remember Me was still a year away; Phil Spector was a full three years off completing the Wall Of Sound with Da Doo Ron Ron and Be My Baby. Don Everly was pretty much on his own at the turn of the decade as an auteur pop producer.
1961 brought further UK number ones with Walk Right Back/Ebony Eyes, and a berserk Temptation – the wailing banshee backing and "yeah yeah yeah" intro on this reworking of Bing Crosby's 30s hit came to Don in a dream. Unfortunately, their publisher Wesley Rose didn't own the rights to Temptation and, feeling Phil and Don had put his nose out of joint, wouldn't allow them to record any Acuff-Rose-published songs for the next two years. This meant the Everly Brothers couldn't record their own songs – it puts the record company quibbles of Prince and George Michael into perspective.
On top of this, the Marines called them up for a six-month stint in 1961, so they couldn't record or promote their current singles. Don Everly got married, got divorced, took solace in drink and drugs, and attempted suicide on a tour of Britain in 1962 – Phil had to complete the tour on his own. By the time the argument with Wesley Rose had been resolved in 1963, the Beatles had stolen their place at the table (the influence is laid bare if you play Cathy's Clown and Please Please Me one after the other), and Don's songwriting and production style, understandably, had taken on a darker hue. Nancy's Minuet (1963) is pure David Lynch; it's atmosphere, Don claimed, was borrowed from Henry Mancini's Experiment in Terror soundtrack.
This was all very impressive, but people were buying Everly Brothers records in increasingly smaller numbers, switching their allegiances to British beat groups. With the R&B thunder of Gone Gone Gone in 1964, the Everlys showed how easily they could adapt to the new era. Their southern roots also meant they were more than capable at turning their hands to folk rock when it became the du jour sound of '65: Don's beautifully bitter The Price of Love (a UK No 2) and a battery of 12-strings on Love Is Strange (UK No 11) out-jangled and outfought the opposition. Don was still penning proto-bedsit ballads – the moan-drone of It's All Over (1966) had an almost Benedectine quality – and they would toy with Mamas and Papas-style soft pop harmonies on 1967's exquisite Bowling Green, one of that year's most summery singles.
Reading on mobile? Click to view
Like the Beach Boys in the 70s, the Everly Brothers were continually stymied by the success of their past which would periodically upstage their new recordings through compilations like Golden Hits (1963), Original Greatest Hits (No 7 in 1970), and Walk Right Back with the Everlys (No 10 in 1975) – there were others, too. 1968 saw the first major rock'n'roll revival in Britain, which meant people were ready to dig out Bird Dog and Bye Bye Love but few people – one notable exception being John Peel – were ready for the post-psychedelic class warfare of the extraordinary Lord of the Manor. What would Buddy Holly have been doing had he been alive in 1968? Quite possibly nothing as outre and impressive as this.
1968 also provided the Everlys' best album, Roots. Country rock was – thanks to the Band's Music From Big Pink and Dylan's John Wesley Harding – providing a new rural home for burnt-out psych-rock cases. The Everlys, good old southern boys, were once again cited as role models by the likes of Crosby, Stills and Nash. As if to the ram the point home to the public, and to re-position them in the hippie era, Warner Brothers' Eton-educated A&R man Andrew Wickham encouraged them to make the Roots album, which featured songs from new names like Randy Newman and Merle Haggard, plus a cosmic re-invention of their 50s b-side I Wonder If I Care As Much. The songs were linked and overlapped to create a suite; Wickham's crowning touch was to top and tail the record with clips of the Everly family radio show, recorded in Tennessee in the early 50s. But, good as it was, Roots didn't sell. The brothers could by now barely stand each other's presence. The split finally came during a 1972 show at Knott's Berry Farm in California. Phil threw his guitar down and walked off as Don told the stunned audience "the Everly Brothers died 10 years ago". They didn't speak, let alone record together, for another 10 years.
