Tony Mantor's : Almost Live..... Nashville
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Tony Mantor's : Almost Live..... Nashville
Barry Mazor: Blood Harmony: The Everly Brothers Legacy
Barry Mazor unveils the untold story behind his comprehensive biography "Blood Harmony: The Everly Brothers Story," offering unprecedented insights into the lives and legacy of rock and roll pioneers Don and Phil Everly. This meticulously researched 400-page book represents the first serious, depth-sourced biography of the iconic duo whose harmonies and groundbreaking fusion of country and rock shaped generations of music.
• Writing process took three and a half years of deep research and document analysis
• Many key figures from the Everlys' early career have passed away, requiring extensive archival research
• International fan club provided rare newspaper clippings and materials from around the world
• Interviewed previously unheard voices including producers, road managers, wives and girlfriends
• Explores the complex relationship between two brothers "practically stapled together for 60 years"
• Reveals personal struggles including Don Everly's two suicide attempts
• Examines their musical innovation combining sweet country harmonies with R&B rhythms
• Highlights their massive influence on The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Beach Boys and countless others
• First sentence of book: "The difference between the famed and the rest of us is that so many people think they know them"
Blood Harmony: The Everly Brothers Story is available now wherever books are sold.
My career in the entertainment industry has enabled me to work with a diverse range of talent. Through my years of experience, I've recognized two essential aspects. Industry professionals, whether famous stars or behind-the-scenes staff, have fascinating stories to tell. Secondly, audiences are eager to listen to these stories, which offer a glimpse into their lives and the evolution of their life stories. This podcast aims to share these narratives, providing information on how they evolve into their chosen career. We will delve into their journey to stardom, discuss their struggles and successes and hear from people who help them achieve their goals. Get ready for intriguing behind-the-scenes stories and insights into the fascinating world of entertainment.
Speaker 1:Hi, I'm Tony Mantor. Welcome to Almost Live Nashville. Joining us today is acclaimed music journalist and author Barry Mazur, as he unveils Blood Harmony, the Everly Brothers Story, the definitive biography of rock and roll pioneers Don and Phil Everly. With his signature blend of meticulous research and vivid storytelling, he delves into the lives of the iconic duo whose harmonies and groundbreaking fusion of country and pop shape modern music. Drawing on exclusive interviews and rare archival material, Blood Harmony offers a compelling portrait of two brothers whose music continues to resonate across generations. It's a pleasure to have him here to share the story behind writing this remarkable book. Thanks for coming on.
Speaker 2:I appreciate you having me. I don't think we met, but now we have.
Speaker 1:You're in Nashville, right? Yeah, sure, yeah, I'm in Nashville too. It's amazing. Our paths have not crossed, been here 32 years now. Well, I'm in Nashville too. It's amazing. Our paths have not crossed. Been here 32 years now.
Speaker 2:Well, we've been here 22 years. Of course they still ask me where I'm really from.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't get that as much as I used to. Now. I worked at radio for a while. Of course I had to watch my speech, so to not have any particular accent. I don't worry about that now. You get what you get have any particular accent.
Speaker 2:I don't worry about that. Now you get what you get. Yeah, I've done radio too. I had a streaming radio show here for quite a while out of Acme Radio downtown like 190 episodes. But they can't quite place mine because we moved around a lot in Pennsylvania. It's just sort of general northeast in Pennsylvania, no spot in particular.
Speaker 1:Well, it's always nice to go down memory lane, but we are here to talk about your book that you've written about the Everly Brothers, so can you give us a little information on what led to that?
Speaker 2:Well, I think, as you know, I've been writing about music as a journalist and also as an author for a long time, some 50 years.
Speaker 2:At this point, like a lot of writers about music, I noticed something that simply wasn't a serious depth sourced book about the lives and music of the Everly Brothers. There were fan books, but if you look at the ten original members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, all of them had multiple books like that by this point, but not these guys. And I was having an online conversation with another music writer I know, elijah Wald, who, among other things, did the Dylan Goes Electric thing, and he was asking that question which keeps being asked, and I said I don't know, we were tossing it around. It turned out my literary agent was picking up on this conversation and he said why don't you do it? And I said why don't I? And that came pretty automatically because I've been listening to them since I was eight years old. The alley with the transistor radio in Scranton, pa, and Bird Dog was on the radio and ever after.
