The Mystery of the Disappearing Hits
Face it, every time John and Paul double-teamed up on a mike, they were tipping the hat to the Everlys, even referring to themselves as "The Foreverly Brothers" when they cut "Two of Us." Despite the fact that the Beatles, the Searchers and the Hollies were all scoring big imitating the Everly sound, the Everlys themselves couldn't get arrested with that sound except in England. They went mad trying to figure out how to make it work for them. They recorded an album of old American rock 'n' roll standards, just like the Beat groups were doing.
It did nothing! They wrote great songs like "The Price of Love" and "Man With Money," which the Who recorded but left unissued in Keith Moon's lifetime. On that tune, you get the thrill of hearing good sons Phil and Don getting desperate, painstakingly outlining how they are going to rob a store and end this poor-boy shit right now. Even that didn't work. They do an entire album, Two Yanks in England, with the Hollies providing more than half the tunes and instrumental backing. Zilch!
They embraced folk music after Simon and Garfunkel and the Mamas and Papas also weighed in with Everly sighs. Nada! Once the summer of love rolled around, the Everlys recorded "Bowling Green," a lightweight pop tune in the vein of "Feelin' Groovy." It reached the lower rungs of the Top 40, a height which they'll not scale again. The team was about to meet a chilly demise in this next horrific installment:
Danger at Knott's Berry Farm!
Even with a successful 1970 summer TV series, the Everlys remained "cold" as a recording entity. This turn of events kept the act on the road ad infinitum, and their inability to agree even on where to play contributed to the duo loathing the sight of one another. Baby brother Phil enjoyed the prestige of playing big showrooms in Las Vegas. Don, who sang "I'm Tired of Singing My Song in Las Vegas" on the next-to-last Everlys album, was pushing for the Fillmore West. Somehow, they wound up at the John Wayne Theater in Knott's Berry Farm, where they'd played the usual hits for six consecutive summers.
The accounts of this very public fallout have varied greatly, but Walk Right Back sets the record straight. At this point in time, the brothers demanded separate dressing rooms. You could tell the rot had set when they went from sharing a mike onstage, to using a double mike, to having two single mikes spread out as far apart as possible. Wisely, they decided to take a two-year sabbatical from one another after these three scheduled Knott's Berry Farm shows. Unwisely, Don drank too many preshow margaritas and, to Phil's consternation, began forgetting words to their all-too-repeated set and singing a quarter-note flat.
Once fans started slowly filing out, some stage hand mercifully brought the curtain down. Phil stormed off, spiking his $1,200 guitar into the stage floor and swearing, "I'll never get onstage with that man again." Don, meanwhile, remained onstage taking bows. Not only that, he completed the other two Knott's Berry Farm shows alone, responding to shouts of "Where's Phil?" with a cryptic summation: "The Everlys died 10 years ago."
And it would be 10 years before they would reunite for two shows at the Royal Albert Hall. During those 10 years, both men released several solo albums of agreeable country rock and served as a fantasy camp for any other performers who dreamed of singing with an Everly. Most notably, Cliff Richard stepped into Don's shoes, and the ersatz Everlys scored a big hit in Britain with "She Means Nothing to Me."
The Everlys lost none of their harmonic prowess in the time away, as the overwhelming success of the reunion concert and HBO special proved. With interest in the Brothers at an all-time high, they signed with Mercury in 1984 and recorded the shimmering EB '84 album, produced by Dave Edmunds. Although the album included songs written especially for them by Paul McCartney ("On the Wings of a Nightingale"), Jeff Lynne ("The Story of Me") and Bob Dylan (he'd written "Lay Lady Lay" for them years before, but they turned it down), the best tracks were written by Don, especially a beautiful ballad called "Asleep," which he wrote shortly before the breakup and refused to record until he and Phil were working together again.
In 1986, the duo was doubly honored by a star on the Hollywood Boulevard Walk of Fame and their induction in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The following year, they guested on the title track of Paul Simon's Grammy-winning Graceland. After that, the novelty of a reunited Everly Brothers died down, and the world was soon back to taking them for granted again.
Because of this, their recording work has been sporadic since 1990. In the same year that Axl Rose married and divorced Don's daughter and "Sweet Child o' Mine" inspiration Erin Everly--possibly even the same week--Phil and Don rerecorded a song their daddy taught them in 1952 called "Don't Let Our Love Die." That turned up on the 1994 Rhino boxed set Heartbreak & Harmonies. Then last year, they recorded the song "Cold," written especially for them by Andrew Lloyd Webber, with lyrics by Jim Steinman (I know, I got scared, too, but it's supposedly not bad). The good news is Phil and Don are getting along quite well now these days, only touring four weeks out of the year and singing great. The bad news is they're not daring to enter a recording studio to jinx it. Don wants to record Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, Part 2, but Phil doesn't think they will ever record again. "I think we've done enough," he told Walk Right Back author Roger White. "But you never know. I could do it tomorrow."
The only original rock 'n' rollers left who could still turn out a decent album might never again try. You can't get more mysterious than that.
The Everly Brothers are scheduled to perform on Sunday, May 16, at Celebrity Theatre. Showtime is 8 p.m.
