Doin' the Resurrection Shuffle

Let us consider the Pop Resurrection. You know: Tony Bennett on MTV Unplugged, Johnny Cash at the Viper Room, Roy Orbison onstage with Bruce Springsteen and Elvis Costello. Every few months another old guy hangs out with some not-so-old guy and gets on MTV (or at least VH-1), looking for a comeback even if he's really never been gone.

Why does it work? Well, maybe baby boomers are so worried about getting old that they're desperate to find really old people to admire. Maybe a person who has found his inner child is ready to listen to people old enough to be his parents. Maybe folks from a generation other than X don't understand the sullen indifference that passes for artistic statement these days.

Still, not every resurrection takes. A few years back, Jerry Lee Lewis was counting on the movie Great Balls of Fire to restore his stardom. He didn't bargain on the film making it look, in the words of one participant, "as if the Dukes of Hazzard invented rock and roll." The film bombed, Jerry Lee's (terrific) soundtrack album tanked, and the Killer had a run-in with the IRS and headed to Dublin as a tax exile. He returned to the U.S. and started charging people to tour his house (which is a far cry from Graceland, though it's just as tacky). Now he's launched an egocentric 900 number and is planning another comeback.

And this brings us, in a roundabout sort of way, to our case study: Tom Jones. Remember him? It's Not Unusual, Delilah, What's New Pussycat? Big voice, tight pants, Vegas stages littered with thrown panties. A joke, a guilty pleasure, but not a bad singer if you get past the joke and the guilt.

He's now 54. His voice sounds just like it did in 1965. His pants are just as tight as they were then. "I like to compete," he says. "I don't want to make something that is going to be on only middle-of-the-road stations. I want people to go, 'Wow,' rather than go, 'Oh, that was nice.'"

So Tom's doing the Resurrection Shuffle. There are ground rules for this kind of thing.

(1) To the Toppermost of the Poppermost: Obviously, you have to get big before you can come back. Atomic Rooster, for instance, couldn't have a resurrection, because they never were really surrected, if you will, in the first place.

Tom Jones, though, makes the cut. He had 17 Top 40 hits from 1965 to 1971, and five of those were top ten hits. He had a TV show. He made people go, "Wow."

(2) Voyage to the Bottom of the Charts: This is the tricky part. To have a resurrection, you have to have died. You have to be like Tony Bennett, with no record label and an image based mostly on I Left My Heart in San Francisco. Or like Roy Orbison, playing state fairs and oldies shows with pickup bands that would announce his entrance with the theme from Star Trek.

This is the part that's no fun. But a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, and Tom Jones is nothing if not a man. He fell out of favor in the Seventies, then signed with a record label that decided he should make country albums. Five albums, no hits: The road to limbo often runs through Nashville.

(3) The Ritual Humiliation: OK, so your career is dead, or at least on the critical list. Do you really need jerks to point that out?

Yeah, you do.

Insult: "His name is synonymous with soft-porn schlock," noted Rolling Stone Album Guide. "Tom Jones remains a phenomenon of pandering and a marketing triumph."

Injury: the All-Music Guide, 1364 pages of record reviews. Right on the cover, it says, "The experts' guide to the best releases from thousands of artists in all types of music." The book reviews CDs by Bobby Jones, Carmell Jones, Carol Elizabeth Jones, Curtis Jones, David Lynn Jones, Elvin Jones, Etta Jones, Floyd Jones, George Jones, Grace Jones, Grandpa Jones, Hank Jones. Howard Jones, Jesus Jones, Jo Jones, Linda Jones, Little Johnny Jones, Marnie Jones, Marti Jones, Michael Jones, Nic Jones, Oliver Jones, Philly Jo Jones, Quincy Jones, Rickie Lee Jones, Sam Jones, Shirley Jones, Spike Jones and Thad Jones. Also Engelbert Humperdinck. It does not mention Tom Jones.

(4) Live Long and Prosper: This is a simple strategy: Don't die, don't gain too much weight, don't stop singing, don't forget the words. The last part of this strategy has (continued on page 92)Resurrection Shuffle(continued from page 88) worked especially well for Tony Bennett. Frank Sinatra uses a Teleprompter, but Tony doesn't. When we last looked, Tony was singing with k.d. lang and Elvis Costello. Frank was with Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme.

