There were ten very bad years, with a turbulent time before and periods of hard uncertainty after. Don Everly is 49 now, and he says, "I'd love to snip those years out of my life. Re-edit my life, rearrange it if I could, reassemble my life like a film. I'd like to put those ten years on another planet."
His brother Phil, two years younger, softens the focus just a touch and sharpens the perspective. "We needed the distance to grow, Don," he reminds him. "That was a positive period when the seeds were planted. We're reaping the harvest of it now."
Don has to think on that a little. "We needed to be apart," he says finally. "At least we got it over with. We had five really good years, and the ones after that weren't so bad. Probably made better people of us. We didn't suffer any brain damage. We didn't die."
They came close enough, though, and for a long time one of the seminal forces in all of rock lay dormant. The Everly Brothers, who matched the lofting harmonies of mountain music to the uptown soul of rhythm and blues, sang with a single heart. Their hits -- like Bye Bye Love, Wake Up Little Susie, Bird Dog -- were history everyone could hum. But rock changed when the British hit in the early '60s, and the Everlys had a tough time hanging on, to their success and each other. "Rock 'n' roll was an American invention," Phil says, "but in the '60s a tremendous amount of American talent pumped gas." You could hear heavy traces and fond tributes to the Everlys in the Beatles, in Simon and Garfunkel, in the Eagles, but respect keeps no one on the rock charts. The Everlys were working the oldies circuit in 1973 when Phil walked offstage, smashed his guitar and didn't go back. Don soloed the next night and told the audience, "The Everly Brothers died ten years ago."
For the next decade the brothers would talk, says Phil, "only during family crises." Finally, in 1982, Don picked up the phone to resolve their own crisis. "It was like I'd talked to him yesterday," Phil says. They had lunch, got drunk, and within ten months were singing at their reunion concert in London. There was a subsequent record of the concert as well as a companion television special. PBS did a documentary history of the brothers, and the pair released EB '84, an album that brought them smartly up to date. Perhaps because their rift had been so long and so deep, or maybe just because rock exists in a state of perpetual flux, the reunion had a tentative, tenuous quality, as if the brothers were not only testing audiences but trying each other on for size. No small part of the emotional weight of their new album Born Yesterday comes from the sense that matters have been settled. The Everlys are back. They are back to stay. Back, and as good as ever. And rock ( 'n' roll just doesn't get better than that.