Furrowed-brow gospel rock which risks being weighty in all the wrong ways. The title phrase is from a 1940s magazine cover, said by a cute li’l scamp in a “from the mouths of babes” moment. Transpose it to a rock song and you get a stodgy mix of wartime folksiness and King James solemnity (“no burden is he”). The arrangement echoes this unhappy combination: dustbowl harmonica and churchy string section in a forced marriage of two quite different kinds of seriousness.
And even so, if it was 1969 they’d just about get away with it. It’s a type of song which does very little for me – I was harsh on “Hey Jude” partly because it did so much to establish this style, but there’s a real humility and humanity in that record which I was too wary to spot. Pleas for togetherness in the late 60s weren’t entirely homilies: as with “Woodstock” there’s a desperation lurking behind the hair shirts and chest-beating here, a real sense that something important might not be lost if we’re just good to one another. Even if there’s colossal self-satisfaction too.
It’s the self-satisfaction that admen picked up on when they used “Heavy” for a Miller Lite commercial and launched it to the top of the charts. Lite! Not heavy! That’s why they’re called “creatives” you know. But yes, the music doesn’t just work as a pun: advertising is only toxic to pop when it illuminates something in the record, and I think that’s the case here. “Brother” in the original has a gospelly ‘everyman’ meaning; in the context of chugging a brew it’s halfway at least to the modern “bro”, and a bond of humanity becomes a bond of back-slapping masculinity. Which I’m not wholly against, but only in the late 80s did advertisers make it sound quite so smug. It’s hardly the Hollies fault, but observe the fella’s expression as he raises his beer at the advert’s end and learn why I’ve mistrusted this song ever since.
Score: 3
[Logged in users can award their own score]
It’s not my favourite Hollies song, and the phenomenon of ‘classic’ reissues on the back of advertising campaigns is absolutely anathema to a healthy pop culture, but this song is still pretty good, an 8 even, when put next to (almost all of) the other #1s of 1988.
This must be the point where I temporarily waved the charts “bye bye” and started to look for more Acid House and Hip Hop that was off the radar of the charts and daytime radio.
I’ve nothing against The Hollies really, but beer adverts getting to the top just confirmed the charts as “boring” to me at this time.
Another one that I bought in 1988. I think that I found the arrangement and Alan Clarke’s delivery conveyed a sense of genuine gravitas and engagement to me, such as was rarely found in contemporary pop – not even in Phil Collins’ slowed-down emoting of sixties source material – perhaps just because of its out-of-time feeling. I sort of still feel that now, actually. I really like the tension between the bluesy and the churchy in this song now, actually, like shafts of sunlight penetrating through rainy gloom.
That sodding advert really does kill the mood, though. Its the whacky larks and beery blokiness that repels me. I certainly wouldn’t want to emulate that drinker.
Is this only the second number one for Cook & Greenaway (after ‘I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing’)? I can’t understand why no-one ever seems to go on about them, when they wrote so many fantastic singles; Home Lovin’ Man, Something Tells Me Something’s Gonna Happen Tonight, Doctor’s Orders, Melting Pot, Blame It On The Pony Express, I Was Kaiser Bill’s Batman…
But they’ll have another one in 1989, pop pickers!
(Just in case it isn’t clear from the review, if this had got to #1 when originally released and with no advert it would have got a higher mark – a 5 or so maybe. 5 or 6 seems to be the most I’m ever willing to give this sort of thing – cf Caravan Of Love, Bridge Over Troubled Water, etc.)
TOTPWatch: The Hollies performed He Ain’t Heavy on Top Of The Pops on five occasions (You’ll have to wait to find out about the Christmas 1988 edition);
2 October 1969. Also in the studio that week were; Karen Young, Lou Christie and Sounds Nice, plus Pan’s People’s interpretation of Bad Moon Rising. Tony Blackburn was the host. No copy survives.
15 September 1988. Also in the studio that week were; Bros, The Proclaimers and Phil Collins. Simon Mayo & Peter Powell were the hosts.
22 September 1988. Also in the studio that week were; Pet Shop Boys, Bill Withers and Rick Astley. Nicky Campbell & Andy Crane were the hosts.
