exception that proves the rule

An English sixties band doing a cover of an American song that isn’t pointless compared to the original, by gum.  Here’s the Hollies’ exciting and dynamic cover of ‘I Can’t Let Go.’  Listen to the three point harmony on the word ‘Goodbye. No wonder David Crosby stole Graham Nash away – the boy can harmonize! 

There’s a nice clip of Evie Sands singing the original that my regular readers will both have seen a couple of months ago when I posted “the curse of Evie Sands.”  (Yeah, that’s right, I’m not ashamed to put up links to my own blog – I need the hits dammit!)

So, I Can’t Let Go by The Hollies - the exception that proves the rule – but listen to ‘Stay’ by Maurice Williams & The Zodiacs, or better still Doris Troy’s version of ‘Just One Look’ and tell me I’m not right about the Beat Boom being rubbish.

I guess you had to be there…

There’s a show called  Sounds of the Sixties on BBC Radio 2, or ‘Radio 2, from the BBC’ as all their presenters now have to call the station. (I assume that one was thought up by private marketing consultants – I wonder how much of our license fee was handed over to the authors of that particularly bit of brand re-positioning.
“Oh! Tarquin come and look! There’s a publicly funded organisation in reception – we can all have new Bentleys!”) Anyhow Sounds of the Sixties is presented by Your Old Mate Brian Matthew, and it is a strange beast, to my ear at any rate. I should probably say here that, though I was born in the sixties,  I don’t actually remember them. My first cultural memory is the Apollo 11 moon landing, (December 1969 fact fans,) I’d just turned 5 at the time. Sounds of the Sixties caters to an audience who, by and large, do remember the sixties – and most of them, judging by the requests read out by Your Old Mate Brian Matthew,  are desperate to hear the b-side of a middling hit by Billy Fury or Petula Clark that they grew up with but haven’t heard since their big sister left home in 1967 taking all her 45s with her. And the sixties of memory is a different decade to the sixties as imagined by the likes of me and those younger than me. Sounds of the Sixties  teaches us two important facts. The first is just how rationed pop music was in Britain at that time. Up until 1974  every British household was permitted a maximum of 5 pop singles and one ep - usually Twist and Shout, with the Beatles leaping above a wall on the cover - and the kids in the house had to play both sides of everything they had whenever they switched on the radiogram to make sure the precious records wore out evenly. In those days all records had proper b-sides and none of this ’remix’, ‘accapella’ or ‘bonus beats’ stuff on the flip. 

The Second thing you quickly come to realise is that the British Beat Boom was rubbish, and the Blues Boom was even worse. Seriously, you have to be blinded by nostalgia to give this stuff the time of day.

The other night there was a documentary on about the history of British Motorways – riveting stuff – it included a little newsreel clip of the Rolling Stones from early in their career , the music in the background was their recording of Hitchhike and it was bleeding diabolical – you wouldn’t pay them in washers! I won’t inflict it on you (mostly because I can’t find the clip online – just some stills) but here’s Marvin Gaye:

 

This is not an isolated example, and I may continue on this subject at another time – I have a 70 song playlist to back up my argument. I’m serious here. I’m compiling a third CD of great American songs that were given the highly inferior cover version treatment by a British Invasion era act, and there are remarkably few cases where the Britsh recording adds anything to the original, even when its much more familiar than the original.

Anyway, to put it simply, the British Invasion groups only got any good when they started writing their own songs - ( and the blues in the sixties, as Hip Hop is now, or Reggae was in the seventies,  was the black music genre that white kids just should not have been messing with.)

Exhibit A. The Searchers vs Jackie De Shannon – but I’ll warn you it’s not a fair fight, Jackie kicks seven colours of crap out of those boys.

Four words sum that performance up for me: Chicken in a basket. 
Now the next clip is of dubious quality – the years have not been kind to the video tape, and the performance is pretty jokey stuff  Jackie is lip-syncing to her record although the hand claps are live, and she’s goofing with all the boys on stage.  But if you look past that to her recorded performance of the song…..

In particular  at around 1 minute 55 you get the bridge – key line and emotional heart of the whole song:

“Why can’t I stand up and tell myself I’m strong?”
Silence 
“Because I saw him today…” 

What do the Searchers do in their version ? Fill the silence with a drum roll – and then run through the first verse again - ho hum.

OK, more Jackie,  a very cutesy dance, but a mighty, mighty record.  She’s a young woman singing about her feelings, and they’re strong.  Maybe they got her to mime those shivers so she seemed nice and unthreatening.  
I’m not even going to humilate the Searchers by showing you their weak ass version of this one: