Elvis PRESLEY: Blue Hawaii

(#26: 6 January 1962, 1 week; 24 February 1962, 17 weeks)

Track listing: Blue Hawaii/Almost Always True/Aloha-Oe/No More/Can’t Help Falling In Love/Rock-A-Hula Baby/Moonlight Swim/Ku-U-I-Po (Hawaiian Sweetheart)/Ito Eats/Slicin’ Sand/Hawaiian Sunset/Beach Boy Blues/Island Of Love/Hawaiian Wedding Song

Elvis Exotica is a concept only imaginable in extreme retrospect, and I’m sure that enterprising souls at RCA (or elsewhere) will shove something resembling a compilation together in due course. It’s a pity that no one thought to link Elvis up with Martin Denny or Esquivel at the time, rather than rely on the stolidly stalwart likes of Tepper and Bennett to come up with pale photocopies. Still, throughout the Blue Hawaii soundtrack there are tempting hints of what might have been; Presley’s worried surfer of a voice floating carefully over shallow but colourful conduits of steel guitar, marimba, maracas and sombre Jordanaire harmonies, somewhat baffled as to how he has washed up on this island. In the film he is Chadwick Gates (as one is), a newly-demobbed GI (spotted the link yet?) who opts for the life of the beach bum over that of a trainee fruit company executive, much to the chagrin of his parents – one of whom, Angela Lansbury, was less than ten years Presley’s senior – and so Blue Hawaii set the tone for eight years or so of cinematic beach bumming, an era wherein Presley worked hard at seeming not to work at all, and probably wished that he wasn’t. My father – who knew his cinema, and knew his opinions even more – thought Blue Hawaii absolutely the worst movie ever made but I’m not sure whether he saw the subsequent Paradise, Hawaiian Style, next to which Blue Hawaii plays like The Magnificent Ambersons.

Presley’s sixties films by and large strolled carelessly (in all the wrong ways) through a dentist’s waiting office of glossy magazine covers masquerading as plots and the Blue Hawaii songs more or less act as the blandest of travelogues. Hawaii had only recently (August 1959) been admitted to the Union and was reasonably hip, but already the tourist industry was manfully assembling its own clichés and most, if not all, can be found here; “Aloha-Oe” is the same tune to which Spike Jones’ narrator previously announced their boat to be sinking slowly in the West, and though not straightforwardly structured – an out-of-tempo cod-operatic Hawaiian tenor introduction, oddly punctuated by Boots Randolph’s hissing tenor sax, and a final wriggle of an acoustic guitar chord which seems to cling on forever in the hope of something better – tells us instantly that tour guide is not Elvis’ calling in this life.

The introduction to “Blue Hawaii” itself is moderately startling, almost out of Les Baxter with its subaquatic booms of voices and eddying strings. Yet the song is an old Bing Crosby standard – possibly payback for Bing standing up for Elvis when first he appeared – and Elvis seems, here and elsewhere, to be marooned in a thirties neverland with controlled crooning and overbearing Jordanaires backing vocals (on “Blue Hawaii” they are back to their old tricks – “THE NIGHT IS YOUNG” and “AND SO ARE WE SO ARE WE” being the most intrusive). “Moonlight Swim”’s mild suggestiveness (“I’ll keep you warm/So very warm from your head to your feet”) is flattened entirely by the Anita Bryant disciples who come in and scrape their vocal nails down Elvis’ blackboard, such that the final effect is one of Rudy Vallee trapped in a greying elevator. “Hawaiian Wedding Song,” which went on to become one of Presley’s most popular stage songs of the seventies, dates from 1926 and sounds it; the arrangement is so suffocatingly “epic” (“Soon bells will be ringing” answered by the Jordanaires’ “ring, ring, ring, ring,” the latter crying out for a “w” prefix and a “their necks” suffix) that Presley sounds, as Lena suggested, as though he wants to marry the state of Hawaii rather than His Girl. His final cry of “blue skies” is a desperate grasp for oxygen in the sea that is placidly drowning him. He does a little better with “Ku-U-I-Po” despite, or because of, its strangely phrased sentiments (“I love you less today than I will tomorrow”) but “ Island Of Love ” is strictly tourist board daytime ad country.

“I resisted/Although my arm was twisted”
(“Almost Always True”)

Many of the songs of Blue Hawaii seem to have been sourced by sticking a pin in different issues of Billboard. Generally Presley sounds more engaged with the uptempo rockers – generally substandard though they are – and while Randolph’s excitable tenor and Hank Garland’s brake screech guitar (in an unusually long intro) make “Almost Always True” initially exciting, not to mention Presley’s expert ducking and diving into two-timing and mock innocence (the steady, minimalist drip drip staccato sequences which he swiftly terminates with an anguished/contented downward growl of “Ohhhhhh!!!!”), it took Lena to point out that melodically this was a recasting of children’s favourite “Alouette.” The fact that Elvis should spring to life singing a modified song about plucking the feathers of a dead bird should prove ample ammunition for future allegorists. “No More” also sounds suspiciously familiar in its Dean Martin-goes-Latin-for-a-day amble until you realise that it’s a reshaped “Amor” (subsequently a hit for Julio Iglesias in its original form).

Elsewhere there is congestion and confusion. “Hawaiian Sunset” is described as “peeping from the sun” (despite its melodic and lyrical portents of Richard Hawley’s “Darling Wait For Me”) and goes downhill from there. “Slicin’ Sand” is a feeble rocker (“Got a lot of ocean if it gets too hot”) with the Jordanaires loudly booming the song out of existence and Garland contributing a bored-sounding guitar solo. “Beach Boy Blues” is a case of pouring too many mixes into too small a pot; the Jordanaires’ bulbous bellowing battles with George Field’s harmonica, the rhythm section (and Presley himself) uncertain whether to rock or to play the blues ( Garland ’s solo does its best to negotiate midway). When singing “Only 30 days and 90 years to go” Presley sounds wearier and more prematurely exhausted than ever he had done, and the writhing continues until DJ Fontana mercifully puts the song out of its misery by hammering it to pieces. Worst of all is perhaps “Ito Eats,” a calamitous misreading of Harry Belafonte – and how and when did Hawaii suddenly become Jamaica ? Here, Presley sounds positively embarrassed, and with lines such as “Ito eat like teeth are out of style” and “He even eat the shell from the coconut” (are we suddenly listening to the George Mitchell Minstrels again?), nobody could blame him, apart from the terminal crime of going along with it and allowing it to happen. “Eat-o little faster!” he pleads (“One pineapple straight to the head!” yelled Lena ). It also bears one of the most bizarre endings to any Elvis song, a solitary, agonised, atonal, groaning, croaking Jordanaire (are we suddenly listening to Daniel Johnston?).

And yet and yet and yet…as with every manufactured clipboard of tourist attractions, magic sometimes occurs. The “Can’t Help Falling In Love”/”Rock-A-Hula Baby” double header single was huge and undeniably instrumental in keeping the soundtrack at number one for much of the first half of 1962 (though the single mixes downplay the more obvious Hawaiian elements) and even more surprisingly works. For once, on “Rock-A-Hula Baby,” corn though it may be (well, it’s sweetcorn), Presley actually sounds as though he’s enjoying himself, bouncing off the pinball streaks of steel guitar (Bernie Lewis, the album’s unsung hero). Even the Jordanaires are having fun, unchained with their near maniacal screams of “RockMAN rockMAN rockMAN!” (are we suddenly listening to the KLF?) behind Garland ’s unhinged solo, and wailing orgasmically over Fontana ’s closing drum demolition derby.

And the moment of true magic, of real blue in real air, dates back to 1780. “Can’t Help Falling In Love” was modelled on the song “Plaisir d’Amour” and with his reading Elvis stops the show altogether and starts other, newer things. There is no overarranging here – both marimba and steel guitar are positioned very subtly in the middleground – simply an ocean of celeste doo wop, weightless yet profound, Presley (relatively, emotionally) naked, offering his hand, his whole life too, kissing away the shadows of Rodgers and Hammerstein; as with its contemporary “Moon River” and its vague, slowly-to-the-sea metaphorical antecedent “Unchained Melody” its magic seems to shine a star upon the pop of its age. It utterly transcends the forced banality of its surroundings and reminds us of other important consequences which nobody could have foreseen from Blue Hawaii; not simply how deeply the record, as imagined experience, as sonographic environment, would have been absorbed and remembered by Brian Wilson (“Beach Boy Blues”) when he came to do SMiLE – and note how, in the final, reassembled SMiLE, his Worried Man’s adventures end – perhaps in the afterlife - in blue Hawaii, but also…well, throughout the album, quietly playing ukulele (and a little pedal steel guitar), barely noticeable but indispensable, appears Alvino Rey, grandfather of Arcade Fire’s Win and William Butler. If only Elvis had lived to sing “Wake Up” in an age when nobody would have been twisting his impossibly exotic arm.

