We dialled up the Melochronometer, the valves warmed to their friendly amber glow, and when the digital readout stopped flickering it had settled on 1959. What a place to land. The year was eleven days old when a man in Detroit borrowed eight hundred US dollars from his family and started a record label; three weeks after that, a light aircraft came down in a field near Clear Lake, Iowa, minutes after take-off, and took Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper with it. Ritchie Valens was on that plane because he won a coin toss. In the middle of November, Broadway got its first look at a Rodgers and Hammerstein show about a singing family in Austria, and two nights after that Hollywood premiered the most expensive film anyone had ever made — fifteen million US dollars on Ben-Hur, a million of it on the chariot race alone. Down here, meanwhile, a 21-year-old from Raetihi was finishing the tour that had started the previous November and was only ever meant to run a fortnight. Johnny Devlin came off the road in May 1959, having had eight singles, three EPs and an album pushed out from under him while he was still moving, and promptly left for Sydney.
The records, though, are the reason to come back. This ten-song trip has a number one that was recorded in fifteen minutes of studio time somebody had to be talked into paying for, after the band had already begun packing up. It has an album made overnight in a church office in Maryland by a young man who had borrowed the keys, pressed a hundred copies, broke five of them in the post, and credited half the record to a blind bluesman he had invented. There’s a bellhop from Louisiana who wrote a love song for a girl he is now very glad he didn’t marry, two teenage brothers from Brooklyn who worked out the most famous instrumental of the decade at home on their father’s tape recorder, and a song from a Broadway musical that opened on a Tuesday and closed on the Saturday — six performances, and somebody still won a Tony out of it. There’s a bossa nova that was deliberately booby-trapped to make bad singers sound bad, and a blues recorded three years before the album it came out on, with the same pianist who had played on the original nine years earlier. And there are two songs in this hour written ten years and one ocean apart by the same man, both of them dashed off at the last minute because a leading actor had threatened to walk out — but that’s what the show is for. Ten songs, one year, and a reminder that in 1959 the difference between a masterpiece and a fifteen-minute favour was mostly luck.
Tracklist
- Bobby Darin — Mack the Knife — Mack The Knife / Was There A Call For Me
- João Gilberto — Desafinado — Chega de Saudade (Remastered Edition)
- T-Bone Walker — Call It Stormy Monday — T-Bone Blues
- Wilbert Harrison — Kansas City — An Introduction to Wilbert Harrison
- Ray Charles — Come Rain or Come Shine — The Genius Of Ray Charles
- Santo & Johnny — Sleepwalk — Santo & Johnny
- John Fahey — St. Louis Blues — Blind Joe Death
- Phil Phillips, The Twilights — Sea Of Love — Sea Of Love: The Collection
- Chet Baker — September Song — Chet
- Frank Sinatra — Here's That Rainy Day — No One Cares (Remastered / Expanded Edition)
