THE EVERLY BROTHERS – “Cathy’s Clown”
Fuck all the kisses, they didn’t mean jack. But, of course, they did, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Humiliation is a rarity this high up the charts – when you find it, you find it tempered with sweetness; in this case Don and Phil’s lovely falling harmonies. Their rueful descent and the relentless march-band drumming make it unpleasantly clear that the public agony will continue. By the end the pleas are pitiably feeble – “Don’t you think it’s kind of sad?” Cathy and the clown are both lying, and they’re both lying to the same person, and neither seem likely to stop.
7
(hmmm on ILM i calculated i wz a TWO-CLIFF BABY viz = conception AND birth but either i used a non-canonic chart OR i confused release date w.week got to #1)
I think Everyhit’s chart dates (which for consistency’s sake I have been using) are slightly different to everyone else’s, for reasons I have zero idea about!
Cringe! Cring! Most of us have felt this way–the rage against the love object who makes a fool of us!!! How to avenge such humiliation??? Tell them we DON’T want them, we DON’T need them. (But oh, we do, we do, we do.) But how to save face when everyone knows the truth?
“Don’t you think it’s kind of sad?”
WELCOME TO THE UNDERSTATEMENT OF THE YEAR!
So much drama that so many know all too well, all underscored by the ferocity of the drums and plaintive lyrics. And no one could deliver the (soap) operatics quite so deftly (indeed, even beautifully) as the Nashville rockabilly set.
This is one of the first records that I remember with absolute clarity, hearing it while riding in the back seat of the car my sister Kate (sometimes known as “Kathy”) had just bought. I loved the music and the singing–I wasn’t quite clear about what the words meant–at least not then.
Oh, the adolescent drama! And some of us never grow out of it!
Gilbert O’Sullivan uses this as an example of how he doesn’t mind other people mishearing or misinterpreting his lyrics. For years he thought Phil and Don were singing about this guy called Cathis Clown… (?????!!!!????)
It’s an over-familiar tune, but if you listen to Cathy’s Clown rather than just hear it on the radio, it is quite extraordinary: the metallic drum roll following the condemned man on the chorus morphs into the lurching rinky-tink of the verse as Don Everly drowns his sorrows, even slurring his delivery. This was the first time Don had the time and facilities to truly *produce* an Everlys record. Even Phil Spector and Joe Meek, in early 1960, were learning their craft, and here was one of the most bankable pop stars in the world, stealing a march. An early pop aesthete, his arrangement for Cathy’s Clown was inspired by Andre Kostelanetz’s Grand Canyon Suite. Warners also saw the Everlys as film stars, real actors. They had the looks, and hadn’t blotted their copy book by ogling Jayne Mansfield in a rocksploitation movie. Number one, Hollywood calling, what could go wrong? Incredibly, they were off the map in just two years.
My score:10 for more robust reasons. Nearly gave it to “Dream”/”Claudette”, but this was a step up. I really don’t ever want to feel this way, to have to react this way.
DESERT ISLAND DISCS WATCH:
Anita Dobson, actress (1988).