SONNY BONO - PRODUCER
by Michael Paley
Reevaluating Sonny Bono (1935-1998)
I remember sifting through the 99 cents section of my local used record shop years ago in Albany, New York, and stumbling across Sonny & Cher's 1965 Atco debut LP Look At Us. Curiously, I didn't have 'I Got You Babe' in my collection. Liking the song, but disliking the duo as a whole, due to my recollection of their early '70s television variety show, I figured 99 cents wasn't much to waste on an album for the one tune I'd be playing. It turned out that I had gotten one of the bargains of my record-collecting career. I was pretty much blown away by the consistency of the whole album's sound and energy, and Look At Us ended up spending quite a bit of time on my turntable. I then spent some time tracking down other Sonny & Cher albums.
It is worthwhile reevaluating Bono's musical career. The lapse of a year following his death in a skiing accident January 5, 1998, may perhaps allow us to view his talent in a more objective light. The media tended to remember Bono's career solely from the '70s onward - as one half of a television comedy team, a restaurateur and politician. His life and death became a comedic target for many disc jockeys around the country.
Far from being a joke, the Sonny Bono of the 1960s was a consummate producer, who was intimately involved in all areas of his and Cher's music, and that is where his primary strength had lain. Anyone snickering at Bono's mediocre singing voice and the worn standup comedy he was performing in the early '70s is missing the point - Sonny Bono's genius was in back of the mixing board, and a quick listen to any of the Sonny & Cher or Cher solo albums of the 1960s will confirm Bono's talent. I would even venture to say that Sonny Bono is one of the great overlooked producers of 1960s rock 'n' roll, whose reputation has been squelched by his subsequent careers.
Bono, while in the music business since the mid-'50s, had the fortune to serve as apprentice to wall-of-sound record producer Phil Spector in the early '60s, and it is obvious that it was from Spector that Bono learned most of the tricks of the trade. Perhaps that implies that Bono was derivative - but all art is derivative from other art. It is similar to what many film writers have observed about the great silent film director D.W. Griffith: Griffith did not discover the close-up or many other cinematic devices with which he is associated, but it is what he did with them that matters.
One might almost say that in certain ways, Sonny Bono out-Spectored Spector. Bono took the basic approach of Spector's wall-of-sound - the layering of many instruments and multi-tracking - and made the music more approachable by stripping down the instrumentation yet keeping the beat infectious and big. When listening to a Sonny & Cher album, one's ears somehow manage to keep ringing long after the music is over.
Bono had the talent to take other people's material and personalize it. As a result, he was able to produce albums full of three to three and a half minute pop classics which almost play like short, high-powered symphonies. Bono's version of George Gershwin's 'Summertime' from the Wondrous World of Sonny & Cher is a case in point. Somehow, artists who have covered this 'Porgy and Bess' standard have felt that dragging the song out makes it more heart-felt (Janis Joplin anyone?). Bono, on the other hand, speeds it up and emphasizes the beauty of the melody.
But he was more than competent as a songwriter too. Aside from the isolated youth classic 'I Got You Babe,' Bono penned a number of songs which were strong on social observation with the subtlety that is necessary to carry over the lyrics. 'The Beat Goes On,' 'Laugh at Me,' 'Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down),' 'The Revolution Kind' and 'You Better Sit Down Kids' are just a few of the gems that Bono wrote himself, the latter being perhaps one of the first pop songs to effectively deal with the somewhat serious topic of divorce. This is not to say that the records did not have their share of horrors as well - 'Podunk' and 'Plastic Man' (not to be confused with the Kinks' classic) come immediately to mind - but most artists have at some point been guilty of putting filler on their albums.
1965 through 1967 were peak years in Sonny Bono's artistic creativity, with the production of at least four full-fledged Sonny & Cher albums on the Atco label and four Cher solo LPs on Imperial.
The greatest Bono find that I discovered, however, was a solo album he had produced for himself in 1967 entitled Inner Views. It is Bono's one full-fledged stab at psychedelia and succeeds beautifully. Bono himself was self-deprecating when it came to his musical achievements, and his autobiography reveals very little of the creative processes that went into the making of his records. Bono disparages his musical training - he claimed to know only four or five chords on the piano - but it only takes three to four chords to make a great rock song.
