by Bob Stanley
It was their late masterpiece. With their relationships asunder, the group struggled on for a couple of years, ending with an album (The Visitors) and ultra-realist single (‘The Day Before You Came’) that piled dread and foreboding into their sound.4 They released a compilation optimistically called The First Ten Years, then put their career in the deep freeze.
And when Abba went to sleep, a swathe of pop went to sleep. A sound and image that was toothpaste-clean with a gentle suggestion of filth died with them. It happened very fast. Abba’s final year saw several remarkable records that were clearly based on the Ulvaeus/Andersson model – Tight Fit’s ‘Fantasy Island’ (UK no. 5), Bardo’s tricksy UK Eurovision entry ‘One Step Further’ (UK no. 2), Bucks Fizz’s ‘My Camera Never Lies’ (UK no. 1) – but these were also born of new pop, the bright new sound of ’82, with a knowing wink that Abba simply didn’t possess. Abba were classicists, right down the line. They didn’t belong any more and bowed out at the perfect time.
So what had made Abba so big? Nobody has ever worked harder, that’s all. Yes, they were talented, but Björn and Benny have confessed that they wrote twelve songs a year, sweated over them and released them all; there are no hidden, rash attempts at post-punk or reggae lurking in Abba’s vaults. It was all they did. There were no outside productions, and God knows they didn’t spend too long thinking of what to wear in photo shoots. The end result was a catalogue that seemed oddly out of its time – of any time – because it was, and remains, timeless. Hard, honest toil. It’s not romantic but, like police work, it’s where ninety-nine per cent of the results come from.
1 The reggae boom in Britain at the end of the sixties meant this influence slowly trickled down to mainland Europe. Boney M were the result: ‘Rivers of Babylon’ certainly had as much oompah as it had skank. This odd variant on the British and American black experience was finally killed off by the international success of hip hop.
2 Sandie was easily the most successful British sixties girl on the continent, recording in French, Spanish, Italian, German and Portuguese. Some of her very best songs – ‘Com’e bella la sera’ (Italy), ‘Toy’ (Portugal) – were only released in those territories.
3 1965’s winner had been ‘Poupée de cire, poupée de son’, a galloping Franco-Spectorian yé-yé number sung by France Gall and written by Serge Gainsbourg. The patronising pan-Euro parping of ‘Puppet on a String’ both created and confirmed Britain’s xenophobic ideas about European pop music. And let’s not forget it was chosen as our entry by the British public, ahead of four classy songs: ‘Tell the Boys’, ‘Had a Dream Last Night’, ‘Ask Any Woman’ and the heart-stopping ‘Cry Myself to Sleep’.
4 ‘The Day Before You Came’ is like CSI. Who is the stranger who appears the next day? The man of her dreams? Her murderer? It sounds a lot like death. I’m prepared to ignore the fact that Abba released one more single (‘Under Attack’) before they disappeared, because this is the career-closer to beat them all.
36
BEYOND THE BLUE HORIZON: COUNTRY AND WESTERN
We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier – the frontier of the 1960s, the frontier of unknown opportunities and perils … Beyond that frontier are uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered problems of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus.
John F. Kennedy, 1960
Of all the musical genres in this book, country and western is the only one that pre-dates and survives the modern pop age. From the fifties through the eighties and nineties, it developed on a parallel track, the two musics bumping together frequently, feeding into and from each other, like wary neighbours. I decided to bring it in at this point of the story as, commercially, it peaked in Britain in the mid-seventies when Glen Campbell, Slim Whitman and the late Jim Reeves topped the album charts; Tammy Wynette’s ‘Stand by Your Man’, the ultimate lost housewife anthem, became a number-one single;1 and country rock – a post-Monterey, roots reaction to bubblegum – became a radio staple, with the Eagles especially dominant. I did think about leaving it out completely, but this proved to be impossible because, when you get right down to it, country music is the underfelt of modern pop.
