Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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This is neat!



For starters, I never get tired of listening to the radio version of this tune. There's so much to like. First, it's a delicately balanced rock ballad; the tempo is danceable and almost brisk while the chord progression includes lots of nifty chromaticism that carries an emotional tinge.

Second, the lyrics deal with the overworked topic of young heartbreak with precocious maturity and a heartening lack of melodrama. As an expression of support for a friend who has lost the "game," I always perceived that Gerry was singing to a female friend, but that's not actually "hard-coded" into the lyrics. Assuming my interpretation represents the band's intent, there is one big way this type of song can go wrong: the consoling party (that is, the singer) is using sympathy as a pretext to worm his way into a distraught lady's undergarments. There's no room for suspicion of that in these lyrics, though.

Third, the arrangement handles the orchestration perfectly. The small string section provides atmospherics, the brass instruments contribute dignity, and the oboe phrases evoke the moments before sunrise better than any other voicing I can think of. This part of the chart reminds us that some adults took part in the production, too---George Martin, maybe? Whomever: they did themselves and the band great credit through economy and understatement, avoiding both cloying sentimentality and over-formality.

But this performance, as I say, is particularly neat to my earbones. It's from a 1964 edition of The Ed Sullivan Show. The boys are playing live, for real, with a small orchestra stashed away somewhere behind the theatrical flats or on the sidelines. As you can hear, there were some problems keeping the orchestra in sync with the band in a few places, particularly a brass flourish at the end of the bridge (around 1:40). I find these production artifacts to be endearing, and don't hear them as errors. These are the fingerprints of a noteworthy pop music performance by talented musicians who at the same time sound like regular, approachable people.

Along those same lines, they Pacemakers sound like they're playing regular, everyday instruments. The rhythm guitar and piano don't sound cheap, but unprocessed and unaffected. Their tones are the same sounds that talented kids in the neighborhood could produce in Dad's garage if they had the same equipment and experimented with the knobs. And I enjoy hearing all the raw detail in those instrumental parts---especially the guitar---that were not conspicuous on the single.

Although I can't be certain, this sounds like the same performance included on a disc I own that collects Ed Sullivan Show recordings of five British Invasion bands from 1964 - 1966. A few months ago I dug it out after it laid dormant in my "stacks" for almost 20 years, and became enamored of it. As I've implied, the sound will not impress audiophiles, but the audio fidelity is perfectly good for a live recording of the period, and most of the tracks offer fine performances replete with previously unheard details and artifacts like those I've mentioned above. The Billy J. Kramer material is good (two Lennon-McCartney songs). The Searchers track, Needles and Pins, is also very nice and makes me wish a few more had been included. Peter and Gordon are alright, and even the four (!) Herman's Hermits tracks are decent---much better than I expected. Besides the Pacemakers' three tracks, the disc ends with a great "set" by The Animals, who exude a genuine and unprocessed character that you could imagine being played in a bar or college gym. The only stinker of the lot is I'm Telling You Now by Freddie and the Dreamers (sorry, lads, but even as a kid I didn't care for your sucky novelty music). A production note about the disc: each "set" is well engineered to sound like a single performance, but many of them are edited together from different locations in the space-time continuum.

Anyway, back to the libretto: below I'm providing the catalog information from the version I own, which will deviate from the YouTube particulars because mine is audio and theirs is video.

Don't Let The Sun Catch You Crying, Gerry and the Pacemakers (performance 10 May 1964, from "The Sullivan Years: The British Invasion" [1990], TVT Records TVT 9428-2), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.