29 September 1988. Also in the studio that (SAW-friendly) week were; Sinitta, Hazell Dean and Bananarama. Gary Davies & Mark Goodier were the hosts.
It was a great smoocher in 1969 but I don’t get the feeling Tom likes smoochers and several number ones have been marked down for a slow tempo. Those who conceived the notion of “Dance” music in the 1980s, as if dancing was a revolutionary act nobody had ever thought of before, seem to have stripped all the eroticism from it. A vertical expression of a horizontal desire no more.
It’s a long way from the Hollies’ best (I’d nominate Bus Stop myself – they survived the departure of Graham Nash just about but it didn’t last as they moved from the pop venues to the cabaret circuit. But behind the opportunities for getting to know your companion and the state of his intentions, it’s a nice song, well-executed, and if I wouldn’t go out of my way to listen to it, it would please me if I happened upon it. Thus making a good 5 or possibly 6.
The Hollies, I feel, were the most underrated of the big name groups of my adolescence.
Highest-rated “smoocher” is “Moon River” with a 9 so you’re probably right! (though there’s a bunch of 8s which qualify).
Billy @4 – this was written by Bobby Scott and Bob Russell, not Cook and Greenaway, who wrote the Hollies US #1 “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress”.
Neil Diamond’s version of this was quite good – it always made my mum cry…
I’d forgotten that this was used for a commercial so it doesn’t have that association for me – and I’m not sure that the song can be blamed for that association. I like the melody and Allan Clarke’s vocal. The lyrics are pushed a little too hard which only draws attention to their worthiness in places but if written in 1969 may well have reflected the influence of The Basement Tapes’ return to awkward simplicity. Nevertheless, I find myself humming, even singing along to it when I hear it and so it gets a 6 from me.
According to Wikipedia the original recording features Elton John on piano.
HAHHMB is just a little too stately for its own good methinks (and isn’t the overall feel too churchy and also too familial for a successful smoocher as such?). Still it’s got some tasty chord changes and feels technically impeccably constructed. For example, bouncing the strings off the harmonica really works I find. It’s surprising, even ingenious or inspired.
Of course, the Hollies really mastered this style and tempo a few years later with ‘Air that I Breathe’ (which was kept off #1 by the wretched ‘Billy don’t be a hero’ apparently). *That’s* a gold-plated 10 I’d say, whereas HAHHMB is only a 6 or a 7. That (new to me) ad is truly revolting, just as Miller (let alone Miller Lite) beer is. Beware: Miller beer is not only watery/tasteless/weak, it also gives the most horrendous hangover headaches. It’s the worst beer I’ve ever had the misfortune to drink.
By 1969, not only was the dream over, but after the departure of Graham Nash many thought the Hollies were over, or at least irretrievably lost to cabaret and MoR; one of the Beat Boom groups who saw the future (“King Midas In Reverse”) and didn’t much fancy it,, or were afraid of it. That having been said, “He Ain’t Heavy” was as elegiac a retreat from the wreckage of that dream as Blind Faith’s “Can’t Find My Way Home” or indeed CSN’s own “Long Time Gone,” even though its heavily telegraphed lushness, with full orchestra, harmonica, choir and florid fills on piano (the latter supplied by the session player then still just about known as Reg Dwight) and subject matter of the bloodied survivor attempting to escort, or drag, his friend back into the world of the living make it the missing link between “The Long And Winding Road” and “Two Little Boys.” It is melodramatically effective; note Allan Clarke’s anguished, suppressed howl on the “If I’m leaning at all” line in the bridge and how Bobby Elliott;s emphatic drum figures slow down the song at the climactic “Does-n’t-weigh-me-down” when the protagonist is doing everything to avoid collapsing himself.
It was one of the Hollies’ biggest international hits; in Britain it peaked at number three in 1969’s troubled autumn. But then in 1988 it quite unexpectedly became the latest beneficiary of the backward-looking advertising ambulance when it was used to soundtrack a very strange advert for the aforementioned Miller Lite ; the tall, mulleted, bowler-hatted scruff who wanders through the streets of his town helping out, working small miracles and inevitably getting first crack at orders at the bar. The song thuds out of an ancient, cobwebbed puppet band, through ancient, cobwebbed speakers, David Lynch could have directed it and no one would have been surprised.