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I meant to write this piece as a tribute to Phil Everly, but it is impossible to talk about Phil without talking about Don. And vice versa. Of all the sibling rivalries in pop history, the Everlys had it the toughest. Their voices were inseparable. After their on-stage split both had solo careers. Phil was immediately gifted a huge hit, Albert Hammond Sr's The Air That I Breathe, in 1973. It flopped. The irony can't have been lost on Phil that a few months later the Hollies scored an international hit with the song, with a sound that leaned heavily on the Everly Brothers' harmonies.
Phil and Don had met Hollies Allan Clarke and Graham Nash as far back as 1960, waiting outside a Manchester theatre for an autograph. "Don and Phil Everly talked to us for what seemed like half an hour," Nash later recalled. "Instead of just patting us on the head, they stood and talked to me and Allan Clarke, encouraging us. It changed my life." Without the Everlys, no Hollies harmonies; without the Hollies, no Abba harmonies. The Beatles, the Bee Gees, Simon and Garfunkel, all of them owe a great debt to Phil and Don. Modern pop would have sounded very different without the Everly Brothers.
*More on the Everly Brothers*
• Phil Everly – a life in pictures
• The Everly Brothers: an inspiration for a generation
• Phil Everly obituary Reported by guardian.co.uk 4 hours ago.
• Phil Everly – a life in pictures
• The Everly Brothers: an inspiration for a generation
• Phil Everly obituary
The first wave of rock'n'roll heroes were almost all out of the picture by the turn of the 60s. The army had knocked the stuffing out of Elvis, the media (and his marriage to an underage cousin) did the same for Jerry Lee Lewis; God got to Little Richard, the bottle got to Gene Vincent. Chuck Berry was in jail. People wonder what marvels Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran might have come up with in the 60s had they lived.
So what about the Everly Brothers? They were pretty much the sole survivors of this carnage and yet, in spite of a string of innovative, thoroughly modern, and often dazzling singles and albums right up to their 1972 break-up, they are terribly overlooked. Phil Everly's death at the weekend was mourned by multiple plays for Bye Bye Love and Wake Up Little Susie – tremendous records, of course, but they were the Everlys' first two hits, from right at the start of a recording career that lasted three decades.
Reading on mobile? Click to view
Given their run of hits – oldies radio staples like All I Have To Do Is Dream, Cathy's Clown and When Will I Be Loved – it seems weird to think of them as underrated. I'd go as far as to say they are the single most underrated act in modern pop history. Take Cathy's Clown, for a start. It was written by the brothers, Don coming up with the martial beat of the chorus, the sound of the condemned man walking off into a blazing sunset, while Phil wrote the counterpoint barstool mumbling on the verse. The brothers also produced the record. "Musically, I loved (Ferde Grofe's) Grand Canyon Suite at that point," Don told writer Andrew Sandoval, "and I wanted to do something that sounded like it." This wasn't standard teenage fare in 1960, a year that also gave us My Old Man's a Dustman, Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport and Mr Custer. They re-invented Little Richard's Lucille for the follow-up to Cathy's Clown, with their voices in bi-plane drone unison backed by multiple guitarists – every available session guitarist in Nashville played on Lucille, as Don wanted to give it a heavier fuller sound. This was 1960, remember. Joe Meek's major breakthrough, Johnny Remember Me was still a year away; Phil Spector was a full three years off completing the Wall Of Sound with Da Doo Ron Ron and Be My Baby. Don Everly was pretty much on his own at the turn of the decade as an auteur pop producer.
1961 brought further UK number ones with Walk Right Back/Ebony Eyes, and a berserk Temptation – the wailing banshee backing and "yeah yeah yeah" intro on this reworking of Bing Crosby's 30s hit came to Don in a dream. Unfortunately, their publisher Wesley Rose didn't own the rights to Temptation and, feeling Phil and Don had put his nose out of joint, wouldn't allow them to record any Acuff-Rose-published songs for the next two years. This meant the Everly Brothers couldn't record their own songs – it puts the record company quibbles of Prince and George Michael into perspective.