The George MITCHELL MINSTRELS: Another Black And White Minstrel Show

(#25: 11 November 1961, 8 weeks)

Track listing: Meet The Minstrels (Ring Up The Curtain/Ring Ring Da Banjo/When The Saints Go Marching In/Chicago/You Made Me Love You/Mr Gallagher And Mr Shean/Put Your Arms Around Me Honey/Down Where The Swanee River Flows/When The Saints Go Marching In)/The Good Old Summertime (While Strolling Through The Park One Day/In The Good Old Summertime/Sweet Rosie O’Grady/I’ll Be Your Sweetheart/Little Annie Rooney/The Band Played On)/Alabamy Bound With Al Jolson (Alabamy Bound/Swanee/Is It True What They Say About Dixie?/Carolina/Toot Toot Tootsie)/The Old Ark’s A Moverin’/Western Style (Along The Navajo Trail/In Ole’ Oklahoma/Old Dan Tucker/Country Style/Skip To My Lou/Buffalo Gal)/Your Requests (Singin’ In The Rain/Together/No Two People/My Blue Heaven/Falling In Love With Love)/Ay Ay Ay! (Maria From Babia/I, Yi, Yi, Yi (I Like You Very Much)/When I Love I Love/The Bandit/Cielito Linda/Cuanta Le Gusta/I’ll Si Si Ya In Bahia)/More Stephen Foster Melodies (Hard Time Come Again No More/Gentle Annie/Way Down Upon The Swanee River)/Dry Bones/Goodbye-ee (Tell Me, Pretty Maiden/Put On Your Ta-Ta Little Girlie/Hello! Hello! Who’s Your Lady Friend/I Was A Good Little Girl Until I Met You/In The Twi-Twi-Twi-Light/Two Little Girls In Blue/Goodbye-ee)
Of the thousands of viewers who blew the ITV switchboard in February 1968 after watching the final episode of The Prisoner, it is likely that few had seen or remembered Ibsen’s Brand, or McGoohan’s apparently epochal performance as the lead in that same tractacus-as-play on stage in London in 1959. If they had done, they would have sensed the Brand allusions – verging on parody – in the climactic court scene, with Kenneth Griffith’s judge (or “President” as the credits had it) pleading with McGoohan to “lead us – or go.” The original Brand fails as a preacher or a leader because he cannot compromise the one-way bridge he has erected between faith and reason (cf. Kierkegaard); he knows that, because of the original sundering between God and man, the world can never be perfect, yet is driven to make that same world perfect even if no one else is willing to follow him and the whole world, including himself, is destroyed as a result.

There was that same sense of destructive perfection in McGoohan, a man constantly bewildered by the failure of others to see the world and life as he saw and lived it. The Prisoner’s rationale (and spearhead of attack against “rationalism”) is based entirely on freedom, but in McGoohan’s case freedom might have appeared to some to mean freedom to be left alone, to stand apart, to be a pronounced, hugely magnified individual, visible and unmissable in his individuality.

I was born too late and in the wrong place to see that barnstorming Brand, just as I failed to be alive when McGoohan played Starbuck to Welles’ Ahab in Moby Dick: Rehearsed, but as with so many of these life-altering experiences the dream is perhaps more pursuant, more cherishable, than any first hand reality could have been. When we consider McGoohan’s singular role in making television an art – and it is fully arguable that he was instrumental in facilitating that conversion – we have to think of Welles; Number 6 was McGoohan’s Kane, and it didn’t just come back again and again, regardless of what McGoohan went on to do after The Prisoner – he subtly carried on the series’ internal dialogue in the many episodes of Columbo in which he acted and/or directed – but refracted back onto what he had done before; think, as one of many possible instances, of the despairing, growling beast he portrayed in the latter stages of 1958’s Hell Drivers, less a thug losing his grip, more a Lear eviscerating his kingdom, screaming: “I AM NUMBER ONE!”

Nor was Welles absent from the making of The Prisoner; in town to do his bit on Casino Royale, Welles drove over to Borehamwood to visit his old friend – upon his arrival at reception, McGoohan joyfully announced “It’s all right ladies, let him through, genius is in the house!” McGoohan was shooting the crucial “Once Upon A Time” episode at the time and Welles helped out with the direction and made other key suggestions; somewhere there still exist films of dialogue from the 1955 Moby production, long dialogues between Ahab and Starbuck, out to destroy each other but still in the most precious depths of friendship, some of which appeared in suitably altered form in McGoohan and McKern’s variation on Beckett’s Endgame. And there was no escaping – least of all in “Fall Out” – the influence of Welles’ The Trial. But few paid attention to The Third Policeman.

It may seem wearily predictable to retain emphasis on The Prisoner in a career which spanned a jazz-drumming Iago (in All Night Long, with Mingus, Brubeck, Attenborough, Tubby Hayes, the other Beckett – Harry – et al), Jerry Lee Lewis as Iago (the McGoohan-directed film of Jack Good’s musical Catch My Soul), Disney and Cronenberg. But the series – just seventeen episodes, ten more than McGoohan ideally desired – not only raised the bar for television but virtually created it, and Dennis Potter, Alan Bennett, the Pythons and Jim Henson were only the most prominent television innovators who followed his path, knowingly or otherwise (Alexis Kanner in “Fall Out” miming to “Dry Bones” by the Four Lads - Canada sings Canada if we’re talking about a broken social scene - eighteen years ahead of The Singing Detective; and what is Basil Fawlty at the end but an ageing Number 6 locked into a diminishing circular hell of a Village? And as for Number 6’s other unlikely alter ego, Reggie Perrin, the exhausted man who vanishes on a beach and reappears under a different title…well, it could and should go on forever).

And yet it was also a programme which seemed to eat the rest of television as it set up its shop, including itself; contrast the relatively glamorous location shoots and setpieces of the early episodes with the blank childishness of “Once Upon A Time” or the unwinding of the ITC biscuit cutter melodrama spool which occurs throughout “Fall Out,” a piece more or less improvised as it was being shot. It drew some remarkable performances from undervalued actors; Colin Gordon’s two stints as Number 2, for instance, make one regret how badly this fine actor was wasted for virtually all of his career. And there were startling turns by people such as Eric Portman, Mary Morris and Nadia Gray, actors who didn’t make a point of appearing on television. Morris’ Number 2 in “Dance Of The Dead,” with all her foretelling of Thatcher (and astonishingly a last-minute replacement for an unwell Trevor Howard), might still count as the most frightening villain ever to appear on the small screen. Cuddly Patrick Cargill rips “Hammer Into Anvil” apart with something in him that is genuinely terrifying (and which he seldom displayed elsewhere in his long and distinguished career). McKern was famously driven to a nervous breakdown and/or heart attack by the intensity of the “Once Upon A Time” shoots and took a lot of persuading (not to mention a shave and a haircut, two bits) to be resurrected for “Fall Out” a year later, and yet even in his starkest moments there is a bearable lightness which strives to preserve his being.

Number 6, that entirely logical alter ego of Eastwood’s Man With No Name – their eventual and inevitable meeting in Escape From Alcatraz merely underlined that particular hall of mirrors – wants merely to retire from a world of which he has grown tired and finds himself planted in a world which he cannot quite understand, a compulsory retirement stripped of meaningful work in which he is encouraged to settle for less, fit in, comply. He paces every world he inhabits with the fatal impatience of someone unfit to live in any world – or for whom no world is entirely, i.e. satisfactorily, fit. McKern’s bank manager looks forward to the transformation of the whole world into the Village; McGoohan dreams of being the first man to live on the moon. It is telling that one of the few moments of extended peace he finds is in the self-directed “Many Happy Returns,” the first half hour of which contains perhaps a couple of lines of dialogue, both rendered in unreachable foreign – or invented – languages, as well as some of the most sublime images of the British countryside ever portrayed on film, easily comparable with the work of Michael Reeves. The London into which he literally falls – off the back of a lorry, if you will – never quite transcends the nature of a dreamed fantasy; the curious widow who offers him a kindness he had nearly forgotten (McGoohan is very moving in this sequence, as he tries falteringly to thank her), fashion shoots in Hyde Park Corner, the reassuring tones of Donald Sinden, the slightly nightmarish glare of Patrick Cargill. And it all turns out to have been a dream; he is obligingly parachuted back into the Village, the generous widow is the black-badged Number 2, the reverie swims to its graceful end.