The listener is initially treated to 13 minutes of psychedelic ecstasy with Bono's hypnotizing 'I Just Sit There,' which is one of his best excursions into social commentary. The record concludes with 'Pammie's on a Bummer,' which, long before Jane's Addiction and 'Jane Says,' dealt forthrightly with drug addiction and prostitution.
And surprisingly, his voice is a powerful tool for self-expression. Technically, Cher had the voice, but Bono had the style. He certainly did not have a good voice in the classical sense. But Bono was effective with the music that he personally was trying to create. His style is plaintive and human, and much like the voice of the Kinks' Ray Davies, it made the music that much more real. It is no accident that he and Cher covered Davies' 'Set Me Free' on their Wondrous World of Sonny & Cher album, and that he had Cher perform 'I Go to Sleep' on one of her solo albums.
The late '60s, Bono started on his downward spiral. 1967 actually ended on a decidedly upbeat note with the release of the Sonny & Cher film 'Good Times' - a much maligned film that was a commercial failure at the time - that sports an excellent soundtrack written and produced by Bono, and is quite fun to watch nowadays. But it appears that the music industry in general was changing, and the type of music that Bono was offering was falling out of vogue. Without the fiscal success, he would simply not have the backing necessary to produce more records. It would be unfair to claim that his creativity was starting to subside, however. He produced both sides of the 1968 Sonny & Cher single 'Good Combination,' which is as good as anything he had previously released, but the song turned out to be a commercial flop. He is also credited as one of three producers of Cher's late '60s album Backstage, which illustrates how he was moving away from the Spector sound and exploring new, more minimal modes of musical expression.
Bono closed out the decade with a rarely seen film he wrote, produced and scored in 1969 for then wife Cher called 'Chastity' (Sonny and Cher's daughter was named after the film). The resulting soundtrack does suffer from repetition (there are seven variants of the title song), but the closing theme is a haunting tour-de-force that approximates Ennio Morricone's brilliant scores for Sergio Leone's Italian westerns of the 1960s.
Due to the lack of commercial success of his late '60s ventures, however, Bono produced little music till the end of his recording career in (I believe) 1973. With one notable exception. In 1973 Bono produced a solo LP for Cher entitled Bittersweet White Light. An album of standards by such American greats as George and Ira Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, the atmosphere is lush, moody and best of all, tasteful. Bono, perhaps out of all of Cher's producers, knew her vocal strengths and limitations, and brings out her best on the album. He especially knew how to keep Cher's famous warble (which seemed to come into prominence in the early '70s under other producers' tutelage) in check. It would have been interesting to see how Bono's career would have progressed had he been hired by other artists as a producer rather than continue as a performer.
Of course, Sonny & Cher's 1970s resurgence came with their nightclub act and television series. There were albums, too, but they were mostly forgettable. For whatever reason, whether it was time constraints or a decision made by the record executives, Bono veered away from producing and the chores were handed over to the more conventional (and boring) Denis Pregnolato, Michel Rubini and Snuff Garrett. One need only to listen to the Garrett-produced 'You Better Sit Down Kids' from the 1972 album All I Ever Need Is You. The original (performed by Cher on a 1960s Bono-produced record) is a powerful little pop tune; in Garrett's hands it becomes syrupy, sentimental and over-produced. (The one Cher album Bono partially co-produced with Garrett, 1972's Foxy Lady, is so inundated with Garrett's style that Bono's contribution is quite unrecognizable.)
Yet, Bono did write and produce a few songs on the latter Sonny & Cher albums, and they stand out from the rest of the output like day from night. While perhaps not matching the exuberance of his '60s work, they do showcase the talent Bono still possessed. In 1972's 'A Cowboy's Work is Never Done' and the staccato, gospel-influenced 'Somebody,' he wisely went back to the technique he first used in their Reprise release 'Baby Don't Go' and kept his vocals energetically but unobtrusively in the background. And the title track from 1973's Mama Was a Rock and Roll Singer Papa Used to Write All Her Songs is, at 9 1/2 minutes, overlong and overblown, but it is also infectious, textured and best of all, fun.
Sonny Bono will be missed by this writer, but his music will remain close to my turntable.
