Today we remember Scott Walker who passed away yesterday, March 25, with a look back from our archives. —Ed.
The first five key albums by Scott Walker have just been compiled into a CD/LP box set, and in corralling this very important and vastly enjoyable work from a true existential dreamboat, the executives at Universal Music Group have done music lovers the world over a massive service. Scott Walker: The Collection 1967-1970 includes Scott, Scott 2, Scott 3, Scott 4, and maybe most enticingly ‘Til the Band Comes In, and if not flawless, the collection does paint a truly captivating portrait of this singular artist as a young, ambitious and enduringly relevant man.
Had Scott Walker’s recording career been somehow curtailed before the release of his 1967 solo-debut Scott, he’d still be remembered as one-third of the sneakily non-sibling trio The Walker Brothers, an American group that flipped the script to become a UK teen-pop sensation right in the midst of the British Invasion. They even scored a pair of US hits in the process.
The Walker Brothers’ enshrinement in the Pop Hall of Fame sorta rests upon the enduring pleasures of the Bacharach & David-penned “Make it Easy on Yourself” and “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore,” both songs climbing to the apex of the British singles charts. They also landed securely in the US Top Twenty to stand as their biggest homeland success, though the reaction of American girls to the trio’s suave image (and young Scott’s, in particular) fell quite a bit short of the mouth-agape and eyes-agog manner of those Swingin’ lasses across the pond.
During their fairly brief initial run (they did reunite in ’75 to produce three further LPs, essentially setting the stage for the second phase of Scott’s career) The Walker Brothers possessed a considerable diversity, with their discography holding a fair amount of uptempo material, including covers of Motown (“Dancing in the Street”), Chris Kenner’s R&B warhorse “Land of a Thousand Dances,” and even Dylan (“Love Minus Zero”). It’s this stuff that gets them mentioned as partial conspirators in the whole UK Beat scene, and while quite likeable in doses, it also lends an air of unevenness to their output.
For The Walker Brothers (which along with Scott Engel included John Maus and Gary Leeds, all three of them adopting the Walker surname for the remainder of their careers, with one brief but crucial exception) are still generally remembered (at least by folks who immediately associate the name Scott Walker with a certain odious Wisconsin governor) as purveyors of highly emotive balladry, the depth of their throat’s motions getting scientifically wedded to maximal production techniques that were frequently string-based and just as often Spector-derived.
It was all very much a product of the ‘60s, but if Scott Walker’s productivity had stopped with Images, The Walker Brothers’ third UK LP for the Philips label (two albums were also assembled by Smash for the US market), it seems pretty clear the man’s relationship to “The Sixties” (a period/state of tumult that basically begins with the assassination of JFK and lingers a few years into the next decade) would be limited at best.
And while the five solo records that comprise Universal’s brand spanking new Scott Walker: The Collection 1967-1970 make a strong case for the artist as a complex representative of the era from which he sprang, the personality they collectively depict isn’t necessarily the first (or even the fifteenth) thing that might come to mind while musing over the aura of “The Sixties.” And this wouldn’t seem especially unusual if Walker’s solo breakout hadn’t found so much success, with the guy getting so big in the UK that he even received his own fleeting television program.
Folks’ reflections upon “The Sixties” often revolve around a time when the subversive managed to become widely popular. A huge part of that obviously concerns drugs. If 1967’s Scott lacks the smell of drifting pot smoke or the sense-bending qualities of LSD, it exchanges them without the slightest hesitation for the aroma of a freshly uncorked bottle of absinthe.
Yes, he was ditching the commune and heading straight for the French café. In covering not one but three songs from that incomparable Belgian chanteur Jacques Brel, Walker wasn’t encouraging listeners to feed their head or to partake in a mass exodus that was goin’ up the country, but instead was conjuring up the flavor of a place where appealingly thin and sharply-attired denizens soaked up sunshine as they chain smoked unfiltered American cigarettes, sipped espresso, and discussed the finer points of existentialism.
Ah, the life. And if we’ll never get a conclusive gauge on just how many of those who went absolutely bonkers over Walker’s impressively good looks and truly exceptional voice actually cracked open a copy of Sartre’s formidable tome Being and Nothingness, the very gesture toward those intellectual environs remains an admirable one. But Scott is much more than just that.
If the opening Brel cover “Mathilde” rejects ‘67’s Free Love vibes to depict the expository excitement of a dude whose departed titular lover has just returned to him (Or has she? Perhaps he celebrates a bit too much…), Walker’s singing just as often inhabits a zone that’ll be extremely comfortable to those who partake in a songic titan such as Tony Bennett.