Broadly The Prisoner is a story of three halves; he begins by repeatedly attempting to escape before realising that this will get him nowhere; then he attempts to understand and subvert the mechanisms (and mechanics) which run the Village; then his mind evacuates the Village altogether and we are thrust into the dreamed land of Westerns, Danger Man/Avengers pastiches, Number 6 portrayed by a different actor before he ends up, no longer dreaming, in the underground detention centre in which he might have been held all along (however long that may have been – years? A week? Half an hour?). And then he falls out of the bottom of the system. Nothing works out logically; no one – but no one - can be trusted (the woman who wakes up in a replica of her own house and becomes a screaming, gibbering wreck when she finds out where she is turns out to be a candidate for Number 1 – “It was a good idea and you did your best – I’ll stress it in my report”); the Moebius strip is surfed bilaterally; Sisyphus’ stone will be mounted again and again. Democracy is by definition pocket (“Free For All”), information cannot be confused with education (“The General”), the right to dream is almost worth dying for (“A, B & C”).

Or simply a portrait of a fatal purist determined to find out why everyone else is not like him – so 6 being 1 makes perfect sense; in fury, he is intent on creating a society of worshipful clones – or a far simpler portrait of a human being struggling to understand the world and relate to it. Consider how in “Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling” – one of the most dismissed episodes, but one of the most crucial - Nigel Stock as Number 6 suddenly, in his stout, fiftyish body, becomes everything McGoohan can’t be; he kisses his fiancée passionately (contrast with an eternally tensed up Number 6 who has an inbuilt difficulty dealing with women), his determination becomes focused, he is somehow adult in a way which 6 can never really grasp; thus the second childishness of the playroom and Number 48; the boychild running off with the little child-man, the better to begin a more colourful circle.

Or maybe McGoohan just caught The Black And White Minstrel Show on TV one evening and got irritated. Once again we have effusive (as in “effusion” in the knee) sleevenotes by Derek Johnson – it is beyond remarkable that this man was still the NME’s News Editor until well into the New Pop age – which in their somewhat forced ebullience betray the orders of the strapped down community. “…concentrating on the type of songs which are tailor-made for community or party singing,” “Always easy-on-the-ear, continually provoking memories” (of why they resigned?), “…keep feet a-tapping, to banish cares, and to create an atmosphere of bonhomie and carefree relaxation.” Questions evidently being a burden to others.

Moreover, Johnson is keen to paint a picture of the programme as the world’s greatest achievement: “Few will deny that the “Black and White Minstrel Show” is one of the most generally satisfying and consistently entertaining television presentations ever conceived in this country. Indeed, in one’s assessment of its merits, one could encompass the entire world…”

“The whole world…as the Village?”
“That is my hope. What’s yours?”
“I’d like to be the first man on the moon.”
What to say of the second Minstrels album itself? The musical focus seems to move away from placid accordion strolls towards energetic big band enemas but the concept is hardly less nullifying, if marginally more listenable. On the weakly positive side, Dai Francis seems to have done a bit more work on his Jolson impressions since last time, though by the time we reach his “Toot Toot Tootsie” Donald Duck has once again raised his beak and we get wordless elisions (“WAAAAAUUUUUGGGGHHHH!!”) reminiscent of Leslie Phillips slipping off a tea tray and landing in Joan Sims’ bath. Otherwise it largely remains a mystery how such difficult listening could ever have been categorised as easy listening. The Television Toppers girls appear to have attended refresher courses in estuary English with the expected dire consequences; witnessing them plod through the over-enunciated likes of “You Made Me Love You” or “I Was A Good Little Girl Until I Met You” (on the latter they are met by a sinister rising chorus of mass Jack-the-Rippers: “UNTIL YOU MET ME!”) is akin to listening to Margaret Thatcher auditioning for the Nolan Sisters. Their periodic squeals of “Hold me Ti-IGEEEEGHT!!” are unsettling in entirely the wrong way. Meanwhile, the boys chant “MY MY MY MY” or, much, much worse (on “The Band Played On”) “Oom-PAH-PAH oom-PAH-PAH!” and I have to be reminded that “His Latest Flame/Little Sister” and “Tower Of Strength” were riding atop the singles chart at the same time and that this was not the whole story, that the yearnings and intentions of early sixties youth could not be summarised by the verb “spooning” (as heard in the otiose “No Two People”), that “a cosy room” (in the second “My Blue Heaven” to arrive in as many weeks) does not have to be answered by a corny fragment of cod/sub-Shearing Swedish furniture “sophistication.”

When straining to expand their panorama, the Minstrels usually come a cropper; the Latin medley is intruded upon by incongruous Dixieland horns and if there were lovable, cheeky Southern black sharecroppers born within the sound of Bow Bells then the Cockney voicings of “Hello! Hello! Who’s Your Lady Friend” seem determined to prove that this is not merely careless thinking. Still more nauseating are the occasional uprisings of patently false bonhomie with whoops and cheers reminiscent of an office party where one is clearly being forced to have “fun.” Their “Singin’ In The Rain” is steadily drained of all life, aspiration and water with nauseating dots of “pitter patter” harmonies. As for the concluding “girlie” medley with such items as “Put On Your Ta-Ta Little Girlie” and “Two Little Girls In Blue” – the bluest of veils is best drawn over such affairs.

And yet two songs from this interminable medley of medleys – “I, Yi. Yi, Yi” and “Dry Bones,” the latter of which gets a whole track to itself – play crucial roles in the final episode of The Prisoner (well, the latter does, anyway; the former serves as a nice audiovisual pun to accompany the meltdown of Rover) and I wonder whether McGoohan had the Minstrels at least partially in mind when trying to set so many things right (“Toot Toot Tootsie,” along with Seeger’s “Little Boxes,” was also on the shortlist for songs to be played while 6 walks down the corridor of jukeboxes before McGoohan plumped for “All You Need Is Love”). “Dry Bones,” of course, being about rebirth, not to mention resurrection, not to mention clean slate, the right to embark upon a fresh start without the past tagging you like a can tied to the hind leg of a frightened dog (and all due acknowledgement to Simon Barnes for that metaphor); and so 6/1, 2 and 48 jive around in their truck on the A2 (but weren’t they in North Wales? Forget The Man Who Was Thursday at your peril – “I never knew that we were so close to London ”), absolutely liberated even though they are still, strictly speaking, in a cage.

Then there are the times when the Minstrels break away from possum-eating knees-ups, stop pretending to be someone else and begin to sing music they actually feel. Once again the Stephen Foster medley works well because it is clearly heartfelt and no showbiz is involved; just simple but effective choral work and at least the possibility of there being a lump in the throat – the closing “Swanee River” is done slowly and patiently, with a sadness which may or may not mask defiance. Also surprisingly successful is the “Western Style” cowboy sequence of songs wherein the Minstrels, singing authentically white music, suddenly sound entirely at home and at ease. The opening “Along The Navajo Trail” is a fine ballad reading and even the typical wake-up jumpcut to hoedown is manageable; here there seems genuine gusto (even if still relatively clichéd; “hear that banjo” being duly answered by a banjo, etc., and quite what a Bunny Berigan-esque muted trumpet has to do with barn dances is beyond my ken) and at least a semblance of life. And buried deep in the busy scratch mix towards the end is “Buffalo Gal” and it is impossible not to see a fifteen-year-old Malcolm McLaren taking notes.

This is not the only unexpected trail laid by the record; the album concludes with the old World War I song “Goodbye-ee,” and I note that a not dissimilar version of the same song made the Top 40 towards the end of 1975 under the name 14-18, a pseudonym for the young Pete Waterman (in conjunction with the other Peter Shelley). Curiouser, however, is the album’s colourful inner sleeve, listing other HMV albums the listener might wish to buy; one side is devoted to classical music, whereas the “popular” side advertises, as well as songs from The White Heather Club and Joe Loss’ Come Dancing, records by Ella Fitzgerald, Lloyd Price, Ray Charles and, dominating the list at top left, An Evening With Paul Robeson. Did the success of the Minstrels – over Christmas 1961 they held down both first and second places in the album chart – subsidise the production of the real thing? When one considers that HMV at the time also had the UK rights to the Impulse! Catalogue – so that other 1961 releases would have included Coltrane's Africa/Brass – the mind starts spinning as busily as the inner workings of Number 1’s rocket (to destroy or recreate the world?). Still, the second Minstrels album plays like Village music to which not contributing to “community singing” would doubtless be deemed “unmutual.” When McGoohan becomes himself again, the Beatles start playing. We have, of course, several more steps to take before we reach that door marked “WELL COME,” and they do not all trace as you might expect.