Almost every genre in this story so far has withered in its effectiveness after a while, been absorbed or usurped, or at least stopped adding significant new ideas to the mix; the chart lifespan of any new genre is usually five years from start to finish but can be as short as two years (Merseybeat), twelve months (skiffle) or even less (acid house). There can be no such assumptions about country; divided against itself, it has endless internal arguments about what it is exactly. Come what may, even now, it remains the lingua franca of white American pop, the imagined language of the ordinary man or woman. Many of its key songs are about survival, and this probably isn’t a coincidence.2
Country’s appeal beyond the Southern states of America is provided by an incredibly attractive shared canvas of memory. It reminds people of home – but since many of the people drawn to it have never lived in or even seen Abilene, or Death Valley, or El Paso, this is a very curious fact. One possible explanation is its longevity. It’s always been around, in some form: from silent Western movies that go back as far as 1901, to games of cowboys and Indians with Gene Autry as the soundtrack, to Glen Campbell’s panoramic stories of Wichita, Galveston and Phoenix. This is a large part of its appeal, a compelling combination of affection for childhood pleasure with grown-up domestic-scale tragedy and difficulty. Not bohemian tragedy, as sung about by Carole King or Elton John, but unpaid bills, broken marriages, alcoholism. Country dealt with these issues with controlled emotion, and this appealed to sensibilities far away from Texas – the British stiff upper lip, the Swedish culture of lagom, the Ghanaian appreciation of cool and reserve, they would always make room for the stoicism of a singer like Jim Reeves over the ballyhoo of Gene Vincent.
If we can cast our minds back to the start of this tale, we might remember that modern pop had arrived at, and out of, a mid-fifties generational clash within country, when its youthful wing had embraced elements of forties black pop and melded them with the music they knew best. Contrary to orthodox rock thinking, country music had never been merely foolish, sexless and sentimental, and it thrived, in spite of the rock ’n’ roll rebellion, because it was there to deal with complicated adult responses. Unlike most modern pop of the late fifties and early sixties it wasn’t, necessarily, built for teenagers. If you look at Western movies from the early years of modern pop, they were dealing with similar complexities – High Noon, The Searchers, Shane – and were some of the genre’s high points. Country music, like Westerns,3 is a part of the age-old American dream – an impossible dream – a mix of absolute individualist autonomy (‘home on the range’) and civic peace (‘Abilene, Abilene, prettiest town I’ve ever seen, women there don’t treat you mean’). While kids like Johnny Cash, Johnny Burnette and Elvis Presley set up their own youth-led new town, with souped-up Chevys, coffee bars and soda joints lining the streets, there was still the old West territory down the road, ruled by the sheriff of Nashville, a place where a more conservative form of country continued to rule, quietly.
When rockabilly swallowed up a generation and led them away from the Grand Ole Opry, the conservative heart of Nashville and country music, older practitioners stepped back, thought hard and long about what to do next, and came up with a new pop strand of their own. One where you could hear all the words. Sensible music for maturer, wiser heads.
Countrypolitan, born just as Kennedy made his frontier speech in 1960, was the beginning of what became known as the Nashville sound, a breakthrough, a smooth version of country with international adult-orientated appeal which still thrives today. It meant the end of the road for a decades-old template: cowboys were out, strings, twilit piano and butter-soft drums were in. Jimmie Rodgers’s nasal singing, yodelling and fiddles were unwelcome here, and a hint of pedal steel and the patented slip-note piano of Floy
d Cramer would now be quite enough distinctive flavouring. There was a crack team of Nashville session musicians on hand to provide the backing. The producers of this music were slick and businesslike, the ad men of country music, quite convincing and quite cold. Record Mirror met the first names of Nashville when they visited London in 1962: ‘Chet Atkins, we noted, was the tall handsome one in the blue suit. Floyd Cramer, the tall handsome one in the grey suit.’
Chet Atkins was a guitar picker and producer who had been discovered by one Steve Sholes, the man who had taken Elvis Presley from the local Sun Records to the global RCA Victor label in 1956. It was a measure of Chet’s standing – and of country’s commercial reach – that Sholes rated him a more important discovery than Elvis. In 1962 Atkins produced more than half of RCA’s hits, in all genres. His production style smoothed out all of country’s creases and was widely copied. If a performer was good enough, this production created a warm sitting room of sound, a suitable venue for someone like the post-army Elvis, who, when he wasn’t in Hollywood, was in Nashville creating hits with Atkins like ‘She’s Not You’ (US no. 5, UK no. 1 ’62). In the same league as Elvis was Patsy Cline. A tough cookie, she referred to herself as ‘the Cline’ and everyone else as ‘hoss’ – except for Elvis, who she called ‘the big hoss’. When Nashville’s WSN asked where she got her distinctive style from, she told them, ‘Oh, I just sing like I hurt inside.’ In short order, she had US Top 20 hits in 1961 and ’62 with ‘Crazy’, ‘I Fall to Pieces’ and ‘She’s Got You’. The Nashville sound has its detractors, but its hushed minimal backing was all Cline needed as she lived the lyric, cracking up, disintegrating in front of us. Friends said that she would cry at the end of recording sessions. Soon after cutting ‘Sweet Dreams’ in 1963, a plane carrying her crashed into a forest in Camden, Tennessee, and she was killed.