On top of this, the Marines called them up for a six-month stint in 1961, so they couldn't record or promote their current singles. Don Everly got married, got divorced, took solace in drink and drugs, and attempted suicide on a tour of Britain in 1962 – Phil had to complete the tour on his own. By the time the argument with Wesley Rose had been resolved in 1963, the Beatles had stolen their place at the table (the influence is laid bare if you play Cathy's Clown and Please Please Me one after the other), and Don's songwriting and production style, understandably, had taken on a darker hue. Nancy's Minuet (1963) is pure David Lynch; it's atmosphere, Don claimed, was borrowed from Henry Mancini's Experiment in Terror soundtrack.
This was all very impressive, but people were buying Everly Brothers records in increasingly smaller numbers, switching their allegiances to British beat groups. With the R&B thunder of Gone Gone Gone in 1964, the Everlys showed how easily they could adapt to the new era. Their southern roots also meant they were more than capable at turning their hands to folk rock when it became the du jour sound of '65: Don's beautifully bitter The Price of Love (a UK No 2) and a battery of 12-strings on Love Is Strange (UK No 11) out-jangled and outfought the opposition. Don was still penning proto-bedsit ballads – the moan-drone of It's All Over (1966) had an almost Benedectine quality – and they would toy with Mamas and Papas-style soft pop harmonies on 1967's exquisite Bowling Green, one of that year's most summery singles.
Reading on mobile? Click to view
Like the Beach Boys in the 70s, the Everly Brothers were continually stymied by the success of their past which would periodically upstage their new recordings through compilations like Golden Hits (1963), Original Greatest Hits (No 7 in 1970), and Walk Right Back with the Everlys (No 10 in 1975) – there were others, too. 1968 saw the first major rock'n'roll revival in Britain, which meant people were ready to dig out Bird Dog and Bye Bye Love but few people – one notable exception being John Peel – were ready for the post-psychedelic class warfare of the extraordinary Lord of the Manor. What would Buddy Holly have been doing had he been alive in 1968? Quite possibly nothing as outre and impressive as this.
1968 also provided the Everlys' best album, Roots. Country rock was – thanks to the Band's Music From Big Pink and Dylan's John Wesley Harding – providing a new rural home for burnt-out psych-rock cases. The Everlys, good old southern boys, were once again cited as role models by the likes of Crosby, Stills and Nash. As if to the ram the point home to the public, and to re-position them in the hippie era, Warner Brothers' Eton-educated A&R man Andrew Wickham encouraged them to make the Roots album, which featured songs from new names like Randy Newman and Merle Haggard, plus a cosmic re-invention of their 50s b-side I Wonder If I Care As Much. The songs were linked and overlapped to create a suite; Wickham's crowning touch was to top and tail the record with clips of the Everly family radio show, recorded in Tennessee in the early 50s. But, good as it was, Roots didn't sell. The brothers could by now barely stand each other's presence. The split finally came during a 1972 show at Knott's Berry Farm in California. Phil threw his guitar down and walked off as Don told the stunned audience "the Everly Brothers died 10 years ago". They didn't speak, let alone record together, for another 10 years.
Reading on mobile? Click to view
I meant to write this piece as a tribute to Phil Everly, but it is impossible to talk about Phil without talking about Don. And vice versa. Of all the sibling rivalries in pop history, the Everlys had it the toughest. Their voices were inseparable. After their on-stage split both had solo careers. Phil was immediately gifted a huge hit, Albert Hammond Sr's The Air That I Breathe, in 1973. It flopped. The irony can't have been lost on Phil that a few months later the Hollies scored an international hit with the song, with a sound that leaned heavily on the Everly Brothers' harmonies.
Phil and Don had met Hollies Allan Clarke and Graham Nash as far back as 1960, waiting outside a Manchester theatre for an autograph. "Don and Phil Everly talked to us for what seemed like half an hour," Nash later recalled. "Instead of just patting us on the head, they stood and talked to me and Allan Clarke, encouraging us. It changed my life." Without the Everlys, no Hollies harmonies; without the Hollies, no Abba harmonies. The Beatles, the Bee Gees, Simon and Garfunkel, all of them owe a great debt to Phil and Don. Modern pop would have sounded very different without the Everly Brothers.
*More on the Everly Brothers*
• Phil Everly – a life in pictures
• The Everly Brothers: an inspiration for a generation
• Phil Everly obituary Reported by guardian.co.uk 4 hours ago.