{"id":40977,"date":"2014-01-06T12:00:38","date_gmt":"2014-01-06T18:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=40977"},"modified":"2014-01-05T07:40:26","modified_gmt":"2014-01-05T13:40:26","slug":"harmony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=40977","title":{"rendered":"Harmony"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Phil Everly died over the weekend. \u00a0He was 74.<\/p>\n<p>Rock and Roll, we are told, started as a blender-mix of rockabilly and R&amp;B. \u00a0Elvis put a rockabilly delivery onto a rhythm &#8216;n blues beat. \u00a0Chuck Berry sped up the blues to rockabilly speed. \u00a0Johnny Cash did rockabilly over a persona that could have made Howlin&#8217; Wolf go &#8220;wow. \u00a0<em>That&#8217;s <\/em>the blues&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>And the Everly Brothers brought the final piece of the &#8220;billy&#8221; half of rockabilly &#8211; the tight, keening vocal harmonies that characterized bluegrass music &#8211; out of the holler and onto pop radio.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->More below the jump.<\/p>\n<p>With the Everly Brothers, vocal harmony was an artistic element in its own right, a color in a palette that brought feeling &#8211; joy, pain, thrill, gloom &#8211; in its own right, in a way that no single voice could.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/hFE2SnliiV0\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The Associated Press&#8217; David Bauder has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.startribune.com\/entertainment\/movies\/238717511.html\">an excellent obit in the\u00a0<\/a><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.startribune.com\/entertainment\/movies\/238717511.html\">Strib<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>that describes the Everly&#8217;s stylistic impact:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-style: italic;\">Art Garfunkel answered the door to his Manhattan apartment holding a framed black-and-white picture of two smiling men. It was a test.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Correctly identifying Phil and Don Everly in the picture would reveal me as a journalist knowledgeable about music and the roots of Garfunkel&#8217;s career. Flustered, I failed. It should have been obvious.<\/p>\n<p>The Everly Brothers, who will blend their voices no more following Phil&#8217;s death at 74 Friday from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, were the architects of rock &#8216;n&#8217; roll harmony. Simon &amp; Garfunkel were unimaginable without them. John Lennon and Paul McCartney took their cues, too. Their harmonies (and don&#8217;t forget George Harrison) formed the bedrock of the Beatles&#8217; sound.<\/p>\n<p>Like Garfunkel, Phil sang the high notes. He had the lighter colored hair. He would step away from the microphone, like on &#8220;Cathy&#8217;s Clown,&#8221; to let older brother Don sing a few lines alone and you noticed how unremarkable Don&#8217;s voice was unadorned. Only when that voice merged with his brother&#8217;s as a single, new voice did it become special.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The Everly&#8217;s technique &#8211; two tightly-wound harmonies acting almost like an instrument on their own &#8211; was different from, say, Elvis Presley or Buddy Holly (where the Jordainaires or the Crickets were a background accent). \u00a0And Bauder notes its influence on the Beatles and especially Simon and Garfunkel.<\/p>\n<p>There were many more, and many more recent. \u00a0The Byrds, of course, did their own version of the Everly Brothers (and did it gloriously sloppily in <a href=\"&lt;iframe width=&quot;420&quot; height=&quot;315&quot; src=&quot;\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/OWlth2csLNw&quot; frameborder=&quot;0&quot; allowfullscreen&gt;&lt;\/iframe&gt;\">this rare clip<\/a>\u00a0of &#8220;Turn Turn Turn&#8221;, &#8220;Bells of Rhymney&#8221; and &#8220;Mr. Tambourine Man&#8221;); they mixed two fairly voices that were fairly mundane on their own (Gene Clark and Roger McGuinn) with a young David Crosby, a fairly instinctive, tight high harmony singer.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/OWlth2csLNw\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The Hollies, if anything, bid up the Beatles&#8217; approach to tight harmony:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/cNLP3d1Bd3M\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Of course, the rhythm guitarist on your left (stage right), Graham Nash, would join with the Byrds&#8217; rhythm guitarist on your left (stage right) and Steven Stills to either take vocal harmony to the next level or turn it into a bloated melange that the Everlies would never recognize &#8211; but that&#8217;s another whole argument.<\/p>\n<p>But the idea of the razor-tight vocal pops up with groups that aren&#8217;t &#8220;vocal groups&#8221;. What would &#8220;Night&#8221; be without the raw but impeccable interplay between two vocals (in this case Springsteen overdubbed with both parts, although pianist Roy Bittan did a very capable job at the high part in live performance):<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/EGe1bKEdEag\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>And today, in an age when few bands seem to attempt harmony live, among the leading practitioners of the Everly&#8217;s craft are&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;the dreaded Nickelback.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/4dk0vnULwes\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Whatever you think about the dreaded, leather-lunged Chad Kroger and the hits-in-his-sleep business operation he created, you gotta ask yourself; when was the last time you saw a live, electric band not only try to do tight, two and three-part harmony live on stage, but pull it off without breaking a sweat? (And don&#8217;t yap about Autotune; sure, they use it; but you&#8217;ve gotta get close enough to the pitch for it to work, or it sounds like a T-Pain single played backward).<\/p>\n<p>Closer to the Everly source? I present former mid-period Byrd Gram Parsons joined with a very young Emmylou Harris to take an Everly&#8217;s song back up the holler just a little over 40 years ago:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/vO8C9fqC3uk\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Anyway &#8211; RIP Phil Everly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Phil Everly died over the weekend. \u00a0He was 74. Rock and Roll, we are told, started as a blender-mix of rockabilly and R&amp;B. \u00a0Elvis put a rockabilly delivery onto a rhythm &#8216;n blues beat. \u00a0Chuck Berry sped up the blues to rockabilly speed. \u00a0Johnny Cash did rockabilly over a persona that could have made Howlin&#8217; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memoriam","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40977"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40977\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40980,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40977\/revisions\/40980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}