Goldmine Article - Taking the Bull by its Horns

Taking The Bull By The Horns

In effect, The Hollies were caught in a generational squeeze, the first of several that they would encounter in the 1970s. They'd started out competing with the Beatles on the Liverpool band scene, and were now trying to hold the public's attention in a world of arena rock and musician/poets. Worse still, despite an enviable string of successes, their identity was effectively defined by a dozen or so hits, covering as many years in the business and numerous stylistic changes. It was very hard to sustain a fandom across such a long string of records, regardless of how familiar many of them were.

By 1974, the group was struggling to find a new hit. There were subtle changes in its sound: Their single "Another Night," off the album of the same name, marked the group's tentative venture into the still-developing disco/dance field, and marked the first appearance on a Hollies record of a synthesizer. Released in England during 1974, it had not performed on the charts, nor had their cover of Bruce Springsteen's "Sandy (4th Of July, Asbury Park)."

The decision was made that, for the first time in their history, the group would make a concerted effort to get over in America in a lasting way, with a major tour. Opportunities had been missed in the early 1970s, when they appeared in the United States during Clarke's absence from the line-up, and 1975 was the year they would make up for this. In the spring of 1975, The Hollies made a series of concert appearances in America, at major venues including the Bottom Line in New York and the Roxy in Los Angeles.

There was some irony about the Bottom Line appearance in New York. If they'd been just starting out, it would have been the gig of a lifetime, but for Clarke, Hicks, Elliott and company, it meant that after nearly 15 years in the business, they were still a club act, which was great for the presentation of their music, but hardly a mark of success for a quintet whose first charted single in England predated the Rolling Stones' recorded debut. Only the prestige of the venue made the gig seem worthy of their musicianship.

The tour did get the group the best press of its history in America, even in publications that wouldn't have been expected to appreciate them. In a Village Voice (May 19, 1975) article titled "The Hollies: O.K. Chorale," James Wolcott opened by describing The Hollies rather snidely, "fine as long as you don't pay too much attention to them." He called Another Night "no more or less weighty than its post Graham Nash predecessors, modestly accomplished yet a touch lazy.

"But," he admitted, "when they kicked into 'I Can't Let Go' the voices crossed, looped, and blended in a cluster-burst of full-throated dynamics. The lyrical high point was 'The Air That I Breathe," even more stirring without the swirling studio violins; the comic high point was the transatlantic twist given Bruce Springsteen's 'Sandy.' [Allan] Clarke even managed to inject some tension and ambiguity into Dylan's 'I'll Be Your Baby Tonight.' So what was viscous became effervescent. The Hollies burned through their limitations and went right into jukebox subliminity, which is to say from the coils of the machine to the pleasures of the flesh."

Billboard (May 17, 1975) magazine was more straightforward in its enthusiasm in a critique of a May 2, 1975 show at the Roxy in Los Angeles: "The quintet offered a dozen songs, blending their biggest hits with their most current material and serving up a few older LP cuts. [Allan] Clarke looks and sounds just about as he did at the start and the is perfect lead singer, and when he harmonizes with lead guitarist Tony Hicks and rhythm guitarist Terry Sylvester, the result is one of the most skilful and identifiable sounds in pop. In short, the seemingly ageless Hollies made a totally triumphant return to the United States, and if one wanted a perfect Hollies album, the 55 minutes they gave the happy Roxy crowd would be it."

The closing Billboard comment would prove prophetic. In the meantime, the group had problems of a more immediate nature to contend with, most notably a gradually diminishing commitment to their music on the part of Epic Records.

In October 1973, in the wake of "Long Cool Woman" and "Long Dark Road," Epic had issued the compilation Hollies Greatest Hits, which became a perennial seller in the company's catalog (and one of the label's earliest mid-priced CD releases in the 1980s). This was to have been followed by a definitive double-LP historical compilation of rarities and album tracks. But the double album never appeared.