Cliff RICHARD: 21 Today

(#24: 4 November 1961, 1 week)

Track listing: Happy Birthday To You/Forty Days/Catch Me/How Wonderful To Know/Tough Enough/50 Tears For Every Kiss/The Night Is So Lonely/Poor Boy/Y’arriva/Outsider/Tea For Two/To Prove My Love For You/Without You/A Mighty Lonely Man/My Blue Heaven/Shame On You

“But don’t forget, there’s more than one of you” (“Poor Boy”)

Look at the size of those candles. In my two score plus five years I have never seen candles that big on any birthday cake, not even on dodgy corporate ones concealing strippers. More than anything, they remind me of altar candles, and in a very Cliff Richard way that might make perfect sense. The cake is real and the picture appears by all accounts to have been taken at a genuine party, and yet there is an unavoidable uneasy feeling about the whole scenario, as if something here isn’t quite right, that the picture’s constituent pieces do not seamlessly fit together.

But then Cliff is separate and distinct from most of what we recognise as British pop music even as he is simultaneously British pop music personified. 21 Today was his fifth album and his first to make the top (the first peaked at four and the next three in second place), and perhaps there were stern meetings where the Shadows were reprimanded for beating their mentor to number one. Or perhaps not, since the overriding impression from listening to the record is just how much fun he is having in the company of Hank and the boys, and how little he seems to be enjoying himself when compelled to do other things. The record begins with “Happy Birthday To You” – no, this is not the admittedly intriguing prospect of Cliff singing to himself, but a perky instrumental reading by the Shadows. This proceeds harmlessly for a minute or so before voices and clinking glasses are faded into the picture; we are eavesdropping at the man’s birthday party – and Derek Johnson’s sleevenote, which brings new meaning to the term “egregious,” is adamantly keen on emphasising that Cliff was now A Man – and we hear the lad himself calling for gin and orange while indulging in curiously Flann O’Brien-esque anecdotes (“Remember the time I landed on the shores?” “What shores?”), the scenario intruded upon by the occasional, startling hyena-like cackle.

It is moderately unsettling but does set the scene, although it’s a pity that the album didn’t run with the full concept (as per Beach Boys Party or Recorded Live At A Sloan Party) and keep coming back to the chatter. Here’s Cliff with his mates, celebrating, reminiscing, taking it easy and performing the odd song – and you would be hard pushed to find something odder than his reading of Chuck Berry’s “Forty Days.” When he storms abruptly from the pregnant intro into the furiously paced rocker that is the song proper, complete with surprisingly febrile growls, he does help to dismantle some kneejerk wisdom, namely that Cliff “lost it” or “sold out” after “Living Doll.” On the pronounced contrary, in the Shadows’ company he was still eager to rock in late 1961 – hear his “call of the gypsy woman” (and remember what he and Bruce Welch would do with that cry fifteen years later) or his throbbing “voodoo/do do” couplets, backed by requisite handclaps and whoops, and it’s evident that he’s trying, really and still trying, to cut into the throb of Elvis.

But then other hands who think they know better start interfering. In his sleevenote – as occurs with so many album sleevenotes of this era – Johnson inevitably speaks of Cliff’s gradual transformation into an All-Round (Family) Entertainer and in 1961 you couldn’t really blame Cliff, or anyone else, for going along with this; by then most of the original rockers had burned themselves out, died, got religion, been excommunicated or been neutered and the Beatles were still a bunch of Toxteth scruffs hustling for coins and nights of modest passion in Liverpool and Hamburg. But as soon as the deliberately and infuriatingly coy backing singers simper their way into “Catch Me” the effect is instantly deadening and you can hear Cliff’s interest reducing from top to second gear. Although Hank does his best to make the track interesting – his writhing, descending crescendos after “tumble” and “all over the place” for example – it’s a losing battle; when a song’s central lyrical conceit is “take my tipsy heart,” there is realistically little that anyone could do to improve it.

Yet “Catch Me” is the essence of vivid vitality when set next to “How Wonderful To Know,” the first of several identikit 6/8 ballads which finds Cliff backed by Norrie Paramor and his glutinous orchestra and chorus. Now it’s Cliff’s turn to attempt to turn this leaden dirge into something resembling gold (more fool him) with his idly descending “Share-this-love-with-you” incline and his Hertfordshire ski slope of “How-ow-ow-ooh woo-oooo-onderful” but again his endeavour fails; with ration book homilies such as “now and hereafter” to hand, it is what Lena describes as a starched white tablecloth of a song, something even Donny Osmond might have bridled at recording.

Worse is to come on “50 Tears For Every Kiss” where Paramor decorates/obscures Cliff’s remorse (“I bought so many kisses” – Lena terms this as “the accountant’s drinking song”) with that depressingly and eerily familiar 101 Strings anaesthesia of cascading streams of dog-pitched fluid. “To Prove My Love For You” is so deferentially mild that we might as well be listening to Dickie Valentine, and in 1951 rather than 1961; like one of those pink-topped cakes from Greggs The Bakers, it is wholly a case of icing without character obscuring the song’s taste. “Outsider” features a Cliff as glum as I’ve ever heard him, dutifully clocking in for another day of joyless labouring because it’s the right thing to do rather than something that he wants to do; as with many of these songs, we could be listening to bargain basement Elvis soundtrack rejects (and given that many of these songs were composed by Col Parker publishing contract hacks Sid Tepper and Roy Bennett it’s little surprise); Cliff sings disinterestedly about “our favourite melodies” (is this 1861?) and is regularly interrupted by a ghastly sub-Stargazers choir (“SO MUCH!”) so by the time he gloomily concludes “Outsider – that’s me” his misery is manifest. “A Mighty Lonely Man” does, as a song, give Cliff a little bit more to chew on (or into), but again, lines such as “a foolish, foolish fool” give limited scope for meaningful interpretation; to his credit, the singer does loosen up, stretching out his vowels, keeping the song within his seldom heard bass range, but once more the abominable Home Service backing stingers scupper any attempt at poignancy or depth; we are left with the impression (as Lena puts it) of a diet Elvis, a low sodium Billy Fury.

Back, without much or any regret, to the Shadows-backed tracks; “Tough Enough” is lyrically terrible – night rhymes with moonlight, and marvel at “Hey good people, gonna make her my wife!” – but Cliff has great fun working with seven different varieties of “oooo-wee!” and palpably comes alive again. “The Night Is So Lonely” revisits the 6/8 ballad formula but the Shadows lend a naturally livelier approach than Paramor and at least sound more committed musically, even if they nullify the track with some dreadful echt-Jordanaires harmonies. A far more interesting track is “Poor Boy”; although broadly uptempo and acoustic (in the “Apache”/”Wonderful Land” sense), Cliff, echoing at an odd off-mike angle (and thus sounding like proto-dub), treats it as a study in blue melancholia in his then slightly strained upper register, and the cumulative effect is unsettling; rather than commiserating with the hapless victim of love, Cliff at times sounds as though he’s offering himself as an alternative.

Then, however, we reach the album’s nadir, “Y’arriva,” an active equivalent to the drawling, sated passivity of Sinatra’s “South Of The Border” – but that’s as far as I’m taking that particular comparison. From the opening “Way down in the land of sunny Mexico” we know we are set for a journey into light entertainment hell, and so it proves to be the case; here Cliff is the hapless tourist chatting up the local ladies and being railroaded out of town by stock local heavies and he has audible difficulty keeping a straight face; the chorus, as such, is drowned out by proto-Tremeloes yelps of “arriva” (rather than the actual “ariba”) and “andale,” and with a rhyming schemata which allows “In Spanish this means I’m hee-ya!” we are less in the land of Malcolm Lowry and more in the land of Peter Glaze on Crackerjack. The comparison Lena extemporised here was one of what Mexican food might have been like in the London of 1961 (if anyone is old enough to remember what it was like, then please add your comments at the bottom) – nice try but nowhere near (or, indeed, the tourist London of 2009 and specifically “Mexican” restaurants in Greenwich; who the hell thought that tortillas and pasta went together?).

Remember, however, that Cliff was now A Man, Old Enough To Vote, Put Away Those Childish Things Yes Mr Paramor Sir, and thus had to Broaden His Appeal. Thus the execrable novelty numbers; but also more interesting excursions like his lounge/cocktail reading of “Tea For Two” with a gently swinging Shadows (although they unaccountably swing into full blown cha-cha in the bridge, perhaps in misguided tribute to the “Tea For Two Cha-Cha” top three hit achieved by the posthumous Tommy Dorsey Orchestra three years earlier), although the active serenity is briefly broken up by a demented five-second Tony Meehan drum solo and marred by a missed dive by Cliff in the song’s first climax where he aims for a high final syllable on “telephone” but his subsequent “yeah” completely misses the key change. His vaguely sensual purr of “onnnn” in the song’s final furlong is quite something, however. His “My Blue Heaven” is similarly but even more minimally structured; apart from some discreet piano chords by Hank (and his rather bizarre piano introduction), a quickfire guitar solo midsong and the straight faced quick march middle eights, Cliff is largely accompanied by bass and drums alone and curiously sounds twice his age – in fact, there’s a sudden richness and bottoming out of his voice which sounds remarkably like the Cliff of 1982, but more about the latter when we get there (or thereabouts).