And if that sounds Middle of the Road, well maybe, but Walker is better assessed as a legitimate “old soul” deriving from a time and place where whole battalions of humans couldn’t resist cluing in anyone that would listen to just how young (i.e. hep, ya dig? Groovy, baby…) they were, even as they steadily advanced into full-blown codger-dom.
But Scott isn’t in any way a throwback. It can certainly be (and indeed has been) categorized as Baroque Pop, a description that places it firmly in the realm of the ‘60s (“The Sixties,” a bit less so), but if asked by an inquisitive Martian to provide examples of the form, I’d begin with the Left Banke and surely rattle off The Bee-Gees’ Odessa, The Kinks’ Village Green and even Love’s Forever Changes before getting around to Walker’s solo debut.
That’s not a slight but rather testament to Walker’s disinterest in chasing after trends. And one characteristic that continues to define Scott is the singer’s passion for exceptional material. In addition to Brel (his influence being simply huge upon Walker’s early work), the record includes a fine rendering of the Weil-Mann composition “Angelica,” a swell interpretation of Wayne Shanklin’s “The Big Hurt” (made famous through Toni Fisher’s killer ’59 hit) and a sorta atypical but very welcome reading of Tim Hardin’s “The Lady Came from Baltimore.”
The LP also serves up a nice helping of Walker’s own writing talents however, with his formative skills best expressed through the track “Such a Small Love.” Curiously enough, it actually begins in a region that’s mildly psychedelic (mainly due to some organ atmospherics) before exiting to again explore traditions of song craft that were considered “classic” at the time of the LPs release.
The singer deftly combines that aura with lyrical imagery (“Midnight mornings drenched in Dago Red/words collided, things we left unsaid”) that might’ve sounded a little bizarre coming out of the mouth of Sinatra, but work extremely well as they ooze from the slender lips of Mr. Walker. As said, a substantial bookishness radiates from the guy’s work that’s somewhat complimentary to the literary allusions that popped up with regularity in the ‘60s films (or rather, all films) of Jean-Luc Godard.
So it’s not hard to believe that the same folks that were sponging up the Yé-yé music of the era also found Walker very much to their liking. And while a comparison to Serge Gainsbourg isn’t ill-founded, it’s also somewhat limited, mainly because Walker never comes off as lecherous or pervy, even when he’s expounding upon sexual conquest and catching a case of the clap as he does in Scott 2’s Brel-sourced “Next.”
If Scott endures as a masterful debut, its 1968 follow-up details the assurance of Walker’s vision. It holds three more Brel tunes (“Next,” “Jackie,” and “The Girls and the Dogs”), adds further interpretations from classic songsmiths (including Bacharach & David’s “Windows of the World”), works in another very cool take on Tim Hardin (“Black Sheep Boy”) and also includes four of his own compositions. And where Scott climbed to #3 in the UK album chart, Scott 2 made it all the way to #1.
But if a terrific album, Walker was dissatisfied with the results. That’s often a sign of a great artist, and Scott 3, the first of three LPs issued in ’69 (the second, Scott: Scott Walker Sings Songs from his TV Series has been effectively disowned by Walker and is not included here) find both an increase in the vocalist’s ambitions and unsurprisingly the foreshadowing of his decline as a commercial entity, though the record did land him another (and final) big success, once again hitting #3.
The differences are immediately if subtly palpable. On Walker’s first two efforts the string arrangements from Wally Stott were often deliberately schmaltzy (that shouldn’t be read as a putdown). And that aspect is still apparent on Scott 3, but different is the direction the strings take on opener “It’s Raining Today,” which hints at the singer’s growing interest in Modernist Classical composition.
Scott 3 in no way renounces its numerical predecessors but expands upon and adjusts their basic template and with very interesting results. As strong as the record continues to be after thirty-four years of existence, when heard in the context that The Collection 1967-1970 provides it also stands as a transitional one. For starters, the majority of the record’s thirteen songs belong to Walker, with only the final three borrowed once more to Brel.
Also discernible is the influence of Walker upon his longtime admirer David Bowie, though in a manner similar to the arrival of those dissonant strings, the association is a fairly subtle one. Far more obvious is that the subjects Walker chose to examine weren’t exactly consonant with what listeners expected to hear from a pop singer, even one of unusually large aspirations. For one example there’s “Big Louise,” an ode to a portly prostitute.
