Meet the Hippies… the Teenyboppers with their too-tight capris… and the Pot-Partygoers – out for a new thrill… a new kick!
Poster blurb for Riot On Sunset Strip, a sixties exploitation movie featuring LA band the Standells
Since settling in Los Angeles, Scott Engel had found a near-constant companion in his best friend John Stewart. To some extent John was a kind of doppelganger: young, good-looking; literate and artistic, with an interest in the performing arts; aloof but not quite too cool for school.
He also shared Scott’s precociously cynical view of the local entertainment scene – though he wasn’t above looking for the main chance, if there was one to be found.
It was later claimed that young Engel was accompanying his pal Stewart when they attended an audition for bit-part players on a TV show, Playhouse 90. It was here, in 1960, that Scott would first encounter another significant figure in his life – a rangy blond beach-boy type named John Maus, who’d won a gig as an extra in the TV play.
Maus was also a local musician with Teutonic roots, like Scott. Before appearing on camera, he was killing time and calming his nerves by strumming his guitar. It may have been the similarities between them that caused a near-clash, the anti-magnetic repulsion of two people close enough in time and place to feel the need to outdo each other.
“He asked me if he could play something too and did some uptempo rock song,” John Maus later recalled of his first meeting with Scott Engel. “I thought he was posing a bit too much and taking himself a bit too seriously, generally overdoing the cool-kid act.”
They took their leave with the detachment of two young men who’d just entered into a who-can-piss-furthest contest, without quite knowing why.
This ‘other John’ was irked by the Engel kid, who’d boasted of knowing more guitar chords than his new acquaintance. As a guitarist, however, Scott’s activities remained strictly on the hobby level. As a bassist, he’d find a small niche on the local music scene with the instrumental groups flowering in the wake of non-singing (or rarely singing) guitarists like Duane Eddy and Link Wray. Surf rock had not yet found its wave, but the riffing dance bands Scott occasionally performed with paved the way for the likes of The Surfaris.
Maus was no slouch in that department either. He was proficient enough to give guitar lessons to his friend Carl Wilson, who’d soon form a band called The Beach Boys with his brothers Brian and Dennis. (The latter also buddied up with John over a shared love of the hot-rod and beach-bum lifestyle.)
It was to be another couple of years before the two young Californians met again. By 1962, all of Scott’s tentative steps toward becoming a crooning star had been put behind him, in favour of laying down a solid bass rhythm on the Hollywood band scene. Although he’d cut his last vocal tracks that same year, it seems to have been viewed by him as something from his past – something he’d never seriously intended.
John Maus had no such misgivings. He continued to play guitar and sing wherever there was an opportunity – though the early sixties vogue for girl groups led to his photogenic sister Judy taking over vocals. Originally a duo, in the summer of ‘62 John & Judy expanded into a full band line-up.
“We changed our name to Judy & The Gents,” recalled John, “and had this residency at this coffee-house called Pandora’s Box every Sunday night. The Beach Boys played on Fridays and Saturdays, and on Sundays, we’d be supported by a guest recording act…
“One night, later in 1962, the guest group at Pandora’s Box were The Routers, a surf band who had a hit called ‘Let’s Go’. The bass player was Scott Engel.”
The Routers were, like their contemporaries The Ventures, more of a musical franchise than a fulltime band. With pickup members who could work the studio or the clubs, there was no permanent line-up. For this reason, it’s still a moot point to some pop-music historians as to whether the bassist on their rudimentary cheerleader chant (bah-bah, bah-bah-bah, bah-bah-bah-bah, “Let‘s go!“1) was actually Scott rather than some other session man.
There is no doubt that the ex-crooner was then cutting out a new life for himself on the Hollywood music scene. He also claimed credit for the bass on Sandy Nelson’s instrumental 45 ‘Let There Be Drums’ – a far superior piece to The Routers’, anchored by a heavy bass riff as drummer Nelson scattered himself over the tomtoms and hi-hats. Scott and John Stewart (on guitar and occasional vocals) were playing backing gigs for Phil Spector-produced artists like Ike and Tina Turner and (more significantly) The Righteous Brothers, as well as cutting occasional instrumental tracks under a variety of names including The Moongooners, The Newporters and, a little later, The Dalton Brothers. Scott even did gofer work for wunderkind Spector at his Gold Star Studios and drove a van for Liberty Records, his former record label.