There was a rival version at the same time by, of all people, Bill Medley, from the soundtrack to, of all films, Rambo III, which skated the edge of the top 30. But the Hollies’ original was lapped up like chewing gum wrappers in the Dead Sea and gave the group only their second UK number one, and their first in 23 years. All around, the future of music was booming; and yet this unceasing return to the security blanket of the past – a doubly strange number one, with its themes of compassion and cooperation, in the age of devil take the hindmost Thatcherism – was embraced. “He Ain’t Heavy” was possibly the most problematic number one of its year; a reasonably successful single in terms of its ambitions and delivery, but really, in 1988, it lends itself to the misguided belief of many that the only way was back.
Not only is Miller Lite weak gnat’s piss but the ad makes me want to punch that bloke in the face. There were a lot of those “chirpy lads having fun” beer ads around at the time (Black Label, Hofmeister) when you knew that once they’d had a skinful they’d be down the local curry house loudly abusing the waiters and puking up in the road afterwards.
The record is probably an 8 from me though, I just love those bursting harmonies (especially “but I’m strooooooonnnnggg”), and the ad hasn’t stuck in my memory hard enough to taint it. ‘The Air That I Breathe’ would be higher.
I don’t reeeeeally like “The Air That I Breathe” either to be honest, though probably more than this.
Tom, it also got a sales push from being featured on DLT’s “Golden Oldies Picture Show” with a very literal video.
I agree with Rosie that they never got much kudos in their heyday so it was quite pleasant to see them back in the saddle for a brief moment.
Good time to mention “The Air That I Breathe” as two songs down the line we’ll be coruscating its author.
“The Air That I Breathe” which is widely thought to have been a major melodic inspiration for one of the better known songs (a UK top ten hit in 1993) by another major act who won’t be bothering Popular…
I’m drawn towards a 6 for this, admiring various aspects but with no desire to own it. Fortunately that awful ad means nothing to me, or that would be knocking it down a peg. As for being an anachronism, well, yeah, but 1988 was hardly a year where chronism was a virtue.
Chronism?
Not a real word, unfortunately, but it should be!
A few factoids about this:
The phrase “he ain’t heavy…” was featured in said magazine cover (“The Messenger”, 1941), and was adopted as the motto of a children’s residential centre in Nebraska known as Boys Town – one version of the story states that the illustration was of a former resident of Boys Town who wore leg braces and the other boys would take turns carrying him. The phrase was used in the Spencer Tracy film “Men of Boys Town” also in 1941. (By the 80s, the name “Boys Town” meant something else altogether…)
The song memorably featured in an edition of “Noel’s Christmas Presents” in the 90s, in a feature where a Hollies fan, born with spina bifida and who had recently lost both parents, was called into his back garden by a friend to discover the Hollies in the garden performing “He Ain’t Heavy…” A nation suddenly realized it had something in its eye.
The Hollies song “I Can’t Tell The Bottom From The Top”, as recently featured in “Which Decade”, was co-written by Guy Fletcher, whose son Justin is now known as “Mr Tumble” on CBeebies. (Tom will be nodding sagely at this point.)
Boys Town Gang’s “I Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You” would have got a high mark from me!
Also: my first encounter with the phrase, and the song no doubt, came at the end of “The Return Of Rico”, the Judge Dredd story in which his no-good brother gets released from space prison and Dredd ends up killing him in a shoot-out. At the end, Dredd, carrying his brother, says.. well, you can guess what he says. (But never having heard the song the ending seemed tonally off to me – the emphases suggested it was a phrase I ought to know, but I didn’t, but at the same time the set-up made it feel like a punchline more than anything else.)
Punctum, that Bill Medley version from Rambo III was a wretched piece of cack. That’s the one where Rambo goes to Afghanistan and single- handedly bitchslaps the entire Soviet Army…along with the help of some brave and plucky Mujihadeen (those who we tend to call the Taleban these days) of course.
Why The Reynolds Girls Had To Happen: From the artfully forward-thinking Seventies references of S-Express, The Timelords and Yazz, we’ve now had two consecutive backwards-facing Sixties re-treads, which must have delighted large chunks of Radio One’s ever-aging demographic. (See also: Why Matthew Bannister Had To Happen.)