At around the time that Epic was dropping the idea of the double album, however, a miserably packaged, almost generic 10-song compilation album entitled The Very Best of The Hollies, consisting of pre-Epic Records tracks, turned up from United Artists. That label had inherited the rights to the pre-Epic material when it bought out Imperial. It was the first of many overlapping compilations that would confuse the public, especially in the United States, and devalue the group's catalog. EMI's acquisition of the United Artists label at the end of the 1970s would help reduce the confusion, but only slightly. Even in the 1990s, it is possible to find CDs from rival labels featuring overlapping collections of The Hollies' material from EMI and Sony Music (the successor to Epic Records).

"The whole catalog situation is a mess," Clarke conceded. "We've never been able to sort it out. Nobody wants to give up their little piece of our history."

The group's new album for 1974, Another Night, had barely made an impression in the United States, and their earlier catalog, apart from the Dylan album, was already out-of-print. And then, in 1976, Epic committed what fans might rightfully regard as the ultimate insult, as well as a fatal blunder.

The group had gone ahead and recorded a live album, essentially doing what the Billboard reviewer had suggested. And the 1976 concert album Hollies Live, which was universally praised by fans and critics (that is, those lucky enough to lay their hands on it) was passed on by Epic Records. Hollies fans in the United States had to scramble to find the Canadian import, brought in by JEM Records, and the Canadian release was a double insult, appearing on Columbia Records' north-of-the-border CBS label, a cousin to the Epic label.

This was a particularly unfortunate loss for the group and for American fans, for Hollies Live was one of the finest concert recording ever made by a 1960s British Invasion band, sufficient to get it compared to such classics as The Live Kinks and the Rolling Stones' Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out. Moreover, it was something more than a live greatest hits album, presenting the band as they were in the mid-1970s, doing current as well as vintage material. Its release in America, coupled with decent promotion, could have made it a valuable follow-up to the Epic hits collection, which had always sold well. The issue seems a no-brainer, yet somehow Columbia Records in America never picked up on the album.

As it was, Hollies Live attracted the attention of many reviewers who didn't normally try to write about imports. Critic Steve Simels, writing in Stereo Review, commented, "Many of the songs here--and they span literally the whole of the band's career--are far more moving than they were on their first go-rounds. As for The Hollies' overall singing--well, it's just incredible; not even the Beach Boys can pull off this kind of breathtaking harmony work in person. In case you haven't guessed it by now, I'm just nuts about this record. Since the import sales have already been substantial, Columbia will probably have to release it stateside eventually. It makes the recent Wings live set [Wings Over America ] sound like amateur night. If I hadn't seen the band do essentially the same program presented here at two shows during their 1975 American mini-tour, I would find it too difficult to believe that it had not been totally doctored in the studio--it's that slick."

As it was, things were to get worse. Their 1977 album Russian Roulette, released in America as Clarke, Hicks, Sylvester, Calvert, Elliott--a title worthy of a law firm's name, or a bad parody of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young--(and padded out with "Sandy (4th Of July Asbury Park)," another attempt to sell their cover of the Springsteen song), had an abysmal cover in its U.S. edition. One had to look closely at the notably unattractive cover (nothing but the names of the group members) to see whose album it was, and the record seemed to have been dumped into the record stores.

Perhaps Epic had come to the conclusion, in the wake of "Long Cool Woman" and "The Air That I Breathe," that The Hollies were simply never going to make it in the long-player format. The next step was the realization that there was only so much money to be made with an act that only lured the public to buy singles, regardless of how many copies some of those singles had sold. If the label hadn't been doing well at the time, it still might've treated The Hollies better, but at the time Columbia Records was riding high, buoyed by the presence of Bruce Springsteen, the return of Bob Dylan and the presence of acts like Boston and Blue Oyster Cult, among others, all of which seemed incapable of doing anything wrong commercially, and all appealing to a young demographic, and all selling albums easily.

None of this lack of encouragement was made easier by the changing music scene surrounding the group. For the second time in a decade, The Hollies were hit by a generational squeeze--the combined assaults of disco music on one hand, and punk rock on the other.