But all this disparate activity wasn’t enough to keep a boy occupied. “The next day Scott asked if he could join my band as a bass player,” John Maus recalled the aftermath of the Routers gig. “I wasn’t happy with either my bass player or drummer at the time, so the deal was for Scott to find a good drummer then they would both be hired. He found a guy named Spider Webb, a flamboyant drummer reminiscent of Gene Krupa, one of the best in LA at the time.”
Judy & The Gents soon procured bookings at the Kismet, one of downtown LA’s most ‘in’ nightclubs. John remained the lead singer, but sister Judy stepped forward to sing and dance as their ‘Twist girl’. Maus also encouraged his new bandmate to sing backing vocals to his sister and harmonies with himself, although “he seemed to have a hang-up about singing”. In 1963, being a vocalist seemed to be all in the past for Scott Engel. He was now a working musician for a gigging rock’n’roll band.
Around this time, Hollywood photographer John Reed took publicity photos of Judy & The Gents which showed the young Engel with a goatee beard. This may have had an ulterior purpose. “Scott and I were both 20 – a year shy of the legal age to be in a club,” acknowledged Maus. Due to the USA’s puritanical licensing laws, both risked arrest by developing a taste for drinking hard spirits below the age of 21. As John also noted, Scott “had a decent phoney draft card” to ensure he got served. The eventual arrival of his genuine draft card would prove rather more problematic.
In the summer of 1963, Maus also joined Engel on the surf instrumental scene when they formed a pickup band to capitalise on the massive singles hit ‘Wipeout’ by The Surfaris. As The Surfaris were every bit as amorphous a grouping as The Routers, the foursome could pretend to be the real McCoy and fill a string of dates (apparently fraudulently) in the Midwest. It would be the last tour Engel would undertake for some time.
Maus found his new sidekick less interested in rehearsing with the group than with continuing his art studies. Gary Leeds, who was yet to show up on Scott’s radar, later noted how he “had a natural ability to draw what he saw; he did portraits of Ray Charles and other famous people that looked just like photographs, but he was never satisfied and would always change them or throw them in the trash.”
Any gigs outside of Hollywood – even in LA County – were treated as an unwelcome distraction and avoided where possible. It would not be the last time his distaste for the touring routine was made manifest.
The young Engel remained something of a rock’n’roll dilettante, however. Rather than commit to one band, he continued to record intermittently with Stewart. The following year, 1963, saw them cut an original single with the small independent Martay label. For their song, they went to a mercurial young Texan who had come to LA to make a splash in the record industry.
Of the dozen or more songs they listened to by Jim Smith, it was ‘I Only Came To Dance With You’ which won their favour. Smith, a charismatic showman who, under the name P.J. Proby, would later come on like a rougher hewn Elvis, was not yet a star – like Scott Engel himself, he was an American performer whose period of stardom would be a strictly British phenomenon.
Scott first tested out the song on his new bandmate, ‘the other John’. Its twin Stewart/Engel harmonies still stand up today as one of the more atmospheric teen ballads of the early sixties, blown along on a burst of mariachi trumpet that Proby’s musical memory exported from the Tex-Mex border. Maus would later claim Engel never revealed who was behind the track he played, crediting it to The Dalton Brothers – named after the Wild West lawmen-turned-outlaws. “I told him it was OK, and no big deal, which it wasn’t,” said John.
