Da Capo: 416 pages, $32
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What is it about brothers? So competitive, so determined to outshine the other, so very male. In popular music, there are numerous examples of passionate sibling partnerships that have burned bright only to flame out, leaving recriminatory anger and the occasional lawsuit in their wake.<\/p>\n
The Everly brothers were no exception. Foundational pillars of 20th century popular music, they formed the first great harmony vocal duo to bridge country music and pop. Over a five year period from 1957 to 1962, the brothers recorded a series of singles \u2014 \u201cWake Up Little Susie,\u201d \u201cBye Bye Love\u201d and \u201cAll I Have to Do Is Dream,\u201d among them \u2014 that imprinted themselves into the pop-music canon, their soaring, wistful, close-interval harmonies gliding straight into our souls.<\/p>\n
You don\u2019t have to look too hard to find Phil and Don Everly\u2019s traces. The Beatles regarded them as the harmony group they longed to emulate; you can hear them sing a snatch of \u201cBye Bye Love\u201d in Peter Jackson\u2019s \u201cGet Back\u201d documentary, and Paul McCartney name-checked them in his 1976 song \u201cLet \u2018Em In.\u201d Simon & Garfunkel wanted to be the Everlys and included \u201cBye Bye Love\u201d on the \u201cBridge Over Troubled Water\u201d album. In 2013, Billie Joe Armstrong and Norah Jones recorded \u201cForeverly,\u201d an album of Everly Brothers songs.<\/p>\n
And yet, biographies of them are scant. Barry Mazor\u2019s \u201cBlood Harmony\u201d is long overdue, a rigorously researched narrative of the duo\u2019s fascinatingly zig-zaggy 50-plus-year career, as well as a loving valentine to the pair\u2019s enduring musical power.<\/p>\n
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In his book, Mazor is quick to refute many of the myths that have accreted around the pair, starting with the backstory that the brothers were reared in Kentucky, a cradle of bluegrass, and that their dad, an accomplished guitarist and singer, nurtured them up from rural poverty into spotlight stardom. In fact, Mazor\u2019s book points out that the brothers, who were born two years apart, moved around a lot as kids \u2014 Iowa and Chicago, mostly \u2014 soaking in the musical folkways of those regions and absorbing it all into their musical bloodstream. Though they were apprenticed by their father to perform as adolescents, they were their own men, with a sophisticated grasp of various musical genres as teenagers.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey were as much products of the Midwest as they were of Kentucky,\u201d says Mazor from his Nashville home. \u201cThe music they learned and the culture they absorbed was in Chicago, where they lived with their parents for a time, and they picked up on the R&B there. All of this eventually adds up to what we now call Americana, which is music that has a sense of place.\u201d The Everlys brought that country-meets-the-city vibe to pop music.<\/p>\n
Another misconception that Mazor clears up in \u201cBlood Harmony\u201d is the notion that the Beatles were the first musical group to write and play its own songs. In fact, Phil and Don wrote a clutch of the Everlys\u2019 greatest records, including Phil\u2019s 1960 composition \u201cWhen Will I Be Loved,\u201d which became a mammoth hit when Linda Ronstadt covered it in 1975. It\u2019s also true that Don is rock\u2019s first great rhythm guitarist, his strident acoustic strum powering \u201dWake Up Little Susie\u201d and others. George Harrison was listening, as was Pete Townsend.<\/p>\n
The Everlys produced hits, many of them written by one or both of the husband-and-wife team of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant: \u201cBird Dog,\u201d \u201cLove Hurts,\u201d \u201cPoor Jenny\u201d and others. But the Beatles\u2019 global success became a barricade that many of the first-generation rock stars couldn\u2019t breach, including the Everlys. \u201cEven though they were only a couple of years older than the Beatles, they were treated as old hat,\u201d says Mazor.<\/p>\n
Complicating matters further: A lawsuit brought by their publishing company Acuff-Rose in 1961 meant that the brothers could no longer tap the Bryants to write songs for them. The same year, they enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve and found, just as Elvis had discovered a few years prior, that military service did little to help sell records. By the time the lawsuit was settled in 1964, both brothers had descended into amphetamine abuse.<\/p>\n
The Everlys had to go back to move forward. Warner Bros. Records, their label since 1960, had become the greatest label for a new era of singer-songwriters taking country-rock to a more introspective place. Future label president Lenny Waronker, an Everlys fan, wanted to make an album that would place the brothers in their proper context, as pioneers who bridged musical worlds to create something entirely new.<\/p>\n
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Author Barry Mazor is quick to refute many of the myths surrounding the Everlys.<\/p>\n
(Courtesy of the author)<\/p>\n
The resulting project, called \u201cRoots,\u201d drew from the Everlys\u2019 musical heritage but also featured covers of songs by contemporary writers Randy Newman and Ron Elliott. Released in 1968, the same year as the Byrds\u2019 \u201cSweetheart of the Rodeo\u201d and the Band\u2019s \u201cMusic from Big Pink,\u201d \u201cRoots\u201d sold meekly, but it remains a touchstone of the Everlys\u2019 career, a key progenitor of the Americana genre. \u201c\u2018The \u2018Roots\u2019 album was one last chance to show they mattered,\u201d says Mazor. \u201cAnd there was suddenly room for them again. It wasn\u2019t a massive seller, but it opened the door.\u201d<\/p>\n
If anything, it was their own fraught relationship that tended to snag the Everlys\u2019 progress. Their identities were as intertwined as their harmonies, and it grated on them. Mazor points out that they were in fact vastly different in temperament, Phil\u2019s pragmatic careerism running counter to Don\u2019s more free-spirited approach. This push and pull created tensions that weighed heavily on their friendship and their musical output.<\/p>\n
\u201cPhil was more conservative in some ways. He was content to play the supper club circuit well into \u201870s, while Don wanted to explore and was less willing to sell out, as it were,\u201d says Mazor. \u201cAnd this created a wedge between them.\u201d Perhaps inevitably, from 1973 to roughly 1983, they branched out as solo artists, making records that left little imprint on the public consciousness. They had families and eventually both moved from their L.A. home base to different cities.<\/p>\n
But there was time for one final triumph. Having briefly set their differences aside, the brothers played a reunion show at London\u2019s Royal Albert Hall in September 1983, which led to a collaboration on an album with British guitarist Dave Edmunds producing. Edmunds, in turn, asked Paul McCartney whether he would be willing to write something for the \u201cEB 84\u201d album, and the result was \u201cOn the Wings of a Nightingale,\u201d their last U.S. hit, albeit a modest one.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe harmony singing that the Everlys pioneered is still with us,\u201d says Mazor. \u201cIf you look back, the Kinks, the Beach Boys, all of these brother acts all loved the Everlys. But there\u2019s also a contemporary act called Larkin Poe, who called one of their albums \u2018Blood Harmony.\u2019 They set an example for how two singers can maximize their voices to create something larger than themselves. This kind of harmony still lingers.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On the Shelf Blood Harmony: The Everly Brothers Story By Barry MazorDa Capo: 416 pages, $32If you buy…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6110,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[6871,6869,6874,6876,353,6870,49,48,4398,6873,75,6868,6877,6878,6879,6881,6872,6880,6875],"class_list":["post-6109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-album","tag-barry-mazor","tag-beatles","tag-blood-harmony","tag-books","tag-brother","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-country-music","tag-don-everly","tag-entertainment","tag-everlys","tag-fact","tag-great-record","tag-new-book","tag-occasional-lawsuit","tag-phil","tag-root","tag-song"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6109\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}