If Patsy Cline was a singer you pictured at home, thumbing through a photograph album, hands shaking as she turned the pages, then Brenda Lee was the woman alone at the bar, glued to a glass of whisky, too far gone for any man to dare chat her up. Cline and Lee shared another countrypolitan producer, Owen Bradley, who clearly liked his girls to sound racked. Brenda Lee was just four foot nine, and broke through with ‘Sweet Nothin’s’ (UK and US no. 4 ’60) when she was just fifteen; unlike Cline, she had previously fooled around with rockabilly (‘Rock the Bop’, ‘Dynamite’, ‘Let’s Jump the Broomstick’), which suited her Wanda Jackson-like gravel tone and earned her the name Little Miss Dynamite. She scored her biggest hits with distraught ballads like ‘I’m Sorry’ and ‘I Want to Be Wanted’ (both US no. 1) but was pop-savvy enough to mix up her output with Brill Building songs (‘Dum Dum’, US no. 3 ’61; ‘Speak to Me Pretty’, UK no. 3 ’62; ‘Here Comes That Feeling’, UK no. 5 ’63), Italian balladry (‘All Alone Am I’, UK no. 7 ’63) and even tough post-Merseybeat (‘Is It True’, US and UK no. 17 ’64) and Motown (‘Time and Time Again’).4 Yet, in spite of her varied singles discography, she was Nashville to the core. ‘I do not like recording in any studio but the ones I use in Nashville,’ she told the NME in 1963, ‘because the surroundings and the people are familiar. I use studio musicians including Floyd Cramer and we all know our limits and capabilities. I think it’s only fair to everybody, including myself, to stick to the usual routine.’
While Patsy Cline and Brenda Lee had urgent voices, nonchalance was seen as a major virtue in countrypolitan. This explains the incredible success of Jim Reeves, who spent 322 weeks on the UK singles chart in the sixties, with twenty-six Top 50 hits. The most popular BBC radio show of the era was Family Favourites, which involved letters between soldiers abroad and their loved ones back home, and was broadcast just as the nation was sitting down to its Sunday roast. Reeves was a regular, with at least one song a week. His music was comfort food, his voice had a pre-rock, lullaby quality that made him the first international country star; he was Gentleman Jim, always the stoic, never known to raise a voice in anger.
In many Westerns, the sheriff – lovable Jimmy Stewart, upstanding Gary Cooper – is racked with thoughts of bitterness, revenge and anger, but this always plays under the surface. Outwardly, all that is visible is noble restraint. On Jim Reeves’s first major hit, ‘He’ll Have to Go’ (US no. 2, UK no. 12 ’60), he phones his wife from a bar – presumably he’s tipsy, and he knows she’s at home with another man. They may even be in bed together. This was a pretty radical lyric for a year which also gave us ‘My Boomerang Won’t Come Back’ and ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport’. But throughout the song Reeves never once sounds pissed off or particularly cut up; he just calmly tells his wife to end the affair, and his sangfroid is the song’s strength. On other songs, however, his calm control means something else entirely: ‘Welcome to My World’ (UK no. 6 ’63) has an especially florid Nashville production and sounds, at first listen, like the warmest of invitations. The problem is that Reeves has built the world entirely for one person, and it’s not himself. He sits there waiting in this dreamscape, placid, blank, with that gentlemanly half-smile on his face. Dig deeper into Reeves’s catalogue and it becomes disturbing on a Patrick Bateman level.
Jim Reeves’s death in 1964, again in a plane crash, sealed his fame; his waxy face would never grow old. Posthumously his music continued to accompany Sunday lunches through the sixties and seventies, and ‘Distant Drums’ even gave him a UK number one in 1966. It turned out that he wasn’t quite the gentleman the photos suggested, given to bouts of petulance, complaining about the condition of the pianos on a 1963 UK tour, sleeping around. ‘I don’t like to see women messing around with Jim,’ his wife told singer Ginny Wright, ‘and I don’t want to know anything about it.’ Reeves was cited in a paternity suit, and it was then revealed he was incapable of having children. In the most child-focused, baby-boom era, this must have affected his personality and possibly accounts for that voice – so warm and huggy, like a big sad teddy bear, entirely devoid of sexuality.