Speaker 1:I remember those days with the transistor radio when you started this you had to get the backstory. So how did you approach that in getting this started?
Speaker 2:Well, I have a certain way I work always with this stuff. Yeah, you start with the obvious. I go to the most obvious available sources and work up a timeline. Once you do that from different sources, pretty early on things start to gel against each other. Oh, that happened the same time as that. Oh, they said that, but they were here. You start to get questions and then you start to fill it in. I filled it in for three years and from there, eventually, if you're lucky and I really felt that happen this time Along the way, I found out what this was really about and you start to shape the story and the story arc to work for the story you're telling. If you work my way, you don't go in knowing exactly where that's going to take you. You find it, which is what I did yeah, that makes total sense.
Speaker 1:I've heard from several of my writer friends that once they get going into a book, the characters kind of take over and they write down what's happening but they're not really controlling it. Did that kind of scenario happen to you at all during this writing process? Is there any similarities there at all?
Speaker 2:Well, it's usually fiction. Writers say that and it's kind of spooky. If you ask me, these were real people with real lives. They were facts of the matter that came up and behaviors that came and I had a pretty vast array of material to dig into, to look at. One of the things you don't understand is that it shocks people, but the first time Donna Phil Everly walked into a recording studio here in Nashville is 70 years ago this year.
Speaker 1:Wow, I didn't realize it was that long.
Speaker 2:This is history. Everybody who worked on their big hits for Cadence Records, the ones people know best, the Bye, Bye Love. Wake Up, Little Susie, you know, All I have to Do is Dream. They're all gone. There's not a single person that were involved with those still alive. So this was history. Then I asked you if you interviewed Mr Lincoln. So this is go to the documents. And it was like that. And there's a lot of documents, most of them untouched, precisely because there hadn't been a deep dive book like this.
Speaker 1:With everyone associated with the first hits and Not here Now. What were some of the challenges you hit trying to do this deep dive into the background of them?
Speaker 2:Well, the challenge was to meet the goal, which this is a biography, and you want them to be alive and on the page and you want to deliver. What were they doing in that room? What were they feeling, what were they thinking? So you particularly look for material like that. When you find it, I thought it was a screenwriting background, which means you look for scenes that are really telling about that, that show that stuff.
Speaker 1:So as you moved on this and did the deeper dive and it was all coming together, what surprised you? Because anytime you do something like this, there's always going to be something that jumps out of left field and catches you off guard. You just didn't anticipate that and you kind of go you do something like this, there's always going to be something that jumps out of left field and catches you off guard. You just didn't anticipate that and you kind of go whoa, what just happened here?
Speaker 2:Well, I suspected that these were two complex individuals. I'd actually met and interviewed Phil at one point, not Don. But you know, you get an image of the Everly Brothers especially kind of stuck at the beginning, with these sort of rock gods with high-piled ducktail haircuts and they're smiling and everybody's like you know, aren't they telegenic? But these were two intelligent, complex individuals and there is no simple version of who they were. There's no simple version of how they related to each other, because there's this thing called the Everly brothers. It's a business, it's a group, it's an act.
Speaker 2:And then there's this guy, phil Everly, and this guy, don Everly, these brothers who had to live with this, practically stapled to each other for 60 years. How do you do that? What's it like for them? So I think the degree to which their personal relations and temperaments aligned with the way they related to that act over all that time, how they stuck with it and the troubles they had. People have often heard that they had clashes and differences and this kind of thing, but they were closely aligned. So the book is about who these guys were in the music and who the act was. It had a beat and it very closely connected those two questions.
Speaker 1:Did you, or what kind of reactions did you get from people that either knew them or was associated with them from reading the book that they were maybe shocked. Well, maybe not shocked, but surprised.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, as I said, there's some people that were not available to me except in documents and, by the way, even by documents we have, you'll know, and we have a well-known music journalist here in town, a friend of mine, bob Orman, robert K Orman.
Speaker 1:Yes, I'm very familiar with him.