However, my chief memory of this song concerns the time I saw Neil Diamond perform it, at Nottingham Arena in July 2002. So perhaps a nine year old re-release warrants an eight year old copy-and-paste job:
“There is a fine line between populism and schlock. This line comes perilously close to being crossed during the perhaps inevitable September 11 tribute, with its dedication to the police officers, fire fighters and service personnel involved. I feel myself beginning to wince, as each group is applauded in turn. As the crowd applauds “those brave servicemen who risk their lives, every day”, the nice lady next to me notices my half hearted clapping and nudges me. “That’s us lot he’s talking about”, she says, smiling, and motions towards my hands. I don’t suppose she gets thanked very often by her heroes. She’s probably more used to the poorly concealed wincing. Anyway, we’re not applauding the institutions here – we’re applauding the individuals. The tribute song turns out to be He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother. I get the message.”
Why Enya Had To Happen!
#16. Radiohead ‘fessed up and the writers of ATIB are credited as co-writers of Creep …
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creep_(Radiohead_song)
still shocks kids of a certain generation (<30 yrs old) who've grown up with Creep when you play them ATIB …!
It still shocks me that anyone thinks that the common elements are the most interesting thing about Creep, what Radiohead added was several levels more engaging than the clay they worked with.
The Pixies have got a lot to answer for …
It struck me that this is the first of two consecutive number ones where it’s a non-American band attempting an American roots sound.
In the Hollies case they manage it well in so much as they could pass for American. As for the song I would say it’s concillitary tone carries it for the first 2 or 3 listens, but after that I come to find the harmonica theme dreary, the vocal a bit too nasal and the earnestness is layered on ( ” His welfare is my concern ” and that kind of thing). The middle eight and the coda are good but they draw attention to how plodding the verses are.
I think Punctum@12 sums it up well. In 1969 the likes of Canned Heat and the Band helped form a wider constituency for songs like He ain’t Heavy.
In 1988 probably the most incongruous number one since Jim Diamond.
@20
“whose son Justin is now known as “Mr Tumble” on CBeebies”
Indeed, but it’s only in the companion role of “Grandad Tumble” where I feel that Justin really excels.
I thought this was a Bobby Russell song (Little Green Apples, Honey), but in fact it was written by a 55-year old called Bob Russell who had worked on a bunch of film soundtracks but never scored a real hit single before. He died a few months after the Hollies recorded it.
Neil Diamond’s version apparently predates the Hollies, though Russell’s son-in-law introduced them to the song so that could be a Wiki half-truth.
This was a song which seemed hugely important when I was a kid – along with Something In The Air, its maybe the most claustrophobic ’69 song. When I was old enough to understand it was post-Nash, cabaret era Hollies I found it pompous (Punctum, I think that line is “if I’m laden at all…” which is another boggy biblical line), but I was so much older then. Now I find its muggy air is sliced apart by Ron Richards’ high string arrangement and the weary but optimistic harmonica with its echo of the (then current) Midnight Cowboy theme.
The advert doesn’t affect the way I hear it at all. Its heart-in-mouth use in Terence Davies’ Of Time And The City certainly does.
In NZ we never got the Miller Lite ad, but the song had a very earnest return to telly screens in 1991 as part of a spearhead PR campaign for the New Zealand Police and the recently-invested National government who’d made boosting their numbers a key election pledge the previous year. Apologies for poor quality video, accents etc:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kv-ksrMhWU
I’m pretty sure the original ad as I recall it didn’t have the voice-over and was the more effective for it.
The Hollies song “I Can’t Tell The Bottom From The Top” … was co-written by Guy Fletcher, whose son Justin is now known as “Mr Tumble” on CBeebies
amazing
A song I didn’t fully appreciate when it was first a hit and one that seemed to have been around forever. I wasn’t particularly drawn to it on it’s 88 revival either and it did seem an incongruous and backwards looking number one. However it does have a sincerity and warmth which despite the semi-religious lyrics and overly nasal vocals put it head and shoulders above most of the rest of 88’s number one offerings. A comfortable 6 heading towards 7.
Chronism?
You mean the discrimination against people with Crohns disease? You bastards!