“Without You” is one of those rare things, a song with a Cliff composer credit (together with Marvin and Welch), and churns along as an agreeable rocker, albeit broken apart by a furiously echoed Marvin solo halfway through and ultimately ruined by the unsolicited return of that stupid backing choir (the Mike Sammes Singers?) at the end. Still, one has to wonder about Cliff’s world; he declares that without his Other, he does not wish to “go on a kissing spree.” Quite apart from having to find something to rhyme with “me,” this is surely unique (or as unique as makes no difference) in British or indeed any pop; a kissing “spree”? And whom would he be proposing to kiss if not his other half? Would he perchance venture out with a shopping list of potential targets (see also the King Brothers’ somewhat creepy “Standing On The Corner” from the spring of 1960)? It’s truly baffling.

Proceedings, and the party, are wound up, however, by “Shame On You,” another Shadows-penned rocker with another bemusing central refrain – “Oh, naughty girl” – with a bamboozling mass cascade of “WHYYYYY” and “WAAAAAAAH” following Cliff’s phrase “pretend to cry.” Still, the Cliff of 1961 sounds eminently happier, infinitely more relaxed and far more convincing when rocking with the Shadows than he does when being – well, told what to do, what is right and proper for a Man of His Age. On the rear of the album sleeve he is pictured in a dark suit and tie, proferring bilateral thumbs-up, but not quite smiling. And on his actual 21st birthday, he was dutifully boarding a ‘plane to embark upon his first tour of Australia . Notice that prominent “key to the door” (though Johnson seems to prefer “key of the door”) superimposed on the cover. What if the key led to another cell? Actually, it would lead to a renovated barn, and then to a number nine Routemaster bus (revolution?) but these are tales for other times. In the meantime, let’s take a moment to consider that cake, and the candles which are almost crushing it, in the light of the cake we’ll see at the other end of this decade.

The SHADOWS: The Shadows

(#23: 23 September 1961, 4 weeks; 28 October 1961, 1 week)

Track listing: Shadoogie/Blue Star/Nivram/Baby My Heart/See You In My Drums/All My Sorrows/Stand Up And Say That!/Gonzales/Find Me A Golden Street/Theme From A Filleted Place/That’s My Desire/My Resistance Is Low/Sleepwalk/Big Boy

It was fitting that we sat down to listen to this album directly after Alan Sillitoe’s Desert Island Discs broadcast on Sunday, and I got to thinking about Saturday Night And Sunday Morning in particular while listening to the faded, floating glamour of end of the night last chancers like “Blue Star” and “Sleepwalk”; the grey shuffling back into the dim streets of fifties Nottingham, the dreaming which keeps Arthur alive where the rest of his stupidity merely serves to wake him up. I noted how Sillitoe commented that as a lathe operator he didn’t have to think in terms of doing his job, but that the part of him which did think – the dreamer, the need to escape – was the part that kept him alive, living.

This yearning for escape can be glimpsed here, too; “Find Me A Golden Street” – suddenly I think of Viv Nicholson - is a sort of prototype for “ Wonderful Land ,” a coal-blackened prayer for a bluer future. The melancholy blends in well with the fun. This was the only album to be recorded by the “classic” Shadows line-up – Hank Marvin, Bruce Welch, Jet Harris and Tony Meehan – and on looking at the cover photo, the boys grinning, smirking and pondering in their sensible jumpers, Lena remarked that we might well be looking at Haircut One Hundred, and that moreover, they could well stand as a young Blur: there’s Hank as Graham Coxon, studious, inquisitive, slightly guarded; red-haired Jet as Dave Rowntree, Bruce a dead ringer for Damon, sneaky Tony as Alex. There is a similar cleanness and (hoped for) precision in the Shadows’ early work which finds several subsequent unlikely echoes, Kraftwerk’s “The Model” (which played on tremolo guitars rather than synths could have come directly from this album) being not the least of them.

That they collectively inaugurated at least one of the lines that would eventually lead to Blur and Haircut One Hundred – as well as innumerable others - is beyond question, but throughout their debut album they’re still experimenting, tentatively setting out on several simultaneous paths. “Shadoogie” sees them essaying Bert Weedon’s “Guitar Boogie Shuffle” template and rapidly tearing their way through their Play In A Day books; the promise now amplified and expanded, a rumble more potent than might have been anticipated. Everyone solos; Jet’s bass ominously clipped, like the tip of an ambitious Swiss Army penknife. “Drums” is inevitably a feature for Meehan, taking his kit down to the lowest limits of audibility before exploding back out again (and it’s impossible not to picture the 15-year-old Keith Moon in front of his radiogram avidly taking notes). “Gonzales” and “Big Boy” are semi-surefooted uptempo Western (and Country) stompers, notable for Hank’s quivering jelly of a solo on the former (with Meehan in particular roaring into a thrusting Cliff Gallop gallop) and collective unhinged whooping on the latter. There’s a lovely moment at the end of “Filleted Place” where Jet is left on his own and raises an eyebrow on his bass – “do we go on?” – only to be answered by a thunderously emphatic double chord finale (“NO WE DO NOT!”). But there are other variations: “Stand Up And Say That!” has Hank on piano in an “On The Rebound” mood. “My Resistance Is Low” is done in the Duane Eddy style (and with a heavily simplified structure), dotted by odd, echo-laden high register guitar plucking perhaps indebted to Joe Meek.

There are also three vocal tracks – the Shadows started out as an Everlys-style vocal harmony group before drifting into backing Cliff Richard and concentrating on instrumentals – which give very telling indications of things to come. Hank sings lead – perhaps trying a little too hard to sound his employer - on “Baby My Heart”; its harmonies are not seamless but are certainly enthusiastic. Their essay on the old Frankie Laine chestbeater “That’s My Desire,” though possibly more influenced by Dion and the Belmonts’ 1960 reading, is uncanny; hearing Hank plaintively croon his way through the tune (“That dim café” also stirring spectres of Sillitoe), we could almost be listening to the young McCartney, and we remember that the first song John and Paul wrote together was an instrumental entitled “Cry For A Shadow” and that this would almost certainly have been one of the hundreds – or thousands – of songs the youthful Beatles would have had to learn on the Hamburg circuit.

The most extraordinary track here, however, may well be “All My Sorrows,” a depoliticised reworking of the old Caribbean lullaby and slave anthem “All My Trials” (as subsequently featured on “An American Trilogy” and indeed covered, in its original form, by McCartney) sung by Bruce and Hank in close harmony, as a kind of sombre folk lament, and clearly way ahead of its curve since it points directly to the Byrds and CSN(and eventually Y) developments to come later on in that decade. Coupled with the spilt beer caresses of their versions of “Blue Star” and “Sleepwalk” – the “Blue Star” is the same one my wife has already written about in its Cyril Stapleton version (that reassuring, blinking beacon of safety and recovery) and their “Sleepwalk” is quite spellbinding, stretching out from the dank lamps of the working men’s club, pining for the virtual highways of a brighter and – yes - more wonderful land – and the gentle jazz-lite caresses of “Nivram” (on which Jet gets another, longer bass solo, making this the first number one album to feature both bass and drum solos, and let’s keep the penultimate number one album of the sixties in vague mind here too) which immediately made me think of “Harvest Moon,” we recall how fond the young Neil Young (and the not yet randy Randy Bachman) was of the Shadows, how he’d sit by the radio or the gramophone, learning and perfecting the licks, an uncertain, not quite healthy presence in another far and distant country, connecting with what must have seemed an alien but nearly godly spirit; the lights of the local town, some of its gaseous neon seeping out through faultlines, the sounds penetrating unexpected ears and souls – and how many lines and how many no longer lonely long distance runs this group helped to set in irreversible motion.

