Get In Loser, We're Going Rockabilly Vol. 5 - The fifth time's the charm.

Get In Loser, We're Going Rockabilly Vol. 5

I once read that every new style of music came about as a result of someone trying to play an existing style of music and failing. In the case of rockabilly, country boys who were steeped in country and bluegrass tried to play the blues and it came out wonderful.  

Elvis is credited with being the first, but he wasn’t really.  Carl Perkins was doing the same thing on some of the same stages but Elvis certainly climbed the highest with it (partly thanks to Carl supplying The King with the song that defined him: Blue Suede Shoes).  But they both fit the description above, to some extent.

Simply put, rockabilly was the earliest form of rock & roll.  People think of it as an offshoot, but for the 3-4 years (roughly 1956-1959) when it ruled the charts, it was simultaneously rock ’n’ roll AND pop music.  Pop music being whatever is popular—whatever’s on The Pop Charts.  

People are of the mind that it vanished, and had a resurgence compliments of The Stray Cats, but it’s always been there.  It’s DNA is firmly entrenched in rock music.  Elvis dabbled longer than most with songs like 1969’s Suspicious Minds, and Carl Perkins & Roy Orbison kept the fire burning well into the 60’s as well.  Carl’s Daddy Sang Bass was a 1968 hit for Johnny Cash, and Orbison’s 1964 smash Oh, Pretty Woman harbors a rockabilly heart.  Johnny Rivers scored with Secret Agent Man the same year, and Conway Twitty cut his last rockabilly sides around 1964 before going full-on country.

And lots of country artists tried to cross-over to the pop charts by jumping on the rockabilly bandwagon.  On this installment of Get In Loser, We're Going Rockabilly, we have Jean Shepard, Buck Owens, Porter Wagoner & Ferlin Husky (aka Simon Crum).  Husky and George "Thumper" Jones both recorded rockabilly (the original country rock) under pseudonyms—so as to not hurt their credibility with country audiences.  Of course Jerry Lee Lewis always played whatever he damn well pleased.

Some other country artists were balls-deep in rockabilly like Marty Stuart, Dwight Yoakum, & Billy Swan, who doesn’t get NEARLY enough credit for recording rockabilly well into the 80’s.  He topped the charts with I Can Help in 1974, & included Lover Please (which he wrote when he was 15), & Shake, Rattle & Roll on the same album.  Ubangi Stomp followed in 1975, Blue Suede Shoes in 1976, Lonely Avenue in 1978, and My Girl Josephine in 1981—he was literally holding the door open for Brian Setzer to walk through later that year.  (Watch this space for an already completed “Best Of Billy Swan.”)

But let’s get on with who makes an appearance on Get In Loser, We're Going Rockabilly Vol. 5!  

The Sonics tear Tallahassee Lassie a new one, and The Clash revamp Bobby Fuller’s I Fought The Law (written by sometimes Cricket Sonny Curtis) live at Shea Stadium.  And The MC5 mop the stage with Back In The U.S.A.

One of my favorite purchases was a bootleg CD of Led Zeppelin playing rockabilly songs for fun during their sound-checks, and they illustrate how often blues-based rock side-swiped rockabilly with C’mon Everybody.  Another hard rockin' paint-swappin' Brit, Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan shows his true colors with Trying To Get To You.    

Avant garde artists even love the ‘billy beat—proven by Pink Faires, The Soft Boys, The Flying Lizards & Alan Vega.  But, even in that company, the three strangest tracks here may be The Four Seasons doing The Rockabilly Trio’s standard Blues Stay Away From Me, Moe Tucker doing Ricky Nelson’s Poor Little Fool (with a Bo Diddley beat), and Francoise Hardy’s whacked out and reverb-drenched That’ll Be The Day.  Teen idol Tommy Sands’ rapid-fire version of Maybelline gets a gold star—but to tell the truth, anyone who's slept with Nancy Sinatra is always welcome on one of my mixes.