Just listening to his Greatest Hits cd, and realized that although I really like his music, I really don’t know that much about his personal life.
Remembering him from Ozzie and Harriet , he always seemed shy and self-effacing, and even his music seems to reflect that.
He was one of the many teenage “hearthrobs” of that era, and I was wondering if he was being “groomed” to be the new Elvis? If so, I think his managers failed, which leads me to believe that this is why he was snubbed by all those celebrities at the “Garden Party”.
As for me, I like his renditions of Dylan tunes and being 56, I also like those old standards such as “Mary Lou” and “Lonesome Town”.
Groomed to be “the new Elvis?” I doubt it. Hoping to have some Elvis-like success sounds more plausible.
I’ve never heard about his being snubbed by celebrities at the “Garden Party,” and if he was I can’t imagine that the reason is what you speculated. He was apparently booed off the stage, but that seems to be because he didn’t come in his 50’s/60’s persona and sing his 50’s/60’s songs.
There are plenty of articles on the net that give his personal and professional history. They may answer any questions you have.
He wasn’t without talent, but I don’t think he was anything special.
Ozzie Nelson, despite his nerdy TV character, was something of a show biz dynamo, and threw everything behind Rick’s singing career. Ozzie even supervised the mixing of Rick’s records.
So, yes, Rick was being manufactured. And I suppose his “crime” at the garden party was expecting to be taken seriously as a singer-songwriter.
Not his fault, really. I recall sometime back in the early '80s, some British producer wanted to make a documentary about how pop singers were manufactured. The one he chose to follow was Sheena Easton. For years she carried the baggage that she was manufactured. In fact, she wasn’t treated any differently than any other singer signed to a major record label.
Rick Nelson was a cut above singers like Fabian and Bobby Rydell. But if I want to listen from someone of that era, I’ll go with Bobby Darrin.
He was extremely lucky to have Ozzie, et al hyping him and he had James Burton, Joe Maphis, and Johnny and Dorsey Burnette playing on his early records.
He wasn’t talentless, but he didn’t have great chops. He did at least have pretty good taste in doing some rockabilly instead of just the schmaltz he was steered into to sell to the teenyboppers.
God, I didn’t know that, Gary ! I just thought he and the Stone Canyon Band played and they were basically treated like the piano player in a lounge: “background music”, and that this was his complaint in the song.
Booed off the stage for not looking like he did in the 50’s and 60’s by people who didn’t look like they did in the 50’s and 60’s. Huh!
Booed off the stage by the likes of John Lennon and Bob Dylan?
He surely did not deserve that .
I got to meet him once when he played in Cedartown, Georgia. His drummer’s set didn’t make it off the plane and the concert was delayed while another set was procured from the local music store. Poor drummer had to make do with a bass drum, a snare, one tom and one cymbal, but he did okay. Missed the cowbell on Mary Lou , though.
That’s a completely different tale than that spun by David Haberstam in the Fifties, where a teenaged Ricky, forced to “grow up” and have his problems discusses (and solved!) on TV every week, found the one thing he had to himself, his music, being co-opted by his father.
Ozzie did great damage to Ricky’s development as a musician and as a man, taking him when he was nowhere near prepared and making him a music star - imagine being a kid who picked up a guitar a year or two previously and being forced to play with greats in recording sessions!
Ricky understood that he wasn’t deserving of the adulation, the sales, the recording sessions with musicians who had earned the title, and he felt like a musical fraud, no matter how unwilling his early-career was, his entire life.
You’re right…by “lucky”, I meant he had the means (or his dad did) to have instant success. The price of that success was steep for him personally, to be sure.
Garden Party itself is a song about a man who is trapped in the past, one who is writing new material that nobody wants to hear and who isn’t allowed to change his look, image, or sound:
They were expecting “Ricky” Nelson. “Richard Nelson” showed up and they acted like they didn’t know who he was.
Not even when he sang his old songs… the audience really didn’t “believe” that it was Ricky Nelson singing them. So he said, pretty much, “f* it” and started playing his new stuff (the song about a honky-tonk) in frustration and his old stuff (Mary Lou) the way he wanted to (as opposed to a remake of the single).
He apparently realized the futility of what he was doing and stopped, leaving the stage, a little embarrassed at himself.
When he was done, Chuck Berry came out onto the stage, “Playing guitar like a-ringin’ a bell and lookin’ like he should.” Ricky understood that in order to be as popular as he was in the past, he has to stay in the past, to give up “Richard” and replace him with “Ricky” again, a bargain he’s not willing to make:
It’s a pretty good song, very personal, about a man who realized that he’s been playing to others expectations just too damned long and has had it.
The thing about being a celeb’s kid is, nepostism will get you one album or one movie, guaranteed; after that, you’re pretty much in the same boat as any other LA type looking for a gig. Tori Spelling got the same breaks as Gwyneth Paltrow, and the Nelson twins (Ricky’s freaky offspring) got the same open door as Hank Williams III.
Rick Nelson was an above-average talent who achieved above-average success. I think he played his hand for exactly what it was worth.