The George MITCHELL MINSTRELS: The Black And White Minstrel Show

(#22: 29 July 1961, 4 weeks; 2 September 1961, 1 week; 16 September 1961, 1 week; 21 October 1961, 1 week; 29 December 1962, 2 weeks)

Track listing: Meet The Minstrels (Weep No More/Ring Ring De Banjo/Oh Susanna/Oh Dem Golden Slippers/Li’l Liza Jane/Take Me To That Swanee Shore/Camp Town Races/I Want To Be In Dixie/You Forgot To Remember/If You Were The Only Girl In The World)/Leslie Stuart Melodies (Little Dolly Daydream/I May Be Crazy/Sweetheart May/Lily Of Laguna)/In The Moonlight (Shadow Waltz/Me And My Shadow/By The Light Of The Silvery Moon/Dream Dream Dream/When I Grow Too Old To Dream)/Your Requests (You Must Have Been A Beautiful Baby/Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me A Bow Wow/She Was One Of The Early Birds/Daisy Bell [A Bicycle Built For Two]/Moonlight Bay/Dew-Dew-Dew-Day/Ma [He’s Making Eyes At Me]/I’m Looking Over A Four Leaf Clover/Yes Sir That’s My Baby)/Meet The Girls (Lulu’s Back In Town/Miss Annabelle Lee/Mary’s A Grand Old Name/K-K-K-Katy/Cecilia/Ramona/Laura/Oh You Beautiful Doll)/A Tribute To Al Jolson (I’m Sitting On Top Of The World/There’s A Rainbow ‘Round My Shoulder/Carolina In The Morning/California Here I Come/Swanee/Let Me Sing And I’m Happy/My Mammy/Rockabye Your Baby With A Dixie Melody)/Memories Of Stephen Foster (Poor Old Joe/I Dream Of Jeannie With The Light Brown Hair/Beautiful Dreamer/Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming)/Grand Finale (Coal Black Mammy/Polly Wolly Doodle/Some Folks Do/When The Saints Go Marching In/Back Home In Tennessee/Dixieland/When The Midnight Choo Choo Leaves For Alabam/Camp Town Races)

I need not underline the attendant irony of having to write about this record – this increasingly unaccountable phenomenon that was The Black And White Minstrel Show – in this week of all weeks. I accept that the “K-K-K” in “K-K-K-Katy” does not intentionally carry a hidden subtext and that well-meaning patronisation does not automatically equate with racism, least of all with the late George Mitchell, a man who, when not engaged in Minstrel business, brought blues musicians of the calibre of Josh White over to Britain to tour and become known.

What I find far more difficult to accept is the uniform brassy blandness of this music, a neutralised bonhomie which leads me to believe that accountants are not the best judges of aesthetics. Mitchell was from Falkirk and trained as an accountant, and, as album annotator Bill Webb-Jones puts it, “His mathematical flair could still stand him in good stead” when it came to assembling the Minstrels’ admittedly rather spectacular theatrical setpieces. The Minstrels arose, as do so many other otherwise inexplicable phenomena of this period, from the war; their nucleus comprised the singing soldiers Mitchell recalled from wartime, and they developed from the Swing Group into the Glee Club before turning to belated minstrelsy after BBC radio producer Charles Chilton commissioned Mitchell to put together some music for a show entitled Cabin In The Cotton.

The rest became folklore of a now rather forlorn kind. As with 101 Strings, the album carries the ghosts of a different world; the sleevenote mentions the likes of Jolson, Eugene Stratton and GH Elliott (popularly known at the time as “The Chocolate Coloured C**n”) in the present, or at least recent, tense and draws its purchasers’ attention to memories of “The Great Vance” and the original Christy Minstrels who performed before Queen Victoria nearly one hundred years previously (while the New Christy Minstrels, including amongst others the young Barry McGuire and David Crosby, were busy making their name in the States at this period). The dynamic, however, ties in with the then recent present; Oklahoma!, Annie Get Your Gun and even West Side Story are called in for comparison purposes in the sleevenote, and there are subtle and not so subtle tugs in that particular direction throughout the record, even if only in terms of hearty, full throated unison male singing – as Webb-Jones rather sinisterly refers to it, “the virile method of presentation.”

The album closely follows the format of their shows (minus the various variety turns which broke up the various routines), comprising several quick-change medleys of venerable favourites, many easily a century old. Leni Riefenstahl it is not; but good music or good entertainment it is not either. It is easy to understand, as someone who remembers the Minstrels first hand, exactly how and why they would appeal to a certain alienated demographic of the public; millions watched them on stage or on the screen, and this first album alone stayed on the chart for nearly three years. Many at that time were content with simplified nostalgia, passive memories which didn’t require active thought.

Bereft of the visuals, however, the most remarkable thing about the record is how unremarkable it is. Despite Mitchell’s grandfather’s history of being a noted choral director, his directorial hand here is clearly a mirror of “his calm bank-official type of exterior.” The supine accordion and Nurse Ratchett echo both recall Sing Something Simple rather than a Brit Lawrence Welk, and despite the efforts of stalwart Roy Plummer and his guitar to make the music interesting with repeated upward question mark strokes (for instance, on “Me And My Shadow”) the music resolutely refuses to become alive as even the most basic American minstrel and medicine shows of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were. The singsongs are brash, heartless and decidedly military in bent (“YES! SIR! THAT’SMYBABY! NO! SIR! DON’TMEANMAYBE!” as though busily bashing squares while singing), owing much more to Ralph Reader’s Gang Show and Billy Cotton bustle than to anything approaching minstrelsy. The “Girls,” meanwhile (a.k.a. The Television Toppers, who remained white and supposedly vulnerable to those naughty men in blackface and blazers, but then, see South Pacific), coo along obediently, pausing only to sneeze (“Polly Wolly Doodle”) or scream (“I’m Sitting On Top Of The World”) or even tweet (“She Was One Of The Early Birds”). The occasional melancholy blast of muted trumpet accurately indicated my declining enthusiasm while listening.

There really is little else to say at this stage, since there are more Minstrels to come in this tale. The school assembly glockenspiel, the notion of efficiency above inspiration, are bad enough even without the blackened faces. There are some moments of respite: John Boulter’s light tenor is bearable and Tony Mercer’s Crosby-ish baritone is reasonably affecting at times. But then one is faced by Dai Francis impersonating Donald Duck impersonating Al Jolson and one’s patience is entirely lost. Happily the bass drum responses on “I’m Sitting” suggest that Francis is receiving a good kicking while quacking.

It hardly needs to be said that Donald Duck’s “California Here I Come” and “Carolina” aren’t a patch on Freddy Cannon’s; that Monk had already efficiently deconstructed “Lulu’s Back In Town” by this time; that their “Laura” I take as a personal insult (see Sinatra’s reading on Where Are You? for immediate relief); that their “Ma (He’s Making Eyes At Me)” shrivels before the explosive Johnny Otis/Marie Adams reading (let alone Lena Zavaroni’s subsequent version). But it is worth saying that I listened to this with my American wife who thought that the record’s main insult was that, not to the American black man, but to the American song; here are songs still cherished and truly venerated in America, and she considered the Minstrels to trample them underfoot. Only the Stephen Foster medley achieves even a basic artistic level of satisfaction, or any evidence of respect for its source material; Mercer’s doleful but admirably solemn delivery works, and when sticking to simple but effective choral harmonies the overall effect is almost moving.

But then Lena mentioned Mitch Miller, and the bouncing ball analogy, and the fact that when the young Aretha was under contract to Miller at Columbia she was required to sing hackery of the calibre of “Rockabye Your Baby.” And then, on looking up this album’s initial run at the top, we realised that it first reached number one just a few days before Obama was born. And then we reached for Elvis’ “American Trilogy” and remembered Max Roach’s We Insist! Freedom Now, the absence of involvement of accountants in either, and yesterday's final triumph of both.

Elvis PRESLEY: G.I. Blues

(#21: 14 January 1961, 7 weeks; 11 March 1961, 3 weeks; 8 April 1961, 12 weeks)

Track listing: Tonight Is So Right For Love/What’s She Really Like/Frankfurt Special/Wooden Heart/G.I. Blues/Pocketful Of Rainbows/Shoppin’ Around/Big Boots/Didja Ever/Blue Suede Shoes/Doin’ The Best I Can

The conventional story states that, once Elvis had rebooted himself out of the Army and worked his catharsis out via Elvis Is Back!, he settled back down to the less sexy work involved in becoming an All Round Entertainer and screwed himself into a glass cage for the rest of the decade. Evil Colonel, terrible sub-films, etc. Except that, as with all tales worth telling, it was never so simple. If Elvis wanted to be Dean Martin as ardently as he might have wanted to be Big Joe Turner, then it was his choice – and on “What’s She Really Like” he does one of his best recorded Dino impressions – and despite the undeniably rubbish calibre of most of the songs he was assigned for the G.I. Blues soundtrack, I still hear a spirit, an elf, the Flash of the original blue Memphis fighting back, demanding to be allowed to breathe and thrive still.