Oh hang on, it’s spelled wrong…
In Canada we got this song in a long-running anti-drug PSA: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6rO3TGDAHs
I like it. And the thing I like best is the absence of ham. There are certain songs that are destined (or written) to fulfil the market for cloying ham, and this is one of them – as several minor cover versions have demonstrated. Whereas the original has a biggish production and big vocals but still – to me – sounds simple and slightly sincere.
I recall the existence of the commercial, but no more than that so no negatives from me. A vegetarian 7.
“Anachronism” means — literally — something lie “untimeliness”l; but if “chronism” therefore means “timeliness” i’m not sure it means it the way english means it (i suspect it just would mean “concerned with time” in a vague all-purpose way)
for purposes of clarity (and handy rhetorical singong) i’d opt for a counter-prefix, hence maybe isochronism (which does pretty much mean “contemporaneous”) or if you wanted to be more socially conceptual, epichronism (meaning i’m not sure what, as i think I just invented it, but something like “concerned with timeliness”, on the principle that “anachronism” has taken on the meaning “unconcerned with timeliness”, which it maybe sorta kinda has…)
(ps someone who actually reads classical greek may want to step in here^^^)
also we could get back to discussing the hollies i suppose: i found this a hugely weird record at the time — it pushed buttons, but in such a jumbled-up way; i am susceptible to the resigned blue-collar decency assumed to suffuse the post-hippie shabby small-bar-blues ethic, nostalgic and utopian, self-deprecatingly reactionary, the music of a soured or overlooked world nevertheless struggling for a social space for affability and moments of ease, a world that’s pulled its militant horns in but hasn’t forgotten its — never-very-well articulated? — ideals, etc etc. I think the success of this song as an advert does indeed — as Tom notes — highlight a flaw in this ethos: the advert magnifies the flaw until it overwhelms not just the original mood of the song itself but also the world the song came from (or perhaps more accurately, it OBSCURES and BANISHES the world it came from; places it beyond the reach of those who weren’t already in it; helps allow the substitution of the organising principle of open and generous collectivity for one of self-important cliquieishness, the signifers of the former now attached to the latter)
which is sad: because i think the song is basically true to the earlier world and the near-political concept at its heard, and that world (a failed but dogged attempt to resolve contradictions by non-tribal kindness) is by no means to be reviled — the Dance Revolution that’s already pullulating under and through the charts will of course in summer 88 declare itself the “second summer of love” and throw the rave world’s arms wide, turning its labyrinth of clubby cliques into another utterly open loved-up come-one-come-all heaving vertical bed-in, as generous as it too was doomed…
P^nk s has made a very valid point. The fact that I remembered HAHHMB more as an advertising jingle rather than a song in it’s own right (note I had heard the song before the ad, but I don’t remember being “affected” by it) means that any sentiment the song conveys is buried under a swathe of marketing nonsense. Shame really, because listening to it now (a very safe distance from the influence of the piss from Milwaukee) it’s a fine gospelly flavoured pop song. By this time in 88, I was sporting an acid-yellow bandana and board-shorts and anything with a smiley on it (ugh!).
@18 @34 @37 You do all know that it was meant to be an amusing bit of wordplay, I hope…
Fun fact: achronism = anachronism, according to the OED.
A good solid 7, which is where this peaked in the U.S when first released. The word “nice” has been bandied about for this, and that pretty much sums up the whole recording.
I’m not sure I buy into the idea that a song’s ‘meaning’ can be irrevocably undermined – although I can see that a generation more familiar with the beer ad would struggle to connect with the earlier utopian associations. I’m not sure that HNHHMB was perceived as an authentic articulation of that ideal, any more than Scott McKenzie’s ‘San Francisco’ was seen as a genuine hippie anthem – the Hollies’ version is a little too well arranged. I guess that the ‘meaning’ has never been entirely agreed at any time.
Dylan pissed his fans off (yet again) when he licensed ‘The Times they are a changing’ for use in a bank ad a few years back – but whether he was trying to prove anything or even cared one way or another is open to debate
lonepilgrim @42:
‘Meaning’ is such a fragile thing though, and the meaning you find in a song is synthesised in your head by the reaction of the song with your own experience.
