back beat

Rip It Up, Issue 216, 1 August 1995, Page 28

back beat

CHARLIE RICH 1934-1995 RIP

Charlie Rich was drunk when, on live TV, he opened the envelope for the best male singer at the 1975 Country Music Awards. But that didn’t affect his sense of style and taste. Reading that John Denver had won, he set the envelope on fire. The problem with Rich was he was too damn talented. He came to the Sun Studios in Memphis in 1958, after Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, and seeing the breadth of his talent, the legendary Sam Phillips let him follow his instincts. Taught the piano by a black sharecropper, Rich was well versed in blues and gospel, but he was also adept at jazz. He had pop hits with ‘Lonely Weekends’ and ‘Mohair Sam’, then his genius languished through lack of focus, even though some of his songs became standards (Elvis Costello covered ‘Sittin’ and Thinkin’, Jerry Lee and Bobby Bland, ‘Who Will the Next Fool Be’). It wasn’t until Billy Sherrill started producing him in the late 60s that Rich found a wide audience, singing smooth country. In 1973 they hit paydirt with the sublime ‘Behind Closed Doors’, but the followup, ‘The Most Beautiful Girl’, typified the countrypolitan schlock he was then burdened with. Sherrill even stopped Rich playing piano on his own sessions. Wealth followed, but so did alcoholic despondency - until, in 1992, journalist Peter Guralnick rescued Rich with the astounding Pictures and Paintings. For 25 years Guralnick had championed Rich; his essay in Lost Highways (Penguin) is a classic study of the fame vs creativity dichotomy in American music. Rich may have sung ‘Don’t Put No Headstone on My Grave’, but a more appropriate epitaph is ‘Life Has its Little Ups and Downs’, a look at marriage filled with pathos, written by his wife Margaret Ann, who was with Rich when he died in a Louisiana motel last month. Almost anything Rich recorded before 1974, plus Pictures, can be recommended - and found in the bargain bin at your local secondhand record store.

TILL THE NIGHT IS GONE: A Tribute to Doc Pomus (Rhino)

DR JOHN Afterglow (Blue Thumb/BMG)