His bandmate took it on the chin and kept his counsel to himself. The record would not see wide release till three years later – by which point the Engel-Maus musical alliance would be well established. It became the title track of a Dalton Brothers album which, when issued by Capitol Records’ Tower subsidiary in 1966,2 featured mostly instrumentals of unknown origin – and the single’s B-side, ‘Without Your Love’, a heartbroken Everly Brothers-type ballad with a heavy Western-style bass. One other notable exception is a surf-rock instrumental called ‘Devil Surfer’3 which, when first issued by Martay in 1963, appears to have been the final single credited to one-time family entertainer Scott Engel.
To their peers of the time, it must have looked as though the Engel-Stewart musical partnership would endure – whether they made the leap to pro songwriters/record producers or else just faded into obscurity. Production credits for this period include 1962’s ‘Jump Down’ c/w ‘Wish You Were Here’ by a band called Chosen Few – the B-side of which sounds as if its la-la backing was pastiched by Elton John on ‘Crocodile Rock’ a decade later. 1963’s ‘Have I Lost My Touch?’ c/w ‘Tell Me In The Sunlight’ by Margie Day resembled a WASP-ish take on Spector’s work with The Ronettes, the semi-cinematic production credited to ‘Alec Noel’ (Stewart’s middle name/Engel’s forename).
Despite this welter of activity, 20-year-old Scott Engel maintained a distinctly un-rock’n’roll demeanour. “Scott never displayed any wild behaviour,” a mature John Maus would acknowledge. “He was a quiet, laid back, normal guy with a good sense of humour. He didn’t seek attention, or garner any extra attention either… He liked foreign films, and listened to classical and jazz music. Aside from John Stewart, I never met or heard of any other friends he had. He was quite a private person.”
The show at which the ‘Walker’ stage name first appeared was on November 30, 1963 at the Trolley-Ho! club. This was the debut of The Walker Family – the ‘family name’ taken from the pseudonym John derived from his mother’s maiden name, irritated by how his surname Maus (which the family pronounced ‘Moss’) was spoken in a way that make him sound like Uncle Walt’s creation Mickey. From the get-go, it was accepted by an audience who took it as read that fair-skinned/fair-haired John, Judy and Scott were all related.
One of their regular gigs was the Come To The Party club – later to become the celebrated Whisky A Go Go – on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. P.J. Proby (then trading under the brash moniker Jet Powers) would join them there for drinking sessions, where ingénue boozers Scott and John got their palates used to rum and Coke, or vodka and 7-Up.
Then The Walker Family went on apparently permanent hiatus for a few months. The strong-willed Judy, finding her ambitions stifled, decamped to be a singer/dancer with a band working in Las Vegas. It looked like everyone would just go their separate ways, but the LA band scene was a small solar system. John eventually found his personal trajectory colliding with Scott’s orbit.
“In early 1964, I got a call from Donnie Brooks,” recalled John, “who asked me to play guitar for him at an audition at a hotel on the Strip. I asked him about the line-up and he told me that Scott Engel was on bass.”
Brooks was a young be-suited Mr Showbiz type on the scene, performing white-boy retreads of the Twist and R&B standards like Ray Charles’ ‘What’d I Say’. Donnie and Scott would not remain best of friends, but John was happy enough to be back working with his bandmate – who, he noted, was taking a more musicianly approach to his bass amp equipment than in his surf rock days.
“Donnie was hired permanently for the gig – he was the headliner and we were his backing group,” confirmed John. “We also played our own sets, six nights a week for two weeks, with Al ‘Tiny’ Schneider as our new drummer.”
The former Walker Family members now formed the nucleus of The Walker Brothers Trio. With their classic smart-casual look of black polo-neck sweaters, black blazers and black boots, ‘John Walker’ and ‘Scott Walker’ were yet to transform into the handsome androgynes with tumbledown moptops inspired by The Beatles.4
With a vigour born of his hard-working family’s healthy hunger for the dollar, John naturally fell into the role of band leader and business negotiator. “Donnie Brooks called to ask if he could bring in some club owners so he could audition for them, using us as his backup band,” he’d later recall. “It was lucky for us that one of the club owners was Bill Gazzarri.”