Speaker 2:He had written about the Everleys. He was a great fan of those and written about them many times. Well, when you write for a newspaper, you do an article, you do an interview with Don Everly in the 90s and they use two sentences from it in a newspaper story. Well, he had all the rest of that material which he made available to me. There's an international fan club for the Everleys which still has like 18,000 members and they have preserved clippings from all over the world, from newspaper coverage in Appleton, wisconsin or in Brussels or in the Philippines, and they had this great collection which they shared with me. And you start to put these things together. There's a lot of Phil and Don in there. I got to pick what made the book.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's so great. So that leads me to this. You got to pick what you was going to put into the book. That's the job, yeah yeah, how difficult was that. You have all this information and a lot of it was very vital to what they were. Then you have to compile it all and put it all together in such a structure that tells the story the way that you wanted it to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, once I find the structure, you go with it and you shape it and you rewrite it, and you rewrite it. And, as I said, I've been a journalist and an author and an editor for 50 years. I've written hundreds of profiles for the Wall Street Journal, for no Depression magazine. The idea of how do you find the beginning, middle and end of a thing is kind of pretty natural to me by this point. Yes, it's a more complex thing. With a book, you start to find it. You know it was longer at one point, and tightening it up and the very act of tightening it up gets you closer to yeah, this is what it's about. Don't need that. This is the thing. It's the work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. How long did it take you from start to finish? Three and a half years. Three and a half years. So when you sit back and it's all complete, I know when I listen to something that I've produced, I'll always have that oh, I should have done this, I should have done that. It's all good, but you still find things that you could have done in your mind better. Did you have any of those? Oh, why didn't I do this moment?
Speaker 2:Well, I think that happened earlier on, so I was able to get out. Yeah, this is the other thing. Get some good experience. Experience and you'll know it too. That's all true and I have, you know, two previous books published out there and there's things I learned, you know. As soon as the book comes out, people call you with 14 pieces of information you never heard before. The answer is eventually you get off the pot. It's like, yeah, this is done now. I like deadline work. You know I could have asked for, like, what are these 10 year biographies? I'll talk to you someday. You know I agreed to three years, so we concentrate and get it done. I'm a deadline kind of guy and that works for me. So right now, you know it just went out and published in print over the last two weeks and if that point's going to come again where I say, oh, I should have it hasn't hit yet, maybe it will.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So you was a fan, you listened to them, like you said back in the day on transistor radio, you had your perception of them, what they were. Do you have a different perception of what they were now that you finished?
Speaker 2:Well, I think the difference was about them as individuals. I was aware I had a pretty large their stuff is in circulation now, things like Big Bear Family boxes of their music from all through the years. I knew well past their early hits, that the people who only very casually know them know. So I was aware of the different periods of their music, their comebacks, the different labels, the styles. So I was able to hear. Like some work in the studio I was able to see something people haven't seen for a long time their prim time summer replacement TV show from 1970. There were things that I could get at that maybe evolved the way I could talk about the making of some of these records and talking to people I learned something about the production process, but most of what I felt like I learned was about the people and I didn't have really locked down perceptions about it. I learned it. I think my favorite question people ask is how did you know all that? Of course the answer is I didn't know all that, I found out all that shape.
Speaker 1:Did you ever have that feeling that there's just one more story, one more item, one more topic, anything that might just put the cherry on top to make it that much better for you?
Speaker 2:Well, there's always more. I mean, the fact of the situation is, as I said, a lot of people. If I had any idea I was doing this book 15 years ago, I would have been able to talk to a lot of people that aren't available to me to talk to anymore. There's always that, you know, but it's now. You make the most of what you can do with when and where you do it and the materials you can get at. So I don't worry about that too much. There's enough to do, as you asked before, with what you have.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. Now that it's completed, it's getting out there for everybody to purchase. Are you getting reactions yet? And if you are, are they the reactions that you had hoped for?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm already getting it. There have been, I gotta say, really positive reviews of the LA Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, readers magazines that cover books as they come out. It's been pretty universally as much as I could ask for, and I don't mean readers magazines that cover books as they come out. It's been pretty universally as much as I could ask for, and I don't mean yeah, and they're like five stars, thumbs up, must read all that kind of stuff. But I think what really touches me is that the things I meant to do which I just said to you, which is get them on the page show how what they made related to who they are. There's a bunch of smart reviewers who've been picking up on what I hoped would be found, and when you hear somebody's picking up on what you wanted to do, there's nothing more gratifying than that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that way you know that they are getting exactly what you were writing about.
