Go Slow by Michael Owen

Author:Michael Owen
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2017-03-16T04:00:00+00:00

It didn’t take long for Julie to move to advertising a new—complimentary—product following the loss of the lucrative Marlboro contract. A pair of sexy print advertisements for Smirnoff vodka appeared in magazines and newspapers throughout the United States in the spring and summer of 1964. The promotion for screwdrivers (vodka and orange juice) worked on lot of Americans, including Julie, who made it her new drink of choice.

The rest of the year saw Julie and Bobby hopping back and forth from California through Texas, Indiana, Illinois, and Canada for a series of short dates, usually billed as the New Julie London Show, which took them through early December. “We mostly just worked with a quartet [on] those college tours,” remembered Don Bagley. “We just used what we had: a trumpet and rhythm section, because [for] Julie, the guitar was her main thing. As long as she had Johnny Gray or somebody equally as good an accompanist, that was her style, and we could do a whole show with that.”

Like many American parents in the early 1960s, Julie and Bobby found themselves frustrated by the music their children loved. Stacy and Lisa Webb, now fourteen and eleven years old, respectively, hounded them for money to buy records by the Beatles and plastered their bedroom walls with pictures of the Fab Four. Yet while Bobby recoiled from the music that was relegating his songs to the oldies, Julie was more sanguine. “As long as there are good things like ‘[I Left My Heart in] San Francisco’ and people like Tony Bennett, Sinatra, and Peggy Lee to sing them,” there was still good music to be found.

Few people could push Julie London around. As the recording industry turned away from the Great American Songbook, she fought to keep her standards high—chart success be damned. Yet the demands of the market were not easy to ignore, and the battle was not always winnable. In December 1964 Liberty released “You’re Free to Go,” Julie’s remake of a 1955 hit by country singer Carl Smith, as her newest single. It was the first example of the label’s A&R men trying to fit Julie into the increasingly mainstream country music genre. Taken from a session done at RCA Studios in Hollywood two months earlier with arranger Richard Wess, best known for his work with vocalist Bobby Darin, Julie sounds bored, as she does on the B-side, “We Proved Them Wrong,” another bland Brill Building pop tune, probably a leftover from one of her many sessions with Snuff Garrett and Ernie Freeman. The pairing flopped.

Country music, unless it was done by Ray Charles, held no interest for Julie. This didn’t prevent a second attempt. A year after the release of “You’re Free to Go,” Don Bagley and the Nashville-based rock’n’roll and country producer/arranger Bill Justis (“Raunchy”) were hired to put together an entire album of country songs for Julie. On the evening of December 16, 1965, Julie London arrived at RCA Studios on Sunset Boulevard to hear the playback of the tracks Bill Justis had already laid down.

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