As the owner of Gazzarri’s nightclub on La Cienega Boulevard, the Italianate entrepreneur would be one of the accidental overseers of the sixties rock explosion. As the decade evolved, The Byrds, The Doors and Buffalo Springfield would all play early gigs in the club – as would the original Walker Brothers.5
“It only really started getting serious when I sang with The Walker Brothers,” Scott now acknowledges. “Nights when John couldn’t sing, I would sing at the clubs, because I was the bass player. So we started to work sessions and I think I’ve said this before, but if I hadn’t have been a singer I would have probably been a session musician by now.”
It seems a wistful notion, perhaps reflecting on a life that might have been lived away from the madness of the spotlight. But it echoes with the emptiness of unrealised ideas and unfulfilled projects. Whatever the intensity of what was to follow, this would not be the case.
The Walker Brothers was now a band with two singers – neither taking a fulltime role as lead, each adapting to the same R&B tunes or pop hits of the day as the occasion required. As John defined it, “We would alternate harmonies, depending on who was more comfortable doing the lead part. I usually sang the rock stuff because I’ve got a scratchier voice. Scott sang the ballads.”
John and genial bruiser Tiny were often unnerved by how Scott would go on a walkabout in the 15-minute break between their two sets, but could always drag him back to the stage – even if it meant starting the next set without him. His idiosyncratic approach to timekeeping would follow John throughout the Walkers’ career.
The Walker Brothers Trio was a danceable hit at Gazzarri’s. For the first time since his fifties tours of civic centres and TV studios, Scott Engel was at the centre of something that was becoming a palpable success.
“This was the beginning of the disco[theque] era, so the places in Hollywood were very, very packed all the time,” he reminisces. “They were packed seven nights a week. People were queuing round the block, especially at the weekends, to get in. And I mean big movie stars, Lana Turner and all these people, would come in. So you had that kind of thing every night, it was fantastic. It was an incredible scene, there were four big clubs at that time and they were all just really jamming. We’re talking about the Whisky A Go Go, that had just opened on the Strip, we used to alternate and play there on weekends. It was a great time.”
And yet Scott’s closest bandmate – who’d now called him a friend for over a year – found it hard to get close to him on a personal level. “Scott never got into discussing his personal relationships or girlfriends,” reflected John. “I know there was a waitress at Gazzarri’s named Ann who fancied him, and that they became a quiet item. Aside from commenting about some attractive woman we’d all seen, he kept his thoughts about the ladies to himself.”
Gary Leeds agrees. “Scott never discussed his private life with me. I think he had one or two girlfriends, but I can’t remember their names. One was also going with… Donnie Brooks; I think she was cheating on him with Scott.”
It may be apt that he kept the secrets of the heart so tightly locked up inside. In the years that followed, Scott Walker as a singer would become synonymous with the insanity and drama of the experience commonly known as love. His flair for the dramatic might never have been so pronounced if personal attraction and sex had been merely casual matters.
The Walkers would soon become regular performers on US TV, initially in January 1964 on local TV pop show 9th Street A Go-Go – which would soon be retitled as the less parochial Hollywood A Go-Go. On their first TV appearance, the two white Californians sang the negro-spiritual derived ‘Cotton Fields’, with John strumming acoustic guitar and taking lead vocal. It was the start of a regular residency, performing three songs a show (sometimes in truncated versions) while playing Gazzarri’s five nights a week, where the dancers also featured onscreen.
“Later in 1964, Nik Venet came to see us at Gazzarri’s,” said John. “Nik was an A&R man at Mercury Records; he had a lot of clout and expressed an interest in signing Scott and me… At the time, there were so many phoneys coming in the club each night, and they were always offering us deals, so we disregarded his advances and didn’t take him seriously.”
After negotiations between Venet and the patriarchal Gazzarri, whose wife was doing her best to beef up slender Engel with pasta, the gently Mafioso-like club owner convinced them to sign. The Walker Brothers were now a Mercury recording duo – John and Scott only, contracted as vocalists but not as musicians, “which was fine with us at the time as we both considered ourselves singers who played instruments, and not the other way around,” John later explained. “Tiny seemed pleased for both of us…”6
With staged photographic portraits of the two singers, Mercury seemed set on promoting them as a more photogenic counterpart to The Righteous Brothers. While there was never any disputing the fact that the ‘Brothers’ were in fact two unrelated boys named Maus and Engel, there was still an aesthetic uniformity to Scott and John that just wasn’t there with the totally dissimilar Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield.