The Hollies were utterly unsuited, by temperament or training, to compete with the punk bands. Even in their wildest days 15 years earlier, Clarke, Hicks and Elliott had never been remotely given to the kind of theatrics or destructiveness associated with punk legitimacy, and Bernie Calvert, as one journalist of the era remarked at the time, even went to church on Sundays and didn't mind if the group's publicist said so.

Disco was another matter, and it proved a creative detour for the band. It was manageable as a musical genre, and it was dance music that the group understood. "Another Night" had been a good attempt at a proto-disco number, and there was no reason not to try and do more in that direction.

Additionally, one suspects that they couldn't ignore the fortune being reaped by the Bee Gees during this same era. The brothers Gibb had been music fixtures of the late 1960s, albeit younger than The Hollies and with less credibility as a band, and had endured a temporary break-up. They'd also been through a dry-spell about as long, if not longer, than the one The Hollies were going through, and by 1977 were back in the mega-platinum reaches of the charts, thanks to the soundtrack of Saturday Night Fever. If the disco audience could accept the Bee Gees, there was no reason that it wouldn't listen to The Hollies, and the group tried hard to reach that audience.

It never happened. The albums Russian Roulette and A Crazy Steal both failed commercially, and by the end of the 1970s, with Clarke once again trying for success as a solo artist, The Hollies' career was on hiatus.

In 1980, the group was active again, and had a modest chart success in England with its single "Soldier's Song," placing #58 on the British charts, their first appearance there since the release of "The Air That I Breathe" six years earlier. An attempt to revive their fortunes at the turn of the decade with an album of Buddy Holly covers entitled Buddy Holly, released only on Polydor in England, proved ill-fated. "On paper, the idea of The Hollies recording nothing but an album of Holly songs is fascinating. On vinyl though it turns into something "stiffer than an embalmed corpse," wrote Patrick Humphries in Melody Maker. Humphries may have been a little extreme--Allan Clarke maintains that the record was done as a sincere tribute to Buddy Holly--but, as in the case of the Bob Dylan album of 1969, the performances on the album lacked any particular urgency. That is, they seemed to have little new to say, apart from a version of "Peggy Sue" that, in its opening bars, features only Clarke's voice and a synthesizer.

The Buddy Holly album was never issued in America. By 1981, a new problem arose, as The Hollies' line-up all but disintegrated. In May of that year, Terry Sylvester left the band following an argument, after 12 years in the band, and only a few days later, Bernie Calvert, their bassist of 14 years, resigned as well.

The Hollies were now reduced to their core membership of Allan Clarke, Tony Hicks and Bobby Elliott, and made several unsuccessful attempts to record with guest musicians. The group's story might have ended some time soon after that, if not for the success of a specially edited medley of their early hits, titled Holliedaze, that charted in England. An invitation to appear on Top Of The Pops resulted, unexpectedly, in the agreement of Graham Nash and Eric Haydock to appear with the group in September 1981.

The result of this one-off appearance was a reunion of the mid-1960s Hollies. Rather unexpectedly, Nash indicated his willingness to record with his former band mates. Atlantic Records became The Hollies' newest label, with tracks recorded over several months in London and Los Angeles.

The reunion of the original Hollies--or four-fifths of them, anyway--brought The Hollies more press than they'd had in several years, especially in America. An ambitious tour, including performances at the Felt Forum in New York, was booked, and the resulting album, What Goes Around, was heavily promoted. Unfortunately, the public didn't feel the same fascination with the group that many long-of-tooth music writers did. Perhaps too much time had elapsed. In 1973, there might've been many thousands of people trying to get tickets to the scheduled shows, but by 1983, few people were getting terribly excited by Graham Nash's solo work, or even his appearances with David Crosby and Stephen Stills (although when Neil Young was involved, that was a different matter ... ). Additionally, there were mistakes made on the tour itself. Promotional appearances were poorly planned, and the scheduled gigs at the largest venues had to be hastily rebooked into smaller halls. In New York, for example, the group ended up at the Bottom Line, seating less than 1,000 people.