Speaker 2:And not everybody will, and you can't count on that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that is so true. Now that you have this under the belt, what's next on the list of things to do?
Speaker 2:Oh, I have no idea.
Speaker 1:What's next with?
Speaker 2:Flocky is helping market this book for the months ahead. I'm 75 years old man. I mean I hope I do another book, but I got a catch of breath. Sure, I get that there was years between my last one on Ralph Peer and this. The subject has to kind of bubble up and find me. You know, I think at this point in life the next time I commit you know years, I better mean it. You know, it's like I, it's not like I'm making my next single. You know, this is, this is a book and I'll be back writing my reviews for the papers and those sort of things after a few months. I took a break from that, but I don't know. We'll see. I have certain things in the back of my head but I don't know which one will get to be real.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so now that it's done, it's completely written. My question is are you happy? Are you happy with the way it all turned out?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would have to say so. I mean, I kind of agree with that old adage that it's better to have written than to be writing. I kind of agree with that old adage that it's better to have written than to be writing. I mean, writing is hard, man. You know, it's like lots of people in the art, including even some of the Everly family, were like we're going to do our own book. All these performers say we're going to do our own book and they almost never do because when they started they discovered how very difficult it is. It's long, it's hard, it's a slog, it's detailed and you have to have a certain appetite for it, besides ability. Better of both.
Speaker 1:Exactly. It's very difficult. A lot of people do not realize how difficult it is to write about yourself or your family. Most people tend to forget most of the integral things that are very important to the story, where someone like yourself will ask a lot of questions and dig a lot, and that's where the deep dive comes in to get all the information to put into the story that needs to be told.
Speaker 2:There's a fundamental difference between memoirs, which is what you were just describing, and a biography. This is not a memoir, which is what you were just describing, and a biography this is not a memoir. Those can be great. That's a deliberately personal memory of somebody's experience with the other. My friend, tom Piazza, is about to have a book come out of the last couple of years, his friendly relationship with John Prine and traveling around with him. That's not a biography of John Prine, although he was going to be doing that at one point. That's a memoir of his specific experience. This book is not my specific experience. Well, what are two points? I briefly let it come in for a few paragraphs because I was there. This is, as best I can get, a knowledgeable, reasonably objective picture of what happened?
Speaker 2:You only got two questions what happened and how did that happen?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so where did you get some of the information? Who helped you in contributing to some of the facts that were in the book? There were people.
Speaker 2:I had a rule of the people that are alive that knew them over the years. Think about the years. It was, like I said, almost everybody's 83. And if they're people that writers go to, they've been dining out on those same Everly Brothers stories for up to 50 years. They've told them over and over and in my experience if they change much it's because they're starting to get embellished or somebody actually forgot something. So I'd almost rather see what we have documented down in print from years ago than to revisit that.
Speaker 2:Who I did look for? I wanted two people that I talked to like that, because you know you get to ask the question. Nobody asked, which is an irritating thing. When you go to the documents you might be a good interview and they get right up to the one you really want to know and then they don't ask it. So I can do that.
Speaker 2:But most of the people I interviewed for the book and there were still dozens were people who were not talked to about this before the producer of of their TV show, the road manager for years, a couple. You know they had seven wives between the two of them. I also spoke to two of the some of the long-time girlfriends who hadn't really been on the record before and at this point were willing to talk. So it's a wide variety engineers and on the other hand there's a girlfriend and I'm deliberately looking for the things that I haven't known, the stuff I need to fill in what I try to get when I talk to people like that. And it was helpful. Yeah, lots of those were very fruitful discussions that people can see in the book Blood Harmony.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So how long is the book?
Speaker 2:400 pages.
Speaker 1:Wow, 400 pages. I can just imagine the content in that.
