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Born Yesterday, produced by Dave Edmunds with canny affection, contains some spectacular versions of material as various as Bob Dylan's classic Abandoned Love and the mid-'70s oldie Arms of Mary, a sexual reminiscence that the brothers convert into a reverie of distant innocence and immediate longing. The album's standout is the title track, written by Don, a song of romantic loss and spiritual devastation that has at least a decade's worth of pain packed tight beneath its terse lyrics. Don, who uses the Random House Dictionary and a thesaurus when he writes, expresses grateful surprise when he is complimented on the song but agrees, after a while, "I guess that's life experience I'm writing from now. Born Yesterday took me three to four years to write." "That song," says his brother, "points out that we're all like children. Do any of us really grow up?"
The Everlys were born in Kentucky, where Father Ike was, in the words of his younger son, "a truly unrecognized genius. He taught us everything we know, how to play and how to sing." (One of the greatest of all Everly records is Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, a 1958 album of country songs that shows the brothers may have strayed from tradition but always stayed close to their roots.) Phil and Don were both still in their teens when they hit big in 1957 with Bye Bye Love, and the hot singles and concert tours that followed for the next five years bought them a piece of pop immortality that was recently reconfirmed when they were among the first ten acts to be voted into rock's new hall of fame. When it was happening, though, all that history took on a kind of centrifugal force that spun the brothers around and, eventually, tipped them off balance.
They had developed a heavy dependency on speed from revved-up "vitamin shots" they had started to take in the '60s. Don's problem was particularly severe, and the brothers, starting to stall commercially, were beginning to put more distance between themselves as well. Personally, their lives seemed like a series of wrong turns. Phil put two marriages behind him, Don three. Professionally, they recorded on their own after the split, but there was no spirit in any of that music. "Brothers sing differently," Don says. "We sing as one person. That's what we do."
In a way, it was a new understanding of what they both did best that brought Phil and Don together again, their gifts strengthened, renewed. It was all, finally, about harmony. "Don and I are infamous for our split," says Phil, "but we're closer than most brothers. Harmony singing requires that you enlarge yourself, not use any kind of suppression. Harmony is the ultimate love." The harmony, it became clear, had been disrupted but never broken. At the Albert Hall reunion concert, after those painful years, Don led into the wrong song for the encore, an old Jimmy Reed tune called Baby What You Want Me to Do. The number had never been rehearsed, but when Don hit the first note, Phil jumped in. It was the first time they had sung that song in 18 years, and they got it in the good old Everly Brothers style: just right.