And, finally, although the single chosen from the album, a cover of the Supremes' classic "Stop! In The Name Of Love," reached #29 on the American charts, the record generated as much criticism as enthusiasm in the press. The same problem, ironically, that had dogged The Hollies in their early days for covering American rock 'n' roll classics had come back to haunt them again, except that the music press in 1983 was generally even less forgiving than Screaming Lord Sutch had been in 1963. Nobody did covers of Motown songs like that anymore, and, as far as most rock writers were concerned, certainly not a bunch of early '60s geezers whose most musically credible member was (in the minds of many) one of the weak links in Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and who all should've known when to quit anyway.

Of course, there were people who liked the record, and understood, as Allan Clarke explained recently, that The Hollies were merely doing their own version of the song, not trying to replace the original. It was the same old story that had dogged them in the beginning of their careers.

By 1984, Clarke, Hicks and Elliott were back to recording as The Hollies, with EMI, and Nash was once again working with David Crosby. With a new line-up, including Denis Haines on keyboards, Alan Coates on guitar and vocals and Ray Stiles on bass, the reconstituted Hollies resumed recording, and found some success in Germany with a version of "Stand By Me" that never appeared anywhere else.

Albums were a thing of the past, however, except for hits compilations and CD reissues of the group's classic albums, which began to appear in profusion during the late 1980s. Perhaps as the ultimate irony, The Hollies found themselves once again with a #1 hit in England in 1988, with "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother." The advertising campaign for Miller Lite Beer in England had used the song, under license from EMI, in its television commercials, and the label reissued the single, which became the group's biggest success in their own country in 18 years. A reissue of "The Air That I Breathe" in England during December 1988 reached #60, but an album of hits using that song as its title reached #15 on the album charts in England in the spring of 1993.

Recorded and released in 1983, "Stop In The Name Of Love," the old Supremes hit, charted #29 on the U.S. Billboard charts. 1983 marked the band's 20th anniversary and brought back Graham Nash into the line-up for the occasion.

The release that same year of EMI's triple-CD The Hollies: 30th Anniversary Collection brought the band's history into the 1990s for most fans. In addition to containing most, though not all, of the high points from among the band's single releases from 1963 thru 1973, the set ended with a trio of contemporary songs, Prince's "Purple Rain," Nik Kershaw's "The Woman I Love" and Richard Marx's "Nothing Else But Love," recorded by the 1993-vintage Hollies in concert.

Contrary to what the notes to the triple-disc set indicate, those three live tracks do not feature Terry Sylvester and Bernie Calvert. "I don't know how that got in there," Elliott says, "but it simply wasn't true. We haven't had any contact with Terry Sylvester or Bernie Calvert since 1981, and that is our current line-up playing on those songs."

More recently, the group was the subject of a multi-artist tribute album, Sing Hollies In Reverse, featuring contemporary rock acts doing their own covers of songs written by or uniquely associated with The Hollies. This collection brought the band a new level of respect from the current rock press, which suddenly had to acknowledge The Hollies' 30-year legacy beyond its mere nostalgia value.

Most recently, The Hollies have emerged once again in connection with Buddy Holly, with a cover of Holly's "Peggy Sue Got Married," recorded on an MCA multi-artist tribute album devoted to Holly's music. And in doing so, Clarke, Hicks and Elliott have once again recorded with former band mate Graham Nash, who was responsible for the recording in the first place.

"Graham had this track, 'Peggy Sue Got Married,'" explained Clarke, "that he'd been given by Mrs. Holly, a demo of Buddy Holly on acoustic guitar that he'd recorded at his apartment. What we did was to lay our own voices on with his."

One technical problem that had to be overcome was the presence of Holly's acoustic guitar, which he undoubtedly never would have wanted on a finished track. "His guitar would not have fit in with the band sound," Hicks admits. "We had to eliminate his guitar, yes, which we did with some eq-ing tricks."