Speaker 2:It covers the whole 80 years. It goes back to their family. I mean don and phil everly were performing with their dad in chicago when they were like two and five years old. Two and four, I mean they. So it's like basically, you know, and they were professionally performing from like 1945 to 2005 it's 60. So there's a lot to kind of get a hold of.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly. So in 400 pages. I mean you really did a real deep dive and I'm sure you have things in there that people have just completely forgotten about.
Speaker 2:Let me tell you something. People have already been saying it. Except for extremely involved fans who may have collected everything they know, there's probably there's a high percentage of what's in this book nobody's ever read before. They don't know and have no idea. This is new stuff. As I say, it's not been done.
Speaker 1:That's just perfect. And when you can be the first to bring out so many different things that have never ever been told, and bring that to a new audience plus the older audience, that's a win.
Speaker 2:Well, I hope so. I mean, if they feel that way, they have to have an appetite for what I'm telling them. This is an empathetic book. This is not a nasty tell-all, you know gossip book. It does have personal lives in it and there were dark chapters in those lives and I tell those straight like the joyous chapters in their lives.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and there's nothing wrong with that. When you're trying to be as objective as you personally can as a writer, you have to tell the darker things along with the lighter things, so it all balances out, so that it shows that everything that you wrote is very objective.
Speaker 2:There's kind of two rules doing this. One, remember what I'm saying about the structure of the book, which is about the making of the music and who they were and how they interact. So whether the specific story is dark or light, to the degree to which it affects both of those, I'm interested in the personal lives to the degree that affected the music they made and what they wrote and how they performed. So that's not a dark or light. Question is, how significant and how much did it matter? That matters to me. And then on top of it, you know how telling is it? A dark story that's like nothing but scurrilous and you're just trying to get clickbait on. It is not telling, it's clickbait. And a wonderful story about, you know, their happy birthday party and the happy spoiling kids is not necessarily very interesting either. The question is in each case is you know, how does this matter?
Speaker 1:When you were exploring this, did you discover anything, perhaps lesser known, that could resonate with people, helping them feel more connected to their purpose or what really truly mattered to them, with what you wrote in the book?
Speaker 2:Well, I certainly hope so. That's what the 400 pages are. I mean, they may not know that Don Everly tried to commit suicide twice. They may not also know the great influence they had on the entire generation of stars that came after, whether that's Bob Dylan or the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones or Creedence. Half the British Invasion, the Beatles, the Everly Brothers, introduced a turn in music which has affected us ever since. This is what matters here, which is that they weren't rockabillies. They took inside out what people have been doing. They maintained these close, sweet country harmonies which they were raised on, and they added to those hard-driving R&B guitar, slashing rhythms that would have a future. Nobody did that before them and you can immediately follow what happens next. Ask the Beatles Musically that mattered?
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. That was the whole premise of my question. You just nailed it perfectly. I really like what you're doing and what you've written, because I love history of music, and when you get into the history of people like the Everly Brothers or whoever it may be, there are just so many things that come out that you just might not have realized. So I think this is great, that you wrote this book.
Speaker 2:It's the whole point. If you looked at the book, the very first sentence says the difference between the famed and the rest of us is that so many people think they know them.
Speaker 1:That is a great quote.
Speaker 2:That's where this book starts.
Speaker 1:In closing, what would you like to tell the listeners that they can expect? That will give them incentive to go out there and buy your book about the Everly brothers.
Speaker 2:I think you have every reason to be curious about these two brothers and what they did. You may be already. What I can tell you is when you dive in there, you're going to feel like you know them more than you ever knew them before and you're going to get a new sense of how they matter. And a lot of people already have been telling me whoa, I didn't know about all those records. Some people are saying it takes them a long time to read because they keep turning to the records that come up to hear them.
Speaker 1:That'd be good. Have fun with it. Yeah, absolutely, well, this has been great. Great conversation, great information. I really appreciate you taking the time to join us today.
Speaker 2:Thank you, and I appreciate when people ask about how it happened and not just the subject. You get used to people talking about the subject rather than the fact that this is a written piece of work, so thank you.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's been my pleasure. Thanks again. Thanks for joining us today. We hope you enjoyed the show.