Back
in the day there were only two stations in Chicago that played what they used to
call rock and roll, WLS and
WCFL. They divided the town just as the
Cubs and the White Sox did. You listened
to one or the other. I started out as a
WLS fanatic and switched over about the time Dick Orkin and Jim Runyon brought Chicken Man to
WCFL.
My
original favorite had a great advertising gimmick called the WLS Silver Dollar
Survey. (You can find a great website
about the survey here.) Handed out in
record stores, the survey gave the top 40 tunes each week along with promotions
for the station’s dee-jays. Every now
and then I go back and take a look.
There’s
something about a song, you know. Songs
come and go, providing a few weeks of entertainment and toe-tapping and, in the
old days, a frenzy to get down to the E. J. Korvettes in order to snap up the
latest piece of vinyl. But there is also
the value of a song ten or twenty or forty years later. Events set to the music of one’s life in some
ways keep a better record of the past than a journal can.
Way
back in 1961, just beginning my second decade, the Silver Dollar Survey had Walk Right Back by the Everly Brothers
as its number one pick. Great song sung
by two top-notch vocalists, the exquisite harmony strung together in a helix of DNA that the two
brothers shared.
The
song was written by a guy named Sonny Curtis, who is a member of the Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame and who is perhaps best known for his hit I Fought the Law.
Who
can turn the world on with her smile?
Who can take a nothing day and suddenly make it all seem
worthwhile? Sonny Curtis could. He not only wrote that song; he sang it on the
opening sequence of The Mary Tyler Moore
Show.
 |
| Sunny Curtis (Google Images) |
Curtis
was an original member of the Crickets, the band that stood behind Buddy Holly,
the members of which contributed so much to the success of the legend that it’s
hard to tell where the genius of Buddy Holly leaves off and the musicianship of
the Crickets begins.
When
the band dissolved, Curtis went on to play with his mates, Jerry Allison and
Joe B. Mauldin, as they backed up the Everly Brothers until Curtis was inducted
into the United States Army in 1960. It
was at Fort Ord in California that his keen eye for a good guitar lick and
catchy lyrics also served him as a marksman.
As
he related in a 2014 interview with the Nashville Songwriters’ Association’s
Bret Herbison, out of 250 men in his company he was one of six who received
“Expert Marksman” status, an achievement that earned him a three-day pass which
he decided to use for a trip to Los Angeles to visit Jerry Allison, his old band mate.
There
he played for Allison Come Right Back,
which he had put together on a Sunday afternoon at the barracks, playing on “old, beat-up Sears Roebuck kind of
guitar.” He had that first lick in his
head when he was inducted, simple and memorable, adding an F# and an Ab on the
E string to a basic A chord.
As
luck would have it, Phil and Don Everly were also in Los Angeles, learning how
to be movie stars at Warner Brothers. Allison and Curtis dropped in on Don Everly,
and Allison prompted his friend to “Sing that song to Don.” Upon hearing it,
Everly went straight to the phone, asked his brother to come over, and before
the afternoon was out the harmony had been arranged for the song.
Sometimes
even a great lick needs a little bit of luck and a serendipitous ability to be
in the right place at the right time. A
few days one way or the other, and the magic might never have happened.
Soon
after the meeting in Los Angeles Curtis was transferred to Fort Gordon, Georgia,
and from there he shipped out to France.
On the day he landed in France the song was released.
There
was only one verse for the song that Curtis had worked up there at Fort
Ord. The Everly Brothers didn’t see that
as a problem – they just sang the existing verse twice. Clearly, the music buying public didn’t mind
the repetition.
Repetition
is what the song got in Chicago as in four weeks it moved from Number 28 on the
survey to the top spot on March 25 where it lasted just one week before the
Marcels interpretation of Blue Moon
knocked it into second place.
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