The problem with Elvis is like the problem of, say, the sun. The sun blots out stars. The sun creates heat waves. The sun is a good thing but there’s a hell of a lot else going on besides the sun. There might be a star behind the sun we’d love to know more about but the damn sun gets in the way. It’s a stupid analogy but if you spend enough time hanging around in the weeds of 1953-1957, not just skipping alongside Elvis, but hanging out with ALL of them, then you definitely get a sense of how much was going on – before Elvis, and “after” Elvis – but it’s just hard to SEE because the light is so blinding. Kind of like other playwrights doing good work in late 1500s England. Like, who cares, right? History doesn’t care. Or how you have to bodily move James Joyce out of the way in order to see what other Irish writers were doing in the 1920s. It just is what it is. You can bemoan how unfair it is but you’re participating in the least interesting part of the conversation.
Gene Vincent was a HUGE figure in the first wave of rockabilly, and he was extremely important in influencing the next wave – the boys coming up right behind, particularly the British invasion boys, who were stunned by him. Everyone was stunned by Elvis, but Elvis was a little bit otherworldly. His rise was so unprecedented you couldn’t even really ASPIRE to it. But Vincent’s level seemed much more achievable.
Vincent was, in a way, emblematic of the Elvis Effect. Elvis was inspired by old blues players he could name, specific gospel quartets, etc. Whereas people like Vincent were inspired by Elvis alone. A connecting thread to the source was lost really quickly. And this continues on down the line. The Beatles were hugely influenced by Vincent. When they sang “Hey Good Lookin'”, they probably weren’t covering Hank Williams, they heard Gene Vincent do it.
Vincent was different from Elvis/Carl/Cash/JLL. He didn’t record at Sun Records. He was from Virginia, not the Delta. He wasn’t a dirt-poor country boy. His parents ran a little store. He joined the Navy, and was involved in a hair-raising life-altering motorcycle crash. His injury was so severe they wanted to amputate his left leg, but he wouldn’t allow it. He never knew a pain-free day after that. He was in the naval hospital for a year. He had to wear a metal brace on his left leg, which would rub against him and he’d get sores which would then get infected. It was gnarly. He got out of the hospital and walked right into the next life-altering event: He went to a “jamboree” show headlined by Hank Snow. There were a bunch of acts on the bill including the Louvin Brothers and also this stunningly gorgeous newcomer with the weird name.
Vincent watched Elvis Presley perform and decided immediately he wanted to do that, and wasted no time. He got a gig on a country radio show. He put together a band (the Blue Caps). Capitol at that time was flailing around in total panic looking for “their” Elvis. It was 1956. The Gold Rush. Maybe this rough pockmarked guy was their ticket.
You can clearly hear the heavy Elvis influence in Vincent’s voice. But. It’s impossible to imagine Vincent singing “Peace in the Valley” the way Elvis did, or “It’s Now or Never” … Elvis’ voice was a real instrument, with fullness and richness and those deep warm tones. Vincent’s voice wasn’t like that. He did, though, have this falsetto – and he used it almost like a party trick, it’s almost surrealistic, how he uses it. Elvis used his falsetto for being being gentle and tender, and it’s to-die-for. But Vincent … it’s almost like he becomes a 10 year old girl when he uses falsetto. You really can hear it on his version of “Over the Rainbow”. Outside the falsetto, Vincent had the Elvis twitches in his voice, the hiccups, etc., but the voice itself is a little tense, a little tight. Elvis had RELEASE in his voice. He could release the tension. With Vincent, there’s no release.
I’m not sure what kind of songs the Capitol people THOUGHT he’d come in and sing, but nobody quite knew how to handle “Woman Love”.
There’s nothing dirty about the lyrics. Unless you think hugging is dirty. But everyone – the producers, the execs, and the DJs – heard dirty! It sounded filthy to them. Radio stations wouldn’t play it.
The next song they recorded, though, was “Be-Bop-a-Lula”. It’s a professional high-end recording studio – with Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, none of whom are high-end musicians: and this is why I think it works so well. It’s that contrast. There’s the “Heartbreak Hotel” echo on it … and then there’s the unmotivated SCREAM in the middle of it. Shocking!
Incredible record. “Woman Love” had a point. “Be-Bop-a-Lula” has NO point, and that is in its favor. 1955-56, music did a gigantic pendulum swing from sense to sound. Crooners of the generation before sang amazing lyrics by Cole Porter, Gershwin, etc., and needed to be able to interpret these lyrics. Rock ‘n roll was abolishing those requirements. What mattered was the energy. A-whop-bop-a-lu-bop.
“Be Bop a Lula” was HUGE with the British invasion boys. It laid them flat.
“That beginning – ‘we-e-e-e-e-l-l-l-l-l!’ – always made my hair stand on end.” — John Lennon
Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps appear in Frank Tashlin’s fantastic The Girl Can’t Help It, starring Jayne Mansfield, who slithers around the city “running into” all the hot acts of 1956, so you get to watch performances from Little Richard, The Platters, Eddie Cochran, Fats Domino, Abbey Lincoln … captured just as the wave HIT over the world. Vincent and his band are heard before they are seen – that opening “weeeeeellll” floating out over the sidewalk, and then there’s a cut to them, with no warning, and they’re standing in some kind of garret space, singing “Be Bop a Lula”.
LOOK at him.
