ROBERT GORDON LIKES POP! Retro Rocker Brush Cuts The 80’s

ROBERT GORDON LIKES POP! Retro Rocker Brush Cuts The 80’s

Bill Holdship

We’re not trying to be a pretty boy band or a fashion show. This is real.

--Robert Gordon

Abusive is the only word to describe the audience the last time Robert Gordon was in Detroit as part of a some-thought-smart/ some-thought-not-so-smart double bill with Roxy Music. Gordon performed admirably that night (aided by the stunning guitar work of Chris Spedding), considering at least half the crowd was loudly condemning his rockabilly repertoire. As one enlightened “critic” let it be known in-between cries of “Fripp is God!” (what that had to do with anything beats the heH out of me): “If I wanted to hear this shit, I’d go see Elvis Wade or Sha Na Na!”

Tonight, though, Gordon isu in friendly territory, headlining a triple bill of rockabilly revivalists, including a local cover band and Steve Nardella, who has virtually forsaken his blues roots to become Michigan’s best interpreter of the' boppin’ blues. The performance is taking place in an old Motor City dance hall, the Vanity Ballroom, the type of palace that housed big bands during the swing era and which probably hosted a rockabilly act or two during the form’s initial heydey in the 50’s. Needless to say, the effect is pure magic, as kids tear it up to a type of music their parents might have been dancing to 25 years before.

From the enthusiastic reaction of this crowd, it would appear that the rockabilly revival which recently swept England has come back to reclaim these foreign shores as well. Kids are going berserk every time a classic Sun recording of Elvis, Jerry Lee or Warren Smith blares from the speaker columns, and the dance floor is in total pandemonium by thq time Gordon and his Wildcats take the stage. Couples are jitterbugging and pogoing to a modernized rendition of “Twenty Flight Rock” and a slow, blusey “Rockabilly Boogie,” and I can’t help wondering if Eddie Cochran or Johnny Burnette had any idea on the days they died that kids with bright orange hair would still be raving to their music two decades later.

With rockabilly bands popping up all over the place—running the gamut from L. A.’s Kingbees, who nonchalantly cop licks from the likes of Gene Vincent and Carl Perkins ' without giving credit where credit’s due, to New York’s Stray Cats, who head a fullscale cult movement in the U.K.—it seems', ironically, that Robert Gordon was ahead of his time, presupposing current music trends by at least three years.

Nonetheless, this revivalism put Gordon in a critical bind during the early part of his career. Some of the attacks may have been justified: there was something strange about this guy singing songs from the ’50’s without the slightest hint of camp or parody. Gordon’s devotion was obsessive and there were some dynamic moments on his first three LPs, but what keeps a lot of old rockabilly records from sounding silly today is that these performers were the first to do it and they had enough feeling to make the often syrupy lyrics sound believable. It was nearly impossible to make the corny lyrics of “It’s Only Make Believe” sound as vital in 1979 as Conway Twitty made them sound in 1958, and it’s little wonder that no rockabilly revivalist has yet covered Elvis Presley’s “Paralyzed” with its refrain of “I’m gay every morning, at night I’m still the same.”

But Gordon kept plugging away at the romantic fool hiding in most of us, and the perseverence began to pay off with his fourth LP, Bad Boy. It seemed he was moving in more of a pop direction while maintaining his rockabilly roots, yet he included “Need You,” lyrically one of the wimpiest ballads he’d ever recorded. Gordon sang the song with enough conviction and emotion to send chills through any cynical romantic. With its angelic choir and do-wopish “magic changes” chord progression (always the sound of love, as far as I’m concerned), Gordon made the lyrics “Come back and help me find the will to live/in this old troubled world of take and give/I need you by my side” sound almost as profound as Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks, especially if you’d been dumped by a lover at the time. Robert Gordon passed the test by delivering the goods with lyrics that even Bruce Springsteen probably couldn’t get away with.

“I think you really have to feel the pain to convey what’s going on,” Gordon explained backstage shortly before his set. “I’ve been through a few ups and downs in personal relationships, and you have to | draw from these experiences, whether they’re good or bad, to feel it.”

In his black leather jacket and greased ducktail (“Enough grease to lube a ’57 Chevy,” as a press release once described it), Gordon looks like he’s been in a time warp since the “Elvis is King” years. He’s suffering from a mild case of laryngitis tonight, so he’s not in a real talkative mood. Cordial, definitely friendly , but just not very conversational.

Gordon has frequently been called “the father of,the rockabilly revival,” but he’s not particularly fond of the title. “Oh, I don’t know, man. We were definitely doing it before these other people. We were doing it when it wasn’t fashionable, so to speak. But at the same time we’re not trying to be a pretty boy band or a fashion show. This is real. You’ll see that these cats I’m playing with are real solid players, and we’re not up there trying for a pretty boy look or anything like that. It’s just some heavy playing. And we just try to work in the older stuff people expect to hear with our newer material. ”

From Gordon’s mention of “pretty boys” and “fashion shows,” it sounds like he’s not too haRpy with most of the rockabilly acts currently making the scene. “Well, let’s put it this way. I really haven’t heard enough of them to judge. I do think I approach it differently than most of them do. The ones I’m familiar with are really trying to recreate something or doing almost a parody bf rockabilly. That’s what it comes off as. I don’t think that’s ever what I’ve tried to do. I started something new when I first began but now there’s all these bands and most of them aren’t really doing rockabilly.”

