4/1/2023 0 Comments Crush the industry drum chart![]() This is also a big reason for the boom in record sales in the middle decades of last century - records are private entertainment, as opposed to going out to a dance or a show.Īnd this left the big film studios in dire straits. So white flight had essentially meant the start of a process by which entertainment in America moved from the public sphere to the private one. And in the same way it’s also uneconomical to run mass entertainment venues like theatres and cinemas in low-population-density areas, and going to the cinema becomes much less enticing if you have to drive twenty miles to get to one, rather than walking down the street. This is largely what led to America’s car culture and general lack of public transport, because low-population-density areas aren’t as easy to serve with reliable public transport. After World War II there was a corresponding period of white flight, where white people moved en masse away from the big cities and into small towns and suburbs, to get away from black people. In the thirties and forties, there had been huge waves of black people moving from rural areas to the cities in search of work, and we’ve looked at that and the way that led to the creation of rhythm and blues in many of the previous episodes. A series of lawsuits from actors had largely destroyed the star system on which the major studios relied, and then television became a huge factor in the entertainment industry, cutting further into the film studios’ profits.Īn aside about that - one of the big reasons for the growth of television as America’s dominant entertainment medium is racism. Anti-trust legislation meant that the film studios had to get rid of the cinema chains they owned, losing a massive revenue stream (and also losing the opportunity to ensure that their films got shown no matter how poor their reputation). In the late 1940s and early fifties, the film industry was being hit on all sides. Warner Brothers Records had started in 1958, and had largely started because of changes in the film industry. But Don Everly, in particular, wanted them to have more artistic control themselves - and if they could move to a bigger label as well, that was all the better.īut as it happens, they didn’t move to a bigger label, just a richer one. Both artistically and commercially, they were as successful as any artists of the early rock era. When we left the Everly Brothers, six months ago, we had seen them have their first chart hits and record the classic album Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, an album that prefigured by several years the later sixties folk music revival, and which is better than much of the music that came out of that later scene. This week we’re going to look at the Everly Brothers’ first and biggest hit of the sixties, a song that established them as hit songwriters in their own right, which was more personal than anything they’d released earlier, and which was a big enough hit that it saved what was to become a major record label. This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. I would also recommend this recently-released box set containing expanded versions of their three last studio albums for Warners, including Roots, which I discuss in the episode. This collection has all the Everlys’ recordings up to the end of 1962. The Everlypedia is a series of PDFs containing articles on anything related to the Everly Brothers, in alphabetical order. Ike’s Boys by Phyllis Karp is the only full-length bio, and I relied on that in the absence of anything else, but it’s been out of print for nearly thirty years, and is not worth the exorbitant price it goes for second-hand. There are no first-rate biographies of the Everly Brothers in print, at least in English (apparently there’s a decent one in French, but I don’t speak French well enough for that). ![]() ![]() Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Poetry in Motion” by Johnny Tillotson.Īs always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. ![]() Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Download file | Play in new window | Recorded on July 2, 2020Įpisode eighty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Cathy’s Clown” by The Everly Brothers, and at how after signing the biggest contract in music business history their career was sabotaged by their manager. ![]()
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