Not to keep bringing him up, but Gene Vincent – who was also rather odd – highlights just how TRULY odd Elvis was, AND how his beauty was a PART of why he “hit” the way he did. Now, Vincent is a good-looking guy. But … there’s a disconnect between the VOICE and the FACE (and that disconnection wasn’t there with Elvis: in fact, if you HEARD Elvis first and THEN saw him, he’d hypnotize you even further. It’s almost like ‘Of COURSE he looks like that.” Imagine hearing “Be Bop a Lula” without SEEING the singer – this is, of course, how most people encountered the song for the first time. And then having The Girl Can’t Help It be your first view of the guy in action. It had to be wild. Because at first, it’s just this strange echoing voice floating through the air. Tashlin captures that in how he presents Gene Vincent in the movie.
I’ll just toss this here, a bad-quality live version of Vincent singing “Over the Rainbow”.
He also recorded it, but I think watching him doing it live is the way to go because it’s just so …. odd. The voice is disconnected, and the song choice doesn’t make sense on the face of it, and he’s so rough-looking, and his posture is kind of hunched over or bunched up (probably due to compensating for the pain in his leg: a lot of his physicality onstage came from that), but then he’s also staring upward like a cherub … it all adds up to a very strange performance and I love it.
Another reason Vincent had such an impact on the boys coming up behind from across the pond was he toured England and all over Europe, at a time when that wasn’t really done by Americans, at least not on that scale. European kids were exposed to Vincent in an immediate way, they saw him live, sometimes multiple times, they partied with him, they knew him, and word spread through that close contact. In 1960, he was on tour in England with Eddie Cochran – and those shows were wild, they were causing frenzies throughout England. Vincent was in the car accident that – tragically – killed Cochran and Cochran’s fiancee, songwriter Sharon Sheeley. Vincent suffered severe injuries himself, exacerbating his barely-healed other injury. The two men were close. It was a devastating loss.
I have to take a moment to point to the The Stray Cats’ song “Gene and Eddie”. I am not at all ashamed to admit that this song was my teenage entry-way into Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent, because I had no idea who they were, but I knew who Brian Setzer was!
Vincent’s tours through England and Europe are covered in a lot of detail in Mark Lewisohn’s Tune In: The Beatles: All These Years. Vincent returned to Europe in 1961, and again in 1962, when he went to Hamburg and played with the hottest new band in town, The Beatles. He was a wreck at the time. He was always a little bit of a wreck, and his ineffective pain management was alcohol and pill-popping. Vincent also had a habit of pulling guns on people, which Paul McCartney witnessed on one occasion. But they were in awe of him.
Vincent’s career wasn’t built to last, unfortunately. The 1960s left him behind. The folk scene had no place for him. He was a nostalgia act almost immediately. This was a danger all of them faced. Elvis felt the danger strongly. He “went away” into the Army in 1958 and came back in 1960. Everything changed in that time. Buddy Holly died. Eddie Cochran died. Rockabilly was a FLASH bang and then the world moved on. Elvis moved on too. He was an artist. He had different interests. He was never “rockabilly” anyway. He was just Elvis. So for his first single on his return to performing, he chose “It’s Now or Never”, basically “O Sole Mio” with new lyrics and a daunting melody, where Elvis was eager to show off all the work he had done on his voice when he was away. His album Elvis is Back! is one of his great albums, because it’s so excited and exciting, so many different styles and sounds, Elvis announcing with every track: “That was then and this is now.” I am sure there were many purists who wished he would have come out of the Army and “gone back” to what he did in the 50s. I mean, there’s that famous John Lennon quote.
But Elvis was always about the future, not the past. He knew very well rockabilly or whatever the hell that was was over, and he wasn’t a teenager anymore, he was now 20something, and also a veteran, he wanted to grow and change. He wouldn’t have wanted to go backwards anyway. It was a whole new world and he was excited to explore new music.
Gene Vincent didn’t really have that option. Not many people do.
But “Be Bop a Lula” is one for the ages.
I’ll end with Ian Dury’s sweet tribute song, “Sweet Gene Vincent”.
Blue gene baby
Skinny white sailor, the chances were slender
The beauties were brief
Shall I mourn your decline with some thunderbird wine
And a black handkerchief?
I miss your sad Virginia whisper
I miss the voice that called my heart
Sweet Gene Vincent
Young and old and gone
Sweet Gene Vincent
Who, who, who slapped John?
White face, black shirt
White socks, black shoes
Black hair, white strat
Bled white, died black
Sweet Gene Vincent
Let the blue roll tonight
At the sock hop ball in the union hall
Where the bop is there delight
Here come duck-tailed Danny dragging Uncanny Annie
She’s the one with the flying feet
You can break the peace daddy sickle grease
The beat is reet complete
And you jump back honey in the dungarees
Tight sweater and a ponytail
Will you guess her age when she comes back stage?
The hoodlums bite their nails
Black gloves, white frost
Black crepe, white lead
White sheet, black knight
Jet black, dead white
Sweet Gene Vincent
There’s one in every town
And the devil drives ’till the hearse arrives
And you lay that pistol down
Sweet Gene Vincent
There’s nowhere left to hide
With lazy skin and ash-tray eyes
A perforated pride
So farewell mademoiselle, Knickerbocker Hotel
Farewell to money owed
But when your leg still hurts and you need more shirts
You got to get back on the road
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