G.I. Blues the movie was of course the easiest and most logical option; back from Germany and the Army, so what better than to make a picture about Elvis being in the Army, in Germany ? Never mind that (as with most of his films) producer Hal Wallis insisted on rejected Martin and Lewis plotlines (Loving You had been designed as a Dean and Jerry picture before the pair split and Elvis inherited the dubious mantle) and that G.I. Blues set the low template for the rest of Presley’s Hollywood work; he plays tough and his character’s name, Tulsa McLean, suggests some residue of grit and groin, but the film itself is a lame skunk – essentially a bet set up to see who can get Juliet Prowse into bed first (in real life Elvis won that race, albeit briefly) which then inexplicably devolves into Three Men And A Baby-type mirthless slapstick involving lots of deadly unamusing bits of business involving crying babies and so forth. On the rear sleeve of the soundtrack album, at least two shots feature Elvis giving somebody or something directly to his left the skunk eye, as though demanding to know who the hell lumbered him with this crap.

The soundtrack album is generally all over the place and with only one or two exceptions I would lay no claim to high art, or art at any level, for any of its songs. Still, to imply that this marked the point where Elvis turned into a robot is simply untrue, since the remarkable thing about the album is how passionate and keen Presley is to make this record pulsate and breathe fire, even if he has to pour paraffin all over the Jordanaires. If anything, though, the venerable barbershop quartet sound as baffled and bewildered as Presley at what they’ve been presented with; see for instance the opening “Tonight Is So Right For Love” which uses the same Offenbach tune Donald Peers later turned into “Please Don’t Go” but at 78 rpm – the song ricochets like a reluctant pinball and is frankly a madhouse, featuring inexplicable blasts of accordion, drumming by DJ Fontana so sideways you wonder if he’d glued his feet to the wall and leaned over to play his kit, seemingly random interjections from the Jordanaires and a starscraping purple wax dart of an Elvis, mumbling, moaning and grinding (“Hooooldmetightttt”), determined to inject something approximating spunk into the proceedings – his “love” comes out as “loarve,” indicating an element of panophilia (he’s getting excited over some bread?), his “midsummer night’s dream” is gurgled out of an entirely alien Bottom. He is intent on not making his listener uninterested, despite the song’s unwarranted, tacked-on climax. In the aforementioned “What’s She Really Like” he is presented with some of the worst rhyming schemata this side of McGonagall – “thrillable” with “syllable,” “adorable/and what’s moreable” – but still he swoons himself into an erection, purring and murmuring (“Ho-how-ow long muhy-est-layst” he feeds at one point) through the song’s frozen cod Napoletana. “Frankfurt Special” is like Lawrence Welk essaying “Mystery Train” with its pallid and probably inadvertent echoes of “6.5 Special,” yet is totally derailed by the insane Frankie Laine cheerleading chants tossed back and forth between Presley and the Jordanaires (the latter at one stage being required to chant “clickety-clack, clickety-clack” in the manner of the contents of a broken down carriage of stockbrokers’ clerks, and later a non-plaintive “Fraulein, Fraulein!”) and Elvis’ own demented back batting (“You’ll soon get another jaaaahve!”). Scotty Moore wriggles out of his coil for a wasp-stinging solo and finally Elvis and the Jordanaires swap increasingly distended “Whoa-whoa”s which end up drifting out of tempo, across bar lines, Presley’s moans nodding like a tortoise treading in accidental clover.

But the atrocious “Wooden Heart,” melody supplied by Bert Kaempfert, was the film’s big hit song – six weeks at number one in Britain as a single, with an initial chart run of 27 weeks – and, though mercifully shorn of its irritating children’s choir and vastly infuriating puppet show visuals, remains a dismal affair; did the Flash really rage out of Memphis to end up singing bierkeller dipdowns? Complete with Jimmie Haskell’s accordion? With “O Sole Mio” or Al Jolson he was at least able to resculpt the base material according to his heart’s needs, but there was nothing he could do with this. Or needed to do, for that matter.

The title track is fairly extraordinary in performance terms; a manful attempt by the Hill and Range company hacks to marry martial two-step to the old rock ‘n’ roll thingy, yet to Elvis’ eyes “a room with a view of the beautiful Rhine” is as foreign and bamboozling as the planet Mars as he begins to fulminate and foam. “I’m soon-a gonna blow my fuse!” he exclaims. “Oh yes yes,” reply the Jordanaires in the manner of a fifties BBC television interviewer. “I’d give a month’s pay for one slice of Texas cow!” he burps. “Step, two, three, four” intone the Jordanaires solemnly. “We’d love to be heroes but all that we do is march!” laments Elvis. “They don’t give a Purple Heart!” he howls. The Jordanaires retort with something that sounds suspiciously akin to “bro-mide, bro-mide.”

“Pocketful Of Rainbows” is an ineffectual smoocher propelled by sticks and that accordion again with a rather clumsy rhythmic construct, notable only for Elvis’ longing/longitudinal sighs of “Lonely ni-i-i-i-iee-iy-i-ie-ie-ieght.” “Shoppin’ Around” begins promisingly with Moore’s encouragingly detuned lead guitar rumbles but as soon as Presley utters “You got the huggingest eyes” the track detours into more standard mediocrity. “My little red book I-uh torn it to bits,” he remarks, but soon we are back in haggard “Lover Doll” territory (“Such a pretty little package” and inevitably it’s not long before he wraps her up and takes her home). Then he leans further into his microphone, blurring his words before delivering a killer tag; after the last “I’m gonna stop” and the last elongated pause he kisses the song goodbye with a contemptuous “Yuh! HA!” “Big Boots” sees him crooning a lullaby to the baby with whom he’s been entrusted and is almost touching in its naked anti-flame delivery, the hell of “My Boy” still a lifetime away from his reach.

But then we reach “Didja Ever.” If Elvis were ever going to cover “The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers” the Colonel would surely have signed him away to Disney, but then this track defies any approach resembling rationality. He mumbles and thrusts like a contained and neutered rebel over the asinine Carry On Sergeant march, but the Jordanaires if anything far outdo him here with their deadpan quatrains of “DAYS DAYS DAYS DAYS,” “SHOW SHOW SHOW SHOW” and, perhaps best of all, in reaction to a bad bathroom experience first thing in the morning, chant “CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK!” as though daring Presley not to. Was he shaping up to become the square to bash? The weirdness of this track is positively rhombic.

Then, two oddities. This “Blue Suede Shoes” is a re-recording – the scythe of Elvis’ acoustic suggests an outtake from the Elvis Is Back! sessions – and initially it feels like compromise, the song taken an octave lower, Elvis sounding less committed. But digging deeper into the track’s fabric this seems more intense, more concentrated, a performance (certainly the performance of an older man) and the rhythm is markedly more disjointed. In particular Moore and Fontana seem to be playing in some parallel orbit, cutting and wrenching all colours of blood (the least of them being blue) from the song. Presley himself bends so formidably into the song that at times he sounds in danger of wanting to jump into his guitar and let it eat him.

Finally, there’s a lost masterpiece, Presley’s take on Pomus and Shuman’s “Doin’ The Best I Can,” done in slow doowop 6/8 with a distant harmonica (the latter indirectly predicting the wave soon to engulf everything, Elvis included), and one of the saddest items in the Presley canon; his delivery hovers on that delicate point of tenderness between true regret and fiercely suppressed fury (his “who didn’t mind at all” is delivered as one self-swallowing monosyllable) and there is genuine ruined nobility in his despairing yet very patient “I’m doin’ the best I can…but it’s not good enough for you”; again and again he comes back to this thought, chews it up but fails to spit it out, already thinking of the near-half year this is going to spend at the top of the charts as opposed to the solitary week allotted to Elvis Is Back!, already signing his own warrant of arresting blankness, already asking us what do we – what does anyone? – want from him, or of him. Finally, after a joint, asexually angelic vocal harmony climax where he rises to the stars and becomes dust, Dudley Brooks’ piano collapses to the ground as surely and intangibly as the singer miming Orbison at the climax of Mulholland Dr., the life suddenly pulled away from the singer, and yet the voice…his voice? his soul?...persists, pervades, penetrates like occasionally noticeable drizzle.

