The Walker Brothers: "Make It Easy on Yourself"

November 29, 1965 (2 weeks)

I was in my early-to-mid twenties when I began to hear the name Scott Walker an awful lot. Like Nick Drake and Gram Parsons, he was this tortured artist who no one appreciated when he was young and beautiful. Except in Walker's case, he was still alive at the time. And he wasn't quite as good looking as either Nick or Gram. And he had once been hugely successful, albeit not for all that long. But otherwise, they were three peas in a pod!

Like German novelist Thomas Mann, Walker seemed to "immature with age" as critic Geoff Dyer puts it. In Mann's case, it was political. He went from a young conservative who strongly supported imperialist Germany in the First World War to eventually being so enamoured of social democracy that he found himself abandoning his life in the United States because of the Senator Joseph McCarthy's red scare witch trials — and this was when he was well into his seventies. You're supposed to become a Tory as you get older, not go radical over time. As for Walker, he did so creatively, churning out grand pieces of baroque pop before gradually embracing avant-garde music just as his contemporaries were selling out to MTV commercialism.

One can scarcely detect that it's the same individual who crooned on Jacques Brel's "Mathilde" and Andre Previn's "You're Gonna Hear from Me" on solo debut Scott to the man who crafted the smokestack industrial bleakness of "Bouncer See Bouncer..." and "Face on Breast" on his 1995 masterpiece Tilt. Talk about a departure. Yet his period with fictional brothers Gary and John is typically ignored altogether even though it was by far his most productive time chartwise and wasn't really all that different from his early solo work.

While there has been a steady stream of UK acts who became stars in the US while being little-known back home (The Zombies and Bush are perhaps the two most famous examples), there seem to be fewer who managed to do the reverse. Basically it's The Walker Brothers and Sparks, the longtime duo comprised of real life brothers Ron and Russell Mael. The Walkers did have a fleeting period in which they looked to become big in North America, however, and it was with "Make It Easy on Yourself" that they made their first splash.

Over on Tom Ewing's Popular page, many of the comments accompanying the review of "Make It Easy on Yourself" seem to suggest that Scott Walker is an unconvincing lead singer. I'd agree but that's sort of the case with a lot of his material, especially in the sixties. He could always convince the listener that being Scott Walker was an experience in itself but as for what he did with the lyrics he was presented with, that's another matter. He keeps his cards close to his chest and it's impossible to say whether that's by design or not. The late Jerry Butler's original, by contrast, goes heavy on the emotion as he tries to be as understanding as any spurned man has ever been. Well, scratch that. I remember the first time I was dumped and at one point I tried the highroad tactic (and, no, it didn't help my cause any).

Ambiguous though it no doubt is, The Walker Brothers' version of "Make It Easy on Yourself" is stronger than Butler's. Scott's nougatty tenor alone makes it worthwhile but there's also the hint of a dark side that reveals itself which may be an indication that this isn't as benevolent a song as we might think. It isn't quite at the level of Scott 3 and Scott 4, let alone his recordings from his radical, old-age renaissance, but it certainly gives everyone an indication that a major talent was coming up — even if very few would stick around to hear the end results. Their loss.

Score: 7

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Hey! Where's...?

1965 has been quite the year for should've been RPM number ones so it's only right that it ought to wrap up with yet another pop injustice. The Byrds were a remarkably creative and influential group, one that changed its sound an awful lot considering they were such an inspiration to generations of boring old power pop groups. But they were never as successful as they should've been. Still, at least in the US they had a pair of number one hits with "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "Turn! Turn! Turn!" respectively which is more than can be said north of the border. Coming up short to the Walkers isn't such a travesty but there are a couple of duds coming up that I wish it could've pushed out of the way. But at least it stood a chance as opposed to all those stunning Byrds' singles to come that didn't get a chart placement at all. Where the justice for "Have You Seen Her Face"?