I think Tom’s parallel between HAHHMB and Woodstock is a valid one. In 1969 the guard was being changed an a generation of pop was moving on as its dream faded. Much of the Hollies’ classic 60s canon was an evocation of innocence, young love, coming of age. This is that generation realising that the innocence of youth has been shattered and realising that they are faced with the task of making their way in a cynical world. For a later generation it’s just a catchy song from an advert, something different perhaps from what they’re used to, but for them it will be forever tangled with laddishness and pseudo-beer (it’s made from rice, FFS!)
Persse McGarrigle, the Parsifal figure in Small World, David Lodge’s Arthurian satire of the academic world, accidentally discovers post-structuralism when he slaps down the distinguished academic who is patronising him about his thesis. Oh no, he lies, it’s not about the influence of Shakespeare on Eliot, it’s about the influence of Eliot on Shakespeare and how could you avoid reading Hamlet through the lens of Prufrock. Or something. The example I like to quopte is Mistress Overdone in Measure for Measure, who “keeps a bawdy house in the suburbs”. Of course the meaning of ‘suburbs’ has changed since Shakey used it and now it’s impossibl;e not to think of Cynthia Payne.
@ 43 I agree that ‘meaning’ is a fragile thing and not fixed.
Consequently I don’t think that the song had one (nostalgic/utopian) meaning for an earlier generation that has been replaced by another, more cynical, meaning by a later generation. There’s a danger of ascribing beleifs about the song to ‘a whole generation of pop’ when, more likely, there was, and still is, a range of interpretations across generations.
There’s always the Vietnam angle (there always is with a ’69 single). Terence Davies’ Of Time And The City used it as a backdrop to the Korean War which, for some unlucky souls, involved British soldiers less than a decade after WW2 ended. It’s a flawed but beautiful film; it’s made me listen to this song afresh, and I think it would flush the Miller Lite memories out of anyone’s system.
Re 42: Far from Utopian, it feels like a song that audibly wades through mud, the biblical stuff tying it to centuries-old memories, trying to rise above (which is why the arrangement works for me – it would be a desperate trudge if it was ‘arranged’ like, say, The Weight).
As for Scott McKenzie’s San Francisco, it was written by John Philips, anticipating the forthcoming summer of love, as he was putting the Monterrey festival together. So the hippies were WRONG! It’s, uh, the real thing!!
Of course the beer ad is traducing TWO utopian ideals – that of the late 60s, but also the older ideal of pub-going sociality (probably of more importance to me!)
I seem to remember this load of old guff also got a leg-up from being featured prominently on the charity appeals in the very first Red Nose Day tellyboxcast in ’88!!!! I must say by the end of the proceedings, I absolutely blooming sick of hearing that “harmonica going off-key” intro!!!!! And that was even before The Hollies appeared in one of the most tediously smug and self-satisfied performances I have ever witnessed on TOTP!!!!!! Even the tellybox directors colluded in the smugfest, carefully composing shots of the band singing in three-part harmony, JUST LIKE A CLASSIC SIXTIES BAND, KIDS!!! And even worse, the close-up on the face as he sings into tha camera “He ain’t heavy…. [smugface] He’s my brotheeerrrrr”, by which time the Old Folk’s home has turned into a vomitorium!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Some nugger has stolen the 1/! key from my keyboard.
Waldo? Is that you?
@ 47 – I was about to say that. What turned me off this song at the time wasn’t the Miller advert, but the pompous TOTP studio performances, complete with furrowed brows, sincere stares, and long, lingering camera shots designed to hammer home the “seriousness” of the track. Much of this may have been down to the TOTP production team, of course, but a hell of a lot of the blame lay at the feet of the band themselves. “The Hollies,” as a friend of mine said at the time, “what a bunch of prats”. Thinking back, perhaps they were over-compensating for the way the Miller advert had trivialised the song – although the use of it in that context must surely have been their fault too.
Now that memories of both things have been pushed to the back of my mind, I have to say that I find this to be a really effective single. I’ve arrived late to this discussion, so many people have already commented about the arrangement and vocal delivery, although nobody’s mentioned that bassline yet, which seems to be slowly strolling ahead doggedly in a very determined way. Neither Hollies number one is their best work by a long chalk, but this still stands up perfectly well.
i used to love this album..
———–
Sad, Sorrow and Sadness | Sad Songs of Love | Sad Quote of Love | Sad Love Poems