101 STRINGS: Down Drury Lane To Memory Lane

(#20: 10 September 1960, 5 weeks) Track listing: VOLUME ONE: Drury Lane To Broadway/Rose Marie/One Alone/Make Believe/One Kiss/You Are My Heart’s Delight/Don’t Say Goodbye/A Girl Like Nina/I Won’t Dance/Glamorous Night VOLUME TWO: Between The Acts/Music In May/Rose Of England /My Love Is Like The River/People Will Say We’re In Love/Some Enchanted Evening/Getting To Know You/Fanny/I Could Have Danced All Night Inevitably with a project such as this the writer gets the feeling of being the archaeologist. Most of the time it is a more than good feeling; indeed, throughout all of my blogs I have enjoyed the idea of being the rescuer of forgotten or grievously underestimated music. There is a sometimes terrible power when one stands in front of a ragged rack of cassettes and records; sometimes the ardent cratedigger can feel rather like the emperor in the Coliseum, with the power of life or death over what he sees stretching out before him. But there are also occasions when the archaeologist is simply baffled by what he has dug up; where does this object belong? What was its civilisation, its idolatry, its final penance of dust? Such a feeling – one of gradually oppressive puzzlement - swept over me as I listened to the first double album to top the British album chart, and not only the first double album but also the first wholly instrumental album to reach number one. I felt that I was listening to the ashen footsteps of ghosts. Out of the nearly nine hundred albums now to have topped the chart this seems to me the most singularly neglected and erased – perhaps the most sheerly deserted - of them all. Despite the florid sleevenote’s repeated rhetorical use of the word “unforgettable” this music did not survive into the CD era; despite subsequent conductions by the likes of Les Baxter and Nelson Riddle 101 Strings did not meet rehabilitation in the lounge age. It is a moot point whether it even survived the Beatles era, despite the parallel boom – can we already call it Muzak? – which 101 Strings partly (if accidentally) anticipated. This album’s fate was a wreckage comparable with the rock on which the ghost of Pincher Martin washes up. And yet, even now, almost half a century too late, I can look at the sleeve and see signs of things to come. The cover’s lettering and colouring both anticipate The Lexicon Of Love – and what exactly are that couple doing (the back cover of the album is identical)? Are they laughing at us? Is the man sniggering into his Other’s ear at the record’s intended audience? Are they about to participate in the detonation and destruction of this mirrored whirlpool of strained politesse? – and it’s impossible to listen to the waves of lush string eddies and not picture the young Anne Dudley or Trevor Horn in their parents’ front room, picking up hints and clues for reshaping. Additionally, the sleevenote – extensive but anonymous – which occupies the foldout section, decorously laid out in placid blue, red and yellow against a background of ration book white, is ludicrously, if innocently, overstated to a degree which would subsequently be parodied by records in the lounge era (compared, for instance, the pastiche sleevenote to μ-ziq’s 1993 Tango N’Vectif album) – “The necessity of using 101 string instruments is to utilise various harmonies and voicings and not weaken the dynamics of quality of any one line when playing counter lines,” “…recorded under the most exacting audio engineering standards with specially designed microphones with characteristics to compensate for any possible distortion from the tremendous bass frequency response in cellos and string bass” (in fact the recording sounds compressed, late fifties steam radio standard) - and yet also eerily threatening. We’ll come back to that threat in a moment. The album was issued to commemorate the first anniversary of Pye’s Golden Guinea imprint – which released LPs at the then competitive price of 21 shillings – and as a double retailed for the “special” price of 30 shillings, as opposed to the 30 pence which I paid for the copy I found (and it is not an album to be found in great, or any, quantity in junk shops or used record stores), forgotten and quietly expiring in the back of a long, bulging rack of expired pleasures. At this point the curious multinational origins of the 101 Strings project should be explained; the orchestra was based in Germany (in fact they were the Orchester des Nordwestdeutschen Hamburg – “11 concertmeisters in the first chairs” the sleevenote proudly, if primly, declares) but the concept was dreamed up by an American, one David L Miller (who a decade earlier had released the first sides by Bill Haley), keen on adhering himself to the Mantovani bandwagon. Most of the nineteen tracks on Down Drury Lane were, contrary to the sleevenote’s insistence, not recorded specially for this project but compiled from other 101 Strings releases; yet for the British audience the concept of Songs From The Shows We Have Loved – note the sleevenote’s reference to “the first of ‘our’ shows” - seemed to work. But what was that audience? Listening to the seeping sanitisation of the metamusic – or possibly sub-music – of Down Drury Lane it is hard to establish who those people were, the ones who kept the album at number one for five weeks and in the chart for 21 weeks in total. By some distance this is the first of these number one albums which feels as though it belongs to a totally alien era; its neutralisation defies any attempt at track-by-track analysis since the unceasing scales and arpeggios of the first violins literally seep from one track into the next. There is a slight shudder in this listener as he reads the sleevenote, with its relative present tense references to 1925 – was this really the music of our grandparents and did it die with them, in their own comforted memories? Whether Sigmund Romberg or Ivor Novello or Rodgers and Hammerstein, however, the mood seems to remain the same; calmly shimmering, nearly static, deracinated readings – or flimsy, faded photocopies - of songs “we” might once have loved which attempt to ooze comfort but in time become something approximating creepy. This is the ancestor – or an ancestor – of Muzak for sure; soundtracks for pained dinner parties, home visits by the boss, polite pseudo-seductions, everything at a sanitised, ironed out distance. Although there are some unpredictable selections – one, “My Love Is Like The River,” which stems from a musical entitled The Sun Never Sets, composed by one Kenneth Leslie-Smith, is so obscure that the sleevenote does not bother to mention it at all - I know that the blood of Novello and the fire of Oklahoma! are not reducible to this nothingness; the strings are bolstered by 30-40 woodwind, brass and percussion players but despite the occasional moment of mild animation – the pallid castanets of “A Girl Like Nina,” the imperceptible rhythm n’ pizzicato shuffle of “Don’t Say Goodbye” (the latter from Robert Stolz’s show Wild Violets, premiered at Drury Lane in the autumn of 1932 – the time of Plath’s birth – with Adele Dixon, whom it was my privilege to know on a professional basis in her later life throughout the eighties and early nineties, playing the lead), the bizarre midway tempo-doubling of “Getting To Know You” – everything is nailed to hardwood floors of sameness; despite the odd intrusion of a lugubrious alto sax, there is little to support the sleevenote’s assertion that “many must be the memories evoked in the whole family” when fully half of them would by now have been running screaming into the arms of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. If there were any “innate gaiety” in “I Won’t Dance” – and Sinatra’s reading, you may recall, implied much, much more than that – it is polished to anonymity by 101 Strings to Music While You Work efficiency. By the time we get to Oklahoma! – the sleevenote now discussing the spring of 1947 and its “dismal London, suffering from post-war blues” – the McGoohanesque feeling of wanting to trash the Village radio becomes extremely apparent; whatever kind of song “People Will Say We’re In Love” is – and it is so much more than a “kind of song” (or, as the sleevenote oxymoronically puts it, “one of the most romantic post-war songs ever written.” As compared with all the great romantic post-war songs written before the war?) – it is not this castrated phantom, strings endlessly running up and down the scales (in lieu of imaginative arrangements), sliding like anaesthetic through newly nullified veins, eventually (“Between The Acts”) drawing spectres of air raid sirens and even screams (compare with that other 1960 string phenomenon, Bernard Herrmann’s score for Psycho). “Novello’s musicals,” states the sleevenote, “had everything that Drury Lane productions needed – glorious music, romance, nostalgia, drama and spectacle.” Now, think about that sentence for a second. “Nostalgia”? Where does that fit in? “Music In May” comes from the Novello show Careless Rapture but 101 Strings’ reading is neither. “Some Enchanted Evening,” a song which could hardly be termed nostalgic in 1960, is about fervent belief, expectation, adoration and hope; these strings render yearning into the impersonal bleeps of an echocardiogram. Eventually Brian Eno – significantly, from a hospital bed, following a near-death experience - would ice and freeze these shrieks and turn them into Ambient. Where’s the nostalgia, and why is, or was, it an essence of quality West End musical theatre? The determined anonymity eventually turns into a threat. The unstoppable, nameless German machine? Did somebody say Kraftwerk? But Kraftwerk – not to mention the Kaempferts and Lasts who would emerge out of 101 Strings’ Germanic shadow – were, and are, full of life, drive and even lust. Is it significant that no author’s name is given for the sleevenote which concludes with a decisive threat – “Who can ever forget Julie Andrews’ number I Could Have Danced All Night – and here 101 Strings make sure you never will!”? Or that no conductor or arranger is credited (in fact they were, respectively, Wilheim Stephan and Joseph Kuhn)? One stares out at this dead Styx of false reassurance and realises that they could be listening to anybody, or anything. One longs for the unapologetic brashness of a Liberace, or the cornily perky but unquestionably breathing polkas of a Lawrence Welk. Past lives, passions and colours blanded out into a uniform, keep your head down grey, with sex, drive and mischief ironed out with an almost admirable ruthlessness. Meanwhile, in multiple parallel 1960s, the number one singles were “Apache” by the Shadows and “Tell Laura I Love Her” by Ricky Valance – one about death, the other everything that 101 Strings could never be – and other instrumental essays of or around the year included Coltrane’s My Favorite Things, Miles’ Kind Of Blue and Sketches Of Spain (and Gil Evans’ Out Of The Cool), Coleman’s Change Of The Century, Stockhausen’s Kontakte and Varèse’s Poème Électronique. And (if we take distended voices as instruments) I Hear A New World by Joe Meek. If we allow memory to run back and forth down and up many lanes.