The Everlys Apart

On Thursday I quoted record producer Dave Edmunds on working with the Everly Brothers as they tentatively recorded again after a decade apart. Edmunds also noted:

Something that struck me about Don and Phil was, that I have never before encountered such a disparity of personalities and opposing values in two brothers. You get on well with one, at the cost of not getting on well with the other. I never met anyone who was close to both. While Don and I hit it off so well, I never managed to unravel Phil, and vice versa.

On the other hand, Joel Selvin found Phil more congenial, as he wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle this week:

These two brothers could fight. They refused to do joint interviews and only posed for photographs together by appointment. Their contract not only called for separate dressing rooms, but separate stage entrances. “I don’t know,” Phil Everly once told me. “You’re up there nose-to-nose at the microphone and pretty soon, he starts breathing your air.”

It was a Biblical torture. Two brothers forced together, unable to make their separate ways in the world, dependent and resentful of one another the whole way. . . .

The two brothers couldn't have been more dissimilar. When they were out on the road together, Don was a raucous, outgoing, life-of-the-party type, while his brother was a quiet, cordial and soft-spoken gentleman.

A mutual friend, songwriter Sharon Sheeley, sent me to meet Phil Everly backstage at a show at the Circle Star Theater in the late ’80s. A loud party spilled out of one dressing room into the hallway. A bunch of biker-types and their ladies crowded into the room, drinking bourbon out of Styrofoam cups. In the center of the throng was Don Everly.

Down the hall, at the far end of the corridor, in another dressing room, sitting on an upended suitcase and looking at a magazine all by himself was Phil Everly. He was glad to have company.

I have a couple of compilations of the brothers’ solo recordings from the 1970s and early ’80s. Many of the tracks sound incomplete, like their demos. Every so often one pops out because of the double-tracked harmonies.

As All Music said about one collection, “Don, freed of the brotherly harmonies, usually likes to sing solo lead against backup choruses, while Phil often re-creates brother-like duo vocals.” As hard as the Everlys found it to work together, that was when they were truly the best.

Recording the Everlys’ Comeback

In the early 1980s Don and Phil Everly patched up their professional partnership for the sake of their rabid British fans. They had a reunion concert in London and then recorded a couple of albums there. Here’s some of what producer Dave Edmunds said about the struggle of getting the brothers back into the recording studio at the same time:

The band and I would show up at noon and work on the arrangements, as far as we could without Don and Phil’s input and participation. Don would arrive at about 3 p.m., and could be persuaded to sing a guide vocal and discuss arrangements, but would usually prefer to sit in the control room relaying humorous anecdotes from his legendary career, as though deferring the awful moment of commitment.

While I was quite happy listening, enthralled by his stories of the early recordings they had made, the methods they employed, and the impressive musicians they had available to them, along with many hair-raising tales of their early touring years, we were making slow progress in the vocal department.

Phil would arrive at the studio even later than Don, and, both having made prior dinner arrangements, would consequently leave the studio around seven in the evening. It was even more problematic coaxing Phil up to the microphone. At first he suggested that Don should sing his part first, and that he would add his harmony later.

Now, anyone familiar with their music, and who has listened to Don Everly’s solo work, will be aware of the fact that Don sings completely differently on his own, constantly altering his phrasing, and will rarely sing anything the same way twice. It is inconceivable that Phil was not aware of this fact, but insisted that we do it his way. It was like trying to separate yin from yang. We tried this approach once, but I found it to be a miserable experience, with Phil becoming frustrated and throwing the occasional prima-donna fit. Eventually, after some prodding, I persuaded them to share the microphone, with some magnificent results, once they warmed up and became familiar with the songs.

My favorite track on that EB84 album was “You Make It Seem So Easy,” written by Don. Listen to how they put six syllables into “you”—followed by a cascading seven in “easy.”

Plenty of Everly Brothers Songs to Discover

I was sad to hear about the death of Phil Everly over the weekend. No musicians have given me more pleasure than him and his brother Don. Their 1950s hits for Cadence ensured that the voice of the American teenager was central to rock’n’roll music, but their harmonies (and the guitar licks Don usually came up with) made those songs last.

Of course, one downside of classics is that they become familiar. Almost all those early Everly songs are about teenage love or (more often) heartache, or they’re self-consciously quaint Americana. Phil helped to build that repertoire by writing “(Girls, Girls, Girls Are) Made to Love” and “When Will I Be Loved?”—crystalline in their emotion but subtle. Luckily, their main songwriters, Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, could draw variations on the main theme. “Wake Up, Little Susie” played the awkward end of a teenagers’ date for tragedy; “Poor Jenny” played it for farce.

But after the Everlys signed a giant contract with Warner Bros. and then lost the Bryants’ services, their catalogue turned toward the maudlin. The tempos slowed, the tears jerked. The singing was still wonderful, but those early-1960s records aren’t my favorites.

And then the hits dried up. The Everlys also hit some personal rough patches. Those things happened around the time that the Beatles arrived in America; ironically, the brothers had two more good years on the British charts. Yet they continued to write and record songs together through the late 1960s and into the early ’70s, first for Warners and then under a new contract with RCA.

And a lot of those songs are terrific. In what turned out to be his last interview, with Paste magazine, Phil Everly ruled out ever recording or touring with Don again but added:

Have you heard our Pass the Chicken and Listen album? It’s a strange damn title, but Chet Atkins produced it. So for anybody who’s actually interested in our stuff and wanted to hear something, they ought to listen to that album. It’s a very interesting album. I don’t sit around and listen to our stuff at all—it’s just what I remember. And my favorite song on the thing is called “Lay It Down, Brother.” But whenever people talk about Don and I recording again—which almost everybody usually mentions—I always say ‘Well, there’s plenty of things that you haven’t heard! Plenty of things out there to discover!’

Casting around for a hit or an older audience meant the Everly Brothers got away from the formulas of their early career. Their love songs became more mature. “Up in Mabel’s Room” (co-written by Phil) is on the edge of blue. “Woman, Don’t Try to Tie Me Down” is caddish. They tried the quasi-medieval “Lord of the Manor,” the singer-songwriter confessional “I’m Tired of Singing My Song in Las Vegas” (by Don), even mild psychedelia. Nothing like their big familiar hits, but all immediately identifiable as Everly Brothers recordings. And all fresh to the ears.