In avoiding Gainsbourg territory it also steers clear of the (almost Henry Miller-like) bluntness that exudes from the previous album’s “Next.” Instead the song is tender without ever becoming trite or overdosing on the maudlin, and it establishes Walker not so much as a man born in the wrong era but rather as an artist perpetually on the outside looking in. In retrospect, that he was briefly able to enjoy some serious commercial success almost feels like an accident.
Scott 3 also includes the brief acoustic number “30th Century Man,” a cut that endures as one of Walker’s more popular tunes, or at least it’s such for his now firmly cult-based listenership. And the song helps bring a little variety to a record that while not really in need of stylistic diversity is certainly enhanced by the appearance of some added range.
Originally issued under his birth name Noel Scott Engel, Scott 4 missed the charts entirely, and the change in moniker has been partially blamed for its lack of success. That’s debatable; for one thing, Walker’s charming mug was right there on the cover for all to see, and additionally the very title of the record fell right into line with his previous successes.
But the sounds Scott 4 contained also can’t be faulted for the LPs lack of sales, for the album is a flat-out masterpiece of erudite accessibility. If his ambitions were growing like ivy over latticework, the disc was far from any kind of disruptive departure from his prior green pastures, and up to this point in his career it’s his least dated LP (not that datedness is necessarily a problem).
Sure, opener “The Seventh Seal,” a tune inspired by the Ingmar Bergman-directed cornerstone of art-house cinema, maybe wasn’t the most zeitgeist-friendly film reference to make in the year of Easy Rider (in those days, the only way to even see The Seventh Seal was to locate a theatre bothering to show it), and “The Old Man’s Back Again (Dedicated to the Neo-Stalinist Regime)” displayed a level of political knowledge that was lacking in the supposedly radical movers and shakers of the Hippie movement, but Scott 4 is also the easiest record for folks of a non-Mod/Swingin’/Nouvelle Vague persuasion to absorb.
Comprised entirely of Walker originals, the LP has a superb flow, and while strings are certainly present, they are reigned back and largely missing that aforementioned additive of schmaltz. “Hero of the War” is largely an acoustic strummer with very smart (and contemporarily engaging) string additives by Stott, and “Get Behind Me” finds Walker taking up residence in a country-gospel place and spicing it all up with fuzz-guitar and marimba. The result is straight up bodacious, and the song helps Scott 4 to take its rightful spot as the centerpiece of this exquisite collection.
However, for lots of experienced Walker fans, the opportunity to own an LP copy of ‘Til the Band Comes In is likely one of this set’s true boons. Like the abovementioned Scott Walker Sings Songs from his TV Series and the later ‘70s LPs from Walker’s self-described “wilderness period” such as The Moviegoer and Any Day Now, ‘Til the Band Comes In was long considered one of the records the artist had disowned.
Perhaps no more, for the album received its belated CD reissue a few years back, and while the disc stiffed at the time of its initial release, it’s no real secret that if a definite step down from the delights of Scott 4, the LP is still largely a very good time. This is specifically the case with its first ten tracks, which constitute a loosely rendered concept concerning the downtrodden residents of a fictitious apartment building.
It does find Walker backsliding a bit, surely playing it safe after his previous commercial failure, but he also gets agreeably bluesy (“Joe”) and briefly folky (“Cowbells Shakin’”), shares space with femme singer Esther Ofarim (“Long About Now”), takes a weird turn into faux-vaudeville (“Jean the Machine”), and even pulls off one song that’s accurately described as masterful (the title track).
Unfortunately, the LP’s final five songs are covers that reveal Walker taking a lengthy bath in a soup that’s undeniably MOR. Other than a horrid reading of Kenny Rogers and the First Edition’s unredeemable “Reuben James” however, none of it is actually awful (bland, yes, but hey, his “Stormy” easily bests the Classics IV original, and his take on pop singer Jimmie Rogers’ chestnut “It’s Over” is pretty sweet). But if not yet fully in the wilderness, he’s without a doubt camping out in the forest.
That might be a bummer for some, but after substantial absorption of this whole set, its faults are a minuscule distraction. Actually, ‘Til the Band Comes In’s second side serves to humanize one of the stranger stories in all of modern music. Scott Walker: The Collection 1967-1970 isn’t the beginning of the man’s fascinating journey, but it brilliantly essays his first extended bout with greatness.
Walker would go on to grapple with genius later, but for a full picture of the guy and a spectacular excursion into a deluxe chapter in the copious alternate history of “The Sixties,” this stuff is simply indispensable.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A+