* * *
The US is highly unusual in not having a city from which the nation’s pride flows. Instead, it has several big cities, and all tend to be held in varying degrees of disregard – it has no London, Paris, Rome, Athens, no core metropolis in which the nation’s sense of self is invested. The heart of America, instead, is in the mythic West, beyond the frontier, over the horizon. Yet it is when country cheekily tries on the city’s clothes that it reaches out to modern pop and causes tremors that affect both musics: western swing in the forties, rockabilly in the fifties, country rock in the sixties and seventies.
In the city you have to know how to speak and look, how to fit in, how to subtly change your behaviour from one neighbourhood to another – it is not a matter of choice but a need. Country musicians who moved to California to find work in the sixties knew this to be true, and their new perspective informed a generation who wanted their country with a little more zip, a little less factory air than Chet Atkins’s white-walled studio allowed. Countrypolitan hadn’t been to everyone’s tastes. It hadn’t been what the Lovin’ Spoonful’s John Sebastian had in mind when he wrote about the ‘Nashville Cats’ (US no. 8 ’66) who ‘play clean as country water’. 1966 was the year in which Southern musicians, reared on both country and rock ’n’ roll, started to reclaim it from Atkins and Owen Bradley and their slick orchestrated arrangements. The Monkees’ Michael Nesmith (‘Papa Gene’s Blues’, ‘Don’t Wait for Me’), the Byrds’ Gene Clark and Chris Hillman (‘Time Between’, ‘The Girl with No Name’) and Buffalo Springfield’s Stephen Stills all wrote identifiably country songs as album tracks. 1966 was also the year Lee Hazlewood became a recognised name in pop and country circles – with an international number-one hit, he was hard to avoid.
Born in Mannford, Oklahoma, Lee Hazlewood was the son of an oil man who had spent his childhood flitting across the South, and in the late fifties produced Duane Eddy’s run of bowel-shaking guitar instrumentals. His voice was like a whisky-soused Johnny Cash, and he cut his own sardonic Trouble Is a Lonesome Town in �
�63, a concept album about the residents of a fictional Southern outpost called Trouble – Jim Reeves was probably not a near neighbour. Hazlewood’s break came when he gave a song to Frank Sinatra’s hitless daughter Nancy in ’66 and told her to ‘sing it like a fourteen-year-old who goes with truckers’.
‘These Boots Are Made for Walking’ combined camp, humour and sass, Carnaby Street’s kinky boots with a plain-speaking country undertow. From that tomcat descending bassline in, it was irresistible. Nancy and Lee then embarked on a series of psychedelic cowboy duets (‘Summer Wine’, ‘Some Velvet Morning’, ‘Sand’), none of which matched the commercial clout of ‘Boots’ (six weeks at number one in the UK in ’66), but all of them had a dark knowingness, playing up the duo’s image of hard-living cowboy and leather-booted siren. Where ‘Boots’ had been Adam West’s Batman meets The Mod Squad, Bobbie Gentry’s ‘Ode to Billie Joe’ (US no. 1, UK no. 13 ’67) was somewhere between The Waltons and Deliverance. It was ridiculously cinematic, every line loaded with swampy Southern references: ‘black-eyed peas’, ‘Choctaw Ridge’, ‘they bought a store in Tupelo’, ‘another sleepy, dusky Delta day’. Both records were almost cartoonish and both were recorded in Los Angeles; Gentry, like Hazlewood, was a true Southerner with her own highly individual take on the country myth. ‘Ode to Billie Joe’ could only have been written by someone who had crossed over the Tallahatchie Bridge and could see a tough country life for what it really was – the older generation in Gentry’s songs sound bitter, callous, cold. Billie Joe’s dead? Well, he ‘never had a lick of sense – pass the biscuits, please’. It was number one in the States for a month in the autumn of ’67, a down-home downer after the Summer of Love. In person, Gentry was even sassier than Nancy Sinatra, with a jet-black bouffant and a honeyed croak of a voice. And, like Hazlewood, she didn’t stick around, marrying a multimillionaire and retiring in the early seventies. It’s too bad that her six-album career was so short.