As with virtually all of the Walkers’ repertoire at the time, the first single selected by the record label for release was a cover version. ‘Pretty Girls Everywhere’ had been a 1958 hit for Eugene Church, a simple pop celebration of boys cruising for chicks. (“If I make it to the show… / Even at the rodeo they come on horses.”) With a vaguely flamenco-ish backing and parping sixties brass replacing the original call-and-response vocals, it’s sung as a duet where it’s difficult to distinguish John’s voice from Scott’s or vice versa.
Surviving footage from the TV show Shindig shows them in suits and ties with button-down collars, their hair still quiffed, miming unconvincingly without mikes or leads as Scott follows John around a bevy of conventional sixties chicks, looking vaguely embarrassed. They were not yet The Walker Brothers that would go down in pop history, either visually or musically.
The B-side, ‘Doin’ The Jerk’, is remarkable only in that it’s the first Walker Brothers songwriting credit of Scott Engel. Beyond that, it’s akin to finding that, say, as compelling a performer as Lou Reed started out as a record company songwriter by writing about a silly (and in his case imaginary) dance craze.7 The Jerk was another parochial five-minute fad, and The Walker Brothers secured a slot in a teen movie called Beach Ball (one of many cashins on successful teen-exploitation movie Beach Party) to tell the world all about it – alongside, rather impressively, The Righteous Brothers, The Supremes and The Four Seasons. Otherwise it was as per the A-side – thin but blaring brass and vocal harmonies that could have been either singer. “There’s a new dance, the hippies call it the Jerk,” sang Scott and John – referring to beach party hipsters, rather than the psychedelic pseudo-beats who would soon arrive in California.
(Scott would never be quite so tolerant of them.)
Shindig was the US brainchild of British pop TV producer Jack Good, who had a hit show at home with Oh Boy! The toothsome, blonder-than-blond Walkers became intermittent regulars. On the third show they gave a creditable account of Larry Williams’ R&B number ‘Slow Down’ – as recently covered by The Beatles.8 On the same edition they covered Brit band Manfred Mann’s catchy but irritating ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy’. The musical agenda was, by 1964, being set by English beat groups and the so-called ‘British invasion’. In an audacious act of cultural appropriation, bands from the northwest and southeast of England were re-exporting rhythm and blues to the USA – which, given the white-bread nature of so much early sixties pop, must have sounded like an authentically foreign phenomenon to many young American ears.
Shindig also marked the first exposure of The Walker Brothers in the US national media, when they were photographed on set. “I remember when Scott walked into Gazzarri’s around nine o’clock one night,” recalled John, “with the magazine rolled up in his hand, asking me if I had seen the latest Newsweek, to which I said no, and he proudly showed me the photo.” Fame was not yet anathema to one half of the Walker Brothers duo – but at that stage it was only of the most ephemeral kind.
The Walkers also started copping their sartorial licks from the Brits. Among the second wave of British invaders (after The Beatles) were The Rolling Stones, the epitome of white boys singing the blues. As new habitués of Gazzarri’s, the surly suburban Brits, with long fringes that met their eyebrows and ass-freezer jackets, made John and Scott’s rock’n’roll hairstyles look very old-fashioned. The former responded by growing his hair out; his bassist partner went the whole nine yards, restyling his hair in an approximation of the look Astrid Kirchherr developed for The Beatles in Hamburg.
As with any decade, the early sixties were really the tail end of the era that preceded them. It was still seen as subversive – if not all-out ‘faggy’ – for Scott and John to walk down a Hollywood street with silky hair gravitating towards their shoulders. “Guys would whistle at us, and folks very likely questioned our sexual orientation,” acknowledged John. “We just blew it off, but I guess we were each a little too chicken to face the stares and flak alone, so we always went in together for moral support.”
