It was on a July evening in 1973 when the audience at Hollywood's John Wayne Theater had to understand that the duo they were listening to had basically ceased to exist for a long time: "The Everly Brothers have been dead for ten years", Don said after Phil broke his guitar on the open stage. The concert of these living dead marks a no less decisive date than Paul McCartney's obituary notice for the Beatles in April 1970, who had only learned from the Everly Brothers how to combine two distinctly different voices into a new, inextricable whole. The Everlys remain the synonym for harmony singing in pop music for all eternity. Without them, leading performers from the duo upwards would probably have sounded different: Simon & Garfunkel, the Byrds,Buffalo Springfield and many others.
Edo Reents
Editor in the features section.
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What they did cannot be said more aptly than Rowohlt's rock lexicon: "The Everly Brothers infiltrated honest country & western sounds with the attitude of juvenile delinquency." Tied to home with the lurking thugs of the Rock'n'Roll founding days, which in 1957, when they debuted with two hits, "Bye Bye Love" and "Wake Up Little Susie", almost came to an end. This and other material that was initially provided to them by the author couple Felice and Boudeleaux Bryant, but which they soon wrote themselves - "All I Have To Do Is Dream", "('Til) I Kissed You", "Cathy's Clown" - , outlined the canon of topics that dominated the Eisenhower era, lovesickness, generational conflict, gang creatures, cinema,Ice cream parlor and, beneath the pristine surface, contained some ambiguity that made listening to it a literally dubious pleasure of timeless appeal and, believe it or not, even earned them a radio boycott.
It may be that, especially under the influence of the British rock invasion, which made them look old at an early age, their music, which provided the Warner Corporation with the basis for its music department, is now perceived as harmless;
but that's a misunderstanding.
Every achievement is to be understood in terms of its epoch, the unsavory habitus of the Everly Brothers has proven to be an extremely durable expression of their artistry - otherwise there is no other explanation for the continued admiration for them.
Only together did the brothers make a whole
Of course, only together did the brothers, who once appeared on their parents 'radio show before school, create a whole, with Dons' baritone operating with an almost underhanded melting of overripe sweetness sounding even more seductive than Phil's falsetto usually just a third above . Overall, he was probably also the better songwriter, as his untitled solo debut (1971) shows: Here you can study that young geniuses even in their afterglow phase, which the brothers entered with the scandalously underestimated album "Stories We Could Tell" in 1972 also entered together and for the second time, still able to produce masterpieces. That could not be ignored during their comeback in 1983/84, for which Paul McCartney had given them “On The Wings Of A Nightingale”.
But it was also Don who, with inherently unstable health and amphetamine addiction, jeopardized solidarity at an early stage. Its collapse in October 1962 coram publico gave rise to bad news even then. Phil, the baby boy, died years ago (FAZ January 6, 2014). Brother Isaac Donald "Don" Everly has now followed him at the age of eighty-four.