Like Queen’s “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” which has to be the greatest perversion of the form yet?

"I never considered myself solely a rockabilly singer. --Robert Gordon"

“I don’t think that was a rockabilly tune. They just tried to get the sound, but it was really sort of rock heavy. That sort of tag. Rockabilly has become a loaded term that really doesn’t mean much now.”

As scores of bands try to consciously recreate the basic raw sound that Sam Phillips unconsciously captured in his Memphis studio, Gordon continues to go beyond rockabilly on his most recent album, Are You Gonna Be The One. The LP features synthesizer, saxophone, organ, violin and steel guitar—not exactly your traditional rockabilly instruments—and demonstrates through choice of material that Robert Gordon should be considered as much a pop singer as a rockabilly interpreter.

“I’ve never considered myself solely a rockabilly singer. People like to mention Gene Vincent and Elvis, and they were definitely influences on me. But there were other influences as well. In the country field. In the blues field. In the soul field. When I was living in Washington, D.C. during the early ’60s, there was a place there called the Howard Theater. I used to go there, and I saw all the great black acts. It was one of the last places you could go and pay a buck to see about seven really heavy, heavy acts. So I’ve listened to and been influenced by a lot of different kinds of music.

“Are You Gonna Be The One is basically an extension of what I’ve been doing all along. You can still tell it’s me, but they’re all new songs with the exception of ‘Look Who’s Blue,’ which is an old Don Gibson tune, and ‘Standing On The Outside Of Her Door,’ which is an old Dorsey Burnette demo that never got recorded. Other than that, they’re all new, and I’m pretty proud of that. In the past, it was always the other way around. ‘Drivin’ Wheel’ is actually the only song on the album that can be considered a rockabilly tune.”

Gordon was so concerned with the sound and approach of his follow-up to Bad Boy that he recorded the LP twice, a far cry from the old rockabilly standards he once aped where spontaneity seemed as important as anything else. “The new album is my fifth release, but there was one in-between that I shelved. I recorded an album with my ex-producer, Richard Gottehrer, but it just didn’t feel right. It felt forced. Fortunately, RCA was cooperative enough to let me cut a whole album over again.”

Three of the LP’s 10 tracks were penned by Marshall Crenshaw—a former Detroit singer-composer and Gordon associate for several years—including the single, “Someday, Someway.” It’s the type of song AM and FM programmers should put on the airwaves immediately, since it includes a perfect summer pop hook that makes you feel like you could live forever when you hear it blaring from a car stereo. “Someday, Someway” has the potential to become one of this summer’s biggest radio hits.

That is, it could be a hit if Gordon gets lucky. After all, he’s no stranger to losing hits—many believe that Gordon should have scored with Bruce Springsteen’s CONTINUED FROM PAGE 37

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“Fire,” which he recorded before the Pointer Sisters.

“I first met Springsteen through his bass player, Garry Tallent. He invited me down to the studio to play me some things, and that’s basically how I met him. ‘Fire’ was one of the songs, he played for me. Unfortunately, I was with Private Stock when the song was released. 1 think it would have done a lot better than it did if I’d been on a major label. Still, to this day, people really seem to like our version of it.”

Gordon has felt some discrimination due to the fact that he doesn’t write many songs. In fact, he’s only recorded four of his own compositions over the years, most notably Bad Boy’s “Born To Lose” which was closer to garage punk rock with its recurring Farfisa riff than it was to the Rock ’n’ Roll Trio.

“1 come up with a song every once in a while, but I don’t consider myself much of a writer, and I’ll be the first to admit it. If I Was to write an entire album, there’d probably be at least two years between this album and the next one. Every singer is an interpreter, and I’ve got a lot of good people like Marshall writing and submitting songs to me. There’s a lot of things on this new album that I think are really accessible for radio today. Unfortunately, radio programmers are still really tight. It’s the same old story. But we’re getting a really good reaction to this record and tour, so I think it’s just a matter of time now. ”

☆ ☆ ☆

Onstage, Robert Gordon is tearing the house down. His records may be taking a more pop direction, but it’s still rockabilly this crowd wants to hear and that’s what Gordon gives ’em. The current incarnation of the Wildcats is the hottest band Gordon hai worked with yet. Danny Gatton has replaced Chris Spedding, who replaced Link Wray on guitar. (“There was no animosity involved,” Gordon said. “They just felt it was time to leave, but we’re still good friends.”) Granted, Wray was one of the original greats, and Spedding a cult hero, but Gatton actually sounds like Scotty Moore trying to play heavy metal. He’s absolutely incredible, and there’s no question that Gatton gives the Wildcats’ sound a new credibility.

Gordon concludes the show with his classic cover of Billy Lee Riley’s “Red Hot.” The entire crowd flocks onto the dance floor like lemmings, and there is literally wall-towall people going apeshit to the pulsing beat.

In this sense, Robert Gordon is the real thing. Sure, there might be something regressive about the way he looks and the songs he sometimes sings, but tonight Robert Gordon is proving that rock ’n’ roll,. in its purest form, still exists—just a bunch of crazy cats losing control at the dance hall on Saturday night.. /