In late 1964, the Walkers also made the closer acquaintance of a fellow Sunset Strip anglophile. Gary Leeds was the drummer of The Standells, an LA beat band whose name was reputedly derived from standing around waiting for club bookings. The Standells would write their own footnote to pop-music history with ‘Dirty Water’, a 1966 white-boy R&B single inspired by the Stones.9
But that was still in the future, when Gary had long since vacated the drum seat. For now, the goofy guy with the dark Beatle haircut and Chelsea boots was more interested in networking at Gazzarri’s and getting to know The Walker Brothers – both of whom were distant acquaintances of his from the LA scene. It wouldn’t take long for him to become best of friends with both – including the usually reticent Scott.
“I was always friendly with Gary because he has a great sense of humour,” Scott later confirmed, comparing his zaniness to the idiotsavant humour of Jerry Lewis. John claimed that Gary was known to have donned one of the popular Don Post monster masks of the time, springing out on unsuspecting ‘victims’ in the Hollywood Hills dressed as the Wolfman.
“Gary was playing with a group called The Standells at the Peppermint Lounge,” Scott recalls, “and [he] decided I guess to come to England with P.J. Proby. It was a big mistake evidently, because he came back.”
Gary Leeds left The Standells to drum for Proby (who had now adopted his latest stage alias fulltime), following him to England for a support slot on a Beatles special directed by Oh Boy!/Shindig producer Jack Good. It was an eye-opening experience.
It was the start of a period of British stardom for Proby, the Elvis-alike who infused standard tunes like ‘Hold Me’ with a manic zest and Beatlesque undertones to suit his newly adopted market.10 New drummer Leeds was a firsthand witness to P.J.’s insatiable appetite for girls and booze: “P.J. and I moved into a mews house owned by Shirley Bassey, a stone’s throw from the Royal Albert Hall. P.J. threw a few parties at this house, and they would sometimes last all night long. When I came downstairs in the morning, I would not be surprised to find a couple of girls passed out on the floor with hardly any clothes on, empty beer bottles everywhere, cigarettes, panties and bras strewn all over the floor.”
Ultimately, Gary would be unable to play onstage for Proby, citing problems with work permits and Musicians Union rules. Proby, for his part, claims the genial Leeds had hoodwinked him as to how well he could actually play the drums. In any case, before the end of 1964 Gary was back home in California.
“But he’d been over here11 and he’d seen the scene,” testifies Scott, “he knew what was going on, so he came over to see us one night and he said, ‘Would you be interested in going?’, because he had a financier. So I said, ‘Of course.’”
The ‘financier’ was actually Gary’s generous stepfather, who was prepared to fund the Walkers to the tune of $5,000, with supplements up to a total of $10,000. (No small amount of money in the mid-sixties.) The corresponding condition was that Gary would replace the hapless Tiny on drums.
“I approached Scott and John, laid out the deal, and left it with them,” confirms Gary. “Scott really did want to take up the offer, because he loved Europe, its films, its culture and everything about it…
“There were also a lot of meetings with all the parents. When we finally made up our minds to go to England, Scott’s mother, Betty, wasn’t too happy.”
“Scott and I lapped up every detail as we had been considering going to Britain to check out English groups,” elaborated John. “Scott and I thought British music was very cool, and started using the top UK songs in our sets. The audiences loved them too, regularly requesting Rolling Stones and Beatles hits.”
In fact one of their final Shindig appearances, dated January 20, 1965, featured Scott and John singing an uptempo truncation of The Beatles’ ‘I’m A Loser’, John Lennon’s sulkily defiant lost-love song.
At the same time, The Walker Brothers had no counterpart UK contract to match their US deal with Mercury, nor did they have any contacts in the UK music industry. As Maus attested, to him and Engel the visit was to be strictly exploratory.
