Their songs no longer celebrate the bird dogs and little Susies of their original success, but neither do they first with the musical middle of the road. Their voices are richer now, and more complexly intertwined. And yet, here they are, twenty-nine years after their first hit, “Bye Bye Love,” creating whole new worlds for those heart-melting harmonies to inhabit. This is ironic, because the Everlys, with their clean-cut looks, pristine country harmonies and string of early teen hits largely written to order by Nashville tunesmiths, have in the past seemed to some the embodiment of domesticated white-boy rock – well-mannered worlds away from the rowdier stance of Chuck Berry or Jerry Lee Lewis, the lunatic rumpus of Little Richard, the raw soul of Ray Charles.They have seen rock & roll evolve from a despised pop cult into the American musical mainstream – in which, after years of tears and trials, they are once again aswim. Opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not reflect the views of Rolling Stone editors or publishers.The Best Audiophile Turntables for Your Home Audio SystemThe Everlys have actually been making records for thirty years, if one counts their first effort, a quickie single called “Keep A’Lovin’ Me,” which was released and forgotten in February 1956. Their “comeback” – the 1983 reunion concerts at London’s Royal Albert Hall and the two extraordinary studio albums they’ve released in their wake-has escaped all suggestions of a “rock revival.” (As Don says, explaining why he and Phil have never played an oldies show, “Rock & roll should never have to make a comeback,”)Music, Film, TV and Political News Coverage.
![]() In the beginning, with their crisply thrumming guitars and vibrant harmonies, the Everlys conjured a world of shimmering innocence eternally on the verge of experience, of First Love forever. Both are courteous and unaffected in a way that’s more common among country performers than rock & rollers. Phil, a slender and weathered forty-seven, is diffident, reclusive, a homebody happiest away from the stage in his San Fernando Valley digs. Donald (as his brother and friends call him), now forty-nine, is the darker-haired and bulkier of the two: rootless, restless, mercurial, a lover of good food, fine Beaujolais and beautiful women. Interviews with the brothers were conducted separately, which seemed appropriate, for they are very different men. And through it all, they remained the Everlys – until one bottomed-out night in Southern California, after which they were lost even to each other for ten blood-denying years. Through it all, the wheel of musical fad and fortune spun on, oblivious to their art, to the beauty of two voices chiming as one, clicking on through Beatlemania, acid rock, the disco of the wretched Seventies. They’ve survived the years of endless gigs, the long dead nights on the road, the claustrophobic togetherness. If I’m extremely fond of a woman, if I think I might really wind up walking down the aisle again … I go in another direction.”The women have come and gone so have the drugs that disrupted their lives in the early Sixties. In this new land of lengthening shadows, innocence is an ancient memory.“It’s hard to get fluffed up about love anymore,” says Phil. When Don sings, in the superb title song he wrote for the new LP, “He lost his mind today/She threw his clothes away/A love they thought would last/Just flew away,” the new lyrics’ import is perhaps as intimately pertinent to the Everlys’ original audience, now deep in middle age, as were the dewier odes of their common, now-vanishing youth. It was more uptown, more honky-tonk. Like other white country musicians, from Bill Monroe (also tutord by Schultz) to Hank Williams, Ike Everly was inspired as much by black traditions as by the enveloping hillbilly idiom.Don: Country’s not the right word for what he played. Ike, who was himself a coal miner’s son and was determined not to end his days in the mines, had picked up the rudiments of a hot thumb-picking guitar style (one he would later pass on to the celebrated Merle Travis) from a local black guitarist by the unlikely name of Arnold Schultz, and polished it after work and on weekends with his two musically inclined brothers, Chuck and Len. Before long, lke was appearing with a country group, the North Carolina Boys, on KXEL radio.Don: He loved black music, too. It was in Chicago, on January 19th, 1939, that Phillip Everly was born. White blues.Before Don was two, the Everlys relocated to Chicago, to a teeming Italian neighborhood on Adams Street, where Ike obtained employment with the Works Progress Adminstration and by night set out with his guitar – now equipped with a De Armond electrical pickup and cabled to an amplifier – to play the workingmen’s bars along Madison Street. Backyard soccer mac emulatorAnd they would open the club door, put the amplifier in the doorway and fill the place up. They had pool tables in the front and then the club in the back, with a little stage. I remember he played this Greekowned white club that catered to migrant workers from Kentucky, Tennessee, all those places. Dad also had one of the first amplifiers on Madison Street. ![]() Cartney Paul One On One Tour 2016 Torrent Free As AHe and a fellow on accordion and another on clarinet would back me up. I had a little theme song: “Free As a Little Bird As I Can Be.” Dad had all these songs in the back of his mind – he was the instigator behind it all. Soon he was given his own spot: “The Little Donnie Show.”Don: It was just a ten- or fifteen-minute show, part of another show, actually. ![]() He held on to his musical dreams but began to accept the fact that they might have to be realized vicariously. The family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, where they had found another gig, but Ike Everly saw the handwriting on the wall. We never made a lot of money at it, but enough to get through, to get by.With the rise of records and television over the next ten years, live radio music began dying out. We also played a local barn dance on Saturday nights, and occasionally we’d get up on the back of a flatbed or pickup truck with speakers and go play for various little harvest-jubilee-type things.
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