Here's a scene from the strategy, in action. This is in the Seventies, in Las Vegas. Jones goes to a hotel suite to visit Elvis Presley, who'd freely borrowed from Jones' Vegas act. The King is sitting on a motorized exercise bicycle, the kind where the pedals and handlebars move and you're supposed to work with them. Elvis sits back, his feet on the pedals but his hands ignoring the handlebars because he's too busy downing deviled eggs from a silver tray. He looks at Tom. "You exercise every day?" he asks.

"Yeah," says Tom.

"Me too," says Elvis, downing another egg and grinning as he pats his huge stomach. "Gotta keep in shape."

(5) Some of My Best Fans Are Famous: It always helps to have famous admirers, and it isn't as hard as it looks. "The Beatles didn't mean a fucking thing to me," said R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe not long ago. "The Rolling Stones don't mean a fucking thing to me, either. The Monkees and the Banana Splits meant a lot more." The Banana Splits might get reunion ideas from this quote, but we can draw from it a different lesson: If you made records that got played, you had fans. And some of those fans grew up and perhaps became famous and will want to hang out with you to prove that they have enough clout to pal around with their old heroes.

When Beverly Hills 90210 was at the height of its success, Jones got a call from Jason Priestley and Luke Perry. They went to his house, they had dinner and they talked. They told everybody who would take them seriously--which, we're the first to admit, was not a huge number of people--that Tom Jones was very cool. "Everybody was like, 'Don't do that, it's not good for your image," Perry says. "I'm like, 'Shut up, I'm having fun. I'm hanging out with Tom Jones, for God's sake.'"

In certain circles (not all circles, mind you, but a few), this kind of thing made Jones more viable.

(6) The Son Also Manages: If you can't get good help, you can breed it. This doesn't work for everybody: Frank Sinatra does not gain appreciably by having Frank Sinatra Jr. conduct his orchestra, though it does give him somebody to make fun of onstage.

For more than a decade, Tony Bennett has been managed by his son Danny. Danny has spent that time slowly trying, as he says, to "fit the marketing to the artist." Recently, it has started to fit. Smart kid.

Maybe Jones was watching. His current manager is his son, Mark Woodward. "My son is more up on producers and music than I am," he says. "He brought me the Nine Inch Nails album and said, 'Listen to this.' I said, 'Christ, what a great sound.'"

So the son tries to keep the old man current. And the old man tries to keep the son rich.

(7) Just How Cool Are You?: If you've been around for a while but haven't been heard from much lately, here's an ace in the hole: Really cool people tend to endorse stuff that most people think is a joke. Part of being cool is in not caring about being cool, right?

So last year, Sonic Youth, Redd Kross and a bunch of other alternative gods did songs by the masters of wimp-pop, the Carpenters, on the tribute album If I Were a Carpenter. The album was very cool, even if it wasn't very good. "The Carpenters were really great," all the artists insisted, and the rest of the statement went unspoken: "If you don't think so, that's only because you're not as cool as we are."

In the Eighties, INXS started performing It's Not Unusual and What's New Pussycat? This would have been hipper if the band's lead singer weren't dating a supermodel, but it was a start. Then the ultracool Belly recorded It's Not Unusual. This was an important step up.

Later, Dweezil and Ahmet Zappa--Frank's kids, so you know they have smarts and cynicism to burn--delivered a spontaneous homage to Jones on Conan O'Brien's show. Ahmet even did an imitation that was affectionate, funny and dead-on accurate.

Jones also played the Glastonbury Festival in England. Backstage, he was warned about the tough crowd. He came out in front of a field full of punks and grungeheads, and did It's Not Unusual. The crowd went nuts. Somebody held up a sign that said Tom Fucking Jones.

You can't get a much higher endorsement than that.

(8) The Long and Winding Road: Jones' progress falls somewhere between the smooth buildup of Roy Orbison's revival and the on-again, off-again affair that passes for, say, Meat Loaf's career. Jones' obscurity lifted briefly in 1988, when he recorded the Prince song Kiss with the British band Art of Noise. That video got him on MTV.

The subsequent album sold poorly, and three years later Van Morrison called. "I've got this song, and it sounds like a Tom Jones song," said the notoriously cranky and ungenerous Irishman. "You wanna hear it?" Jones recorded the song, Carrying a Torch, and three other new Morrison songs (Morrison produced them). The album went unreleased in the U.S.

In 1992, the movie Singles came out. In a lovemaking scene, the camera pans across a pile of seminal albums on the floor: Hendrix' Are You Experienced?, the Clash's London Calling and Tom Jones Live in Las Vegas.