“On February 16, 1965, the day before we left for England,” said John, “we finished up recording our second single, ‘Love Her’, at RCA studios; it was backed with ‘Theme From The Seventh Dawn‘. Again it was Nik Venet who chose the songs. ‘The Seventh Dawn’ was originally meant to be the A-side, but ‘Love Her’ was chosen because Nik decided it was the more commercial of the two.”
The arranger chosen by Venet was Jack Nitzsche, due to his fundamental role in creating the Spector ‘Wall of Sound’. As Engel commented in the mid-sixties, his brief seemed to be to create an aural environment that might both resemble and outstrip The Righteous Brothers.
“In fact I wasn’t the lead vocal with [The Walker Brothers],” Scott acknowledges of this pivotal moment, “John was the lead vocalist, but there was this ballad they wanted to do called ‘Love Her’. And so they switched it around because they had to go with the guy with the lowest voice. So it was kind of accidental.”
Gary Leeds claims to have suggested the choice of Brill Building songwriters Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil’s ‘Love Her’,12 formerly the B-side of The Everly Brothers’ ‘The Girl Sang The Blues’. Mann and Weil had composed ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ for Spector/The Righteous Brothers and the idea was clearly to emulate that track for its emotional drama. But what came out was an exercise in understatement.
“When Nik said, ‘I’ll have Scott sing solo with the bass,’ Scott was terrified,” John later recollected. “He was looking at me as if to say, ‘Don’t make me do this, it’s not working. Don’t leave me out here.’… But I knew it was working.”
Whereas Don and Phil Everly’s trademark harmonies had suggested brotherly support and a hand around the shoulder in this lyric of lost love and regret, Scott’s voice reverberates alone in the finely balanced mix of orchestra and rhythm guitar, like a stray planetoid of solitude. As he moodily instructs his girl’s new lover to “love her like I couldn’t do”, John’s high-pitched backing shadows him as if several light years away while still managing to underline the emotion.
This is the point in time and aural space when the Walker Brothers’ sound was truly born.
Gary Leeds, by then still only a theoretical member of the Walkers, was present at RCA Studios for the recording – which directly followed The Rolling Stones cutting ‘The Last Time’, also with Nitzsche. “Scott asked me if I knew that this was also where Elvis recorded; I was very impressed. Scott had a voice more in the vein of Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett, smooth and mellow and deep. John’s was a little higher, gravelly, and ideally suited to rock’n’roll.”
Nitzsche utilised the same 38-piece orchestra that he’d used for Spector’s records, overdubbing the players until they all came together in two and a half minutes of tuneful mournfulness. For all that, he was underwhelmed by the performance, describing Scott’s vocal style as “too white” and praising instead the version by demo singer Freddie Scott.
On the flip side, ‘The Seventh Dawn’ crystallised that fading point of the late fifties/early sixties when Hollywood themes always dripped with sentimentality – even if set during a violent crisis like the Malayan war, as with this martial love story.13 Singing a lyric by Broadway songwriter Paul Francis Webster, Scott and John’s vocals are stereophonically separate but so sweetly close in tone as to be indistinguishable.
The sugary string arrangement would have made Family Favourites fare on either side of the Atlantic, harking back to Scott’s discarded crooning days as a teenager. (It truly was ‘white music’.) But Nik Venet’s decision to flip ‘The Seventh Dawn’ had made the Walkers take a more interesting turn.
When Scott Engel and John Maus flew to London with Gary Leeds, on February 17, 1965, the former was one step ahead of being drafted into the intensifying Vietnamese war. He later also alluded to relief at leaving what he saw as an increasingly brutal and philistine American culture behind.
Not everyone was as thrilled, however.
Several years later, Scott’s mother, ‘Mrs Betty’, was interviewed on the subject by the Japanese fanzine Scott Times:
How did she think about it when he told her?
“I doubted my senses for a moment… and also I wondered about him leaving [art] school.”
How did he tell you about it?
“He said that he had a chance to go to England and that he would like me to let him go there. And he said that I must not worry about him as he would come back after six weeks. But he won’t come back yet after six years.”
