Don and Phil Everly
Phil Everly of The Everly Brothers is dead. His death strikes home with me on a personal note that causes me to bypass a number of things I could say, and others will say, about how important their music was to a whole generation. The news just reached us here from friend and colleague Mark Wernick that Phil Everly has died in California of unspecified causes. It happened yesterday, Friday, January 3, 2014. Phil was age 74.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/03/showbiz/singer-phil-everly-dies/
For those of you who are too young to remember, Phil and his two-years-older brother, Don Everly, now 76, were known to those of us adolescents from the rock and roll baptismal generation of the late 1950s as “The Everly Brothers,” the guys who basically sang stories in harmony with a driving melody and beat that pretty well captured our ongoing angst over finding and losing love – and getting in trouble with your girl friend’s mother for going to sleep in a snuggle hug at the drive in movie theatre in a way that kept you from getting her home by curfew time, as promised.
It happened to my girl friend and me on a Friday night at the Trail Drive In Theatre on O.S.T. in Houston during the late summer of 1957. We actually had gone to sleep in the car from the power of a comfort hug I had given her after she had become frightened at the last showing of the original “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” – We only awakened as the theater operators turned on the “show’s over” glare lights and the loud, irritating adult music box that was designed to run us life-blood younger customers away for the night.
I still recall the race home after we awoke. “What are we going to tell my mother?” my girl friend asked. “We have no choice,” I said, “we’re just going to have to tell her the truth – that we fell asleep because you got scared and because I was already tired from having worked all day unloading produce when he got there.” It never occurred to me that the truth sounded about as credible as the old “the dog ate my homework” excuse.
Irony of ironies (or high probability) followed while we were still racing east on O.S.T. to the Wayside- Telephone area where my girl friend lived. Over the radio, here came The Everly Brothers, singing our theme:
Wake up, little Susie, wake up
Wake up, little Susie, wake up
We’ve both been sound asleep, wake up, little Susie, and weep
The movie’s over, it’s four o’clock, and we’re in trouble deep
Wake up little Susie
Wake up little Susie, well
Whatta we gonna tell your mama
Whatta we gonna tell your pa
Whatta we gonna tell our friends when they say “ooh-la-la”
Wake up little Susie
Wake up little Susie, well
I told your mama that you’d be in by ten
Well Susie baby looks like we goofed again
Wake up little Susie
Wake up little Susie, we gotta go home
Wake up, little Susie, wake up
Wake up, little Susie, wake up
The movie wasn’t so hot, it didn’t have much of a plot
We fell asleep, our goose is cooked, our reputation is shot
Wake up little