(9) Hey, Mr. Record Man: So some of the right people remember you. The career has a little heat going again. Now you need a record label with muscle and style. Johnny Cash pulled this off brilliantly: He signed with Def American Records, a label known for hard-rock and rap acts. He released an album called American Recordings. Around the same time, the label changed its name to American Records.

Jones didn't find a label that would rename itself Pussycat Records, but he did all right for himself anyway. After he played a Carnegie Hall benefit with Tina Turner, Bryan Adams and Sting, he remembers, "Bruce Springsteen's manager came up and said, 'Who are you recording for?' And I said, 'Nobody, at the moment.' So he called Jimmy Iovine and said, 'You gotta hear Tom.'"

Iovine is the head of Interscope Records. Its big acts are Snoop Doggy Dogg (7 million albums sold) and Nine Inch Nails (2 million and counting). Interscope has cash and cachet, both of which they gave to Jones.

(10) All My Rowdy Friends Are Comin' Over Tonight: The big comeback album is where friends really come in handy. Tom Waits and Glenn Danzig wrote songs for Cash's album. The songs weren't as good as the tunes Cash had first recorded several decades ago, but the names were nice. In the early Eighties, Gary "U.S." Bonds' Dedication album--his being one of the first modern-era pop resurrections, albeit a short-lived one--was snapped up by Springsteen fans who noticed that the (concluded on page 144)Resurrection Shuffle(continued from page 92) Boss was all over the credits.

Jones stuck to the time-honored way with The Lead and How to Swing It. "We tried to get it into a pocket where kids would dig it," he says. He also tried to give the kids some names they already dug. The album included vocals by Tori Amos and songs produced by Teddy Riley (Michael Jackson, Bobby Brown), Flood (U2, Nine Inch Nails), Jeff Lynne (Tom Petty, Roy Orbison), Trevor Horn (Seal), Richard Perry (Barbra Streisand) and Youth (Crowded House). His pal Sting doesn't appear on the album, but at least his name is in the liner notes.

(11) A Star Is Reborn: "That old image is going away now," insists Jones. "I still get the horny older ladies saying, 'Take off your jacket!' They still want to see the tight pants and the bulge. But the youngsters, they don't do that. There's a lot of people coming to hear me, now."

The album got onto the charts, the video got played, Jones hosted MTV's European Music Awards and everybody saw the album cover, on which a fishnet-shirted Jones clenches his fists and screams while standing in front of a jackhammer-wielding woman who is clad in a hard hat and a gold lamé bikini.

For further confirmation of his rebirth, here's a tale of two concerts. In 1993 Jones performed at L.A.'s Universal Amphitheater, playing to a crowd that ranged from aging women comparing notes on Engelbert to black-clad twenty-somethings. He was terrific, a rocking and ballsy entertainer who smiled when underwear was thrown onstage but who never pandered to the pantie flingers. The Los Angeles Times, which should know better, dismissed Jones as a middle-of-the-road performer who should be singing show tunes.

A year later, Jones performed at Los Angeles' painfully trendy House of Blues, playing to a jammed room of industry insiders and scene makers. The show was wildly inconsistent; Jones seriously bogged down during long stretches. The Los Angeles Times, which still should know better, said the performance was great, thus reflecting the officially changed conventional wisdom on Tom Jones. What a difference a year makes.

Which means that this year may make a difference to a whole new group of old-timers. Oh, sure, there are lots of artists who've been around for decades who still do great work and deserve resurrections: Charlie Rich, Dion, Waylon Jennings, even 900-number impresario Jerry Lee Lewis. But what about other, more unlikely, candidates? Could Pat Boone become a hot property if he were to trade in his white bucks for a pair of white Doc Martens? Would we be surprised if we were to find that, in addition to his Hendrix fixation, Lenny Kravitz is a closet Tony Orlando fan, and is working on an Orlando album called The New Dawn? If the two remaining members of Nirvana offered to back Perry Como, would he jump at the chance? Where's Sandra Dee, and shouldn't Madonna be looking for her?

Just asking. By the way, if Elvis comes back, we'll need to come up with a new name for this phenomenon. Pop Resurrection won't cut it anymore, at least not for those other guys.

"The Beatles didn't mean a fucking thing to me," said Michael Stipe. "The Monkees meant a lot more."