If it now seems remarkable for a 22-year-old man to be seeking permission to travel abroad from his mother, bear in mind that Betty Engel also extended a maternal hand towards John and Gary. She addressed a letter to all three young men, which the Japanese quaintly translated as follows:
“If you’re having troubles come to us. Your parents and I will wait for you but Scott gets along alone. So please help each other… but if you cannot do anything at all, please come back to us.”
1 The chant-style rhythm predated the English soccer chants that soon became commonplace across the Atlantic. Once Scott crossed the ocean, he may have found something oddly familiar in the football crowd noise that sometimes jangled his nerves: duh-duh, duh-duh-duh, duh-duh-duh-duh, “Chel-sea!”
2 Credited on the cover to ‘John Stewart and Scott Engel, Original Members of The Walker Brothers’. This seemingly catchpenny ‘error’ was compounded by a cover portrait of a grinning Scott and pensive John, their similar brown hair (Scott does not appear blond in the least) underlining the suggestion of them as siblings. It also lends credence to sixties buff journalists who see Stewart as a kind of silent ‘fourth Brother’.
3 ‘Devil Surfer’ contains the controlled trebly hysteria of the best surf instrumentals – verging on the cinematic quality that, much later, led Quentin Tarantino to compare Dick Dale (composer of ‘Misirlou’, the Pulp Fiction theme) with Ennio Morricone.
4 The ‘Brothers” hair was growing long – though they still had the brushed-back semi-quiffs, as styled by trendy Hollywood hairdresser Jay Sebring. A photo from this time has them looking like grown-up versions of the spooky blond kids in 1960 movie Village Of The Damned.
5 After a move to Sunset Boulevard, Gazzarri’s would also be instrumental in the late seventies launch of heavy metal band Van Halen – followed by a decade as epicentre of the cheesy LA glam/’hair metal’ scene.
6 Tiny Schneider may have demurred. “I just wasn’t asked,” he was later quoted as saying. “I guess they knew which way it was going… They just didn’t say anything.”
7 ‘The Ostrich’, for Pickwick Records.
8 In 1977, sixties beat band revivalists The Jam also featured ‘Slow Down’ on their debut album.
9 Written by producer Ed Cobb, ‘Dirty Water’ featured a dirty Farfisa organ riff by keyboard player Larry Tamblyn, brother of actor Russ (West Side Story) Tamblyn. It attained minor classic status with its inclusion on Nuggets – Lenny Kaye’s compilation of sixties US ‘punk rock’ and would become a staple in the live sets of seventies R&B revival bands (‘pub rock’, as it became known in the UK).
10 Proby’s mid-sixties period of stardom also encompassed two show tunes from West Side Story, before a steady decline in popularity. The beginning of the end was first flagged by the incident that brought him notoriety – splitting his trousers onstage in Croydon, in the same month that The Walker Brothers came to England. (Some cynics suggested the apparent accident was staged.) He later headed off into obscurity and alcoholism, before being rescued by stage roles as Roy Orbison and Elvis, taking the latter role at age 58 – 16 years older than Presley at the time of his death. Between the latter two periods, his reputation was kept afloat in the eighties by maverick Manchester publishers Savoy Books, who recruited him to sing lead on an admirably intense series of cover versions ranging from Phil Collins’ ‘In The Air Tonight’ to Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’. Few former sixties pop stars have had such a singularly strange career – except perhaps for Scott Walker.
11 Scott uses the term ‘over here’ to describe the UK, after more than four decades of voluntary exile.
12 Scott asserted it was the selection of Jack Nitzsche – although the arranger had a strangely dismissive attitude toward the recording. As a close associate of the Stones in the sixties (to the extent that he contributed to the mixed score for Mick Jagger in classic cult movie Performance), he seemed to adopt a similar inverted snobbery to Keith Richards in not listening to ‘white music’.
13 The original version of the theme was performed by The Lettermen. Its cover version by The Walker Brothers marked the first of a number of cinematic themes sung by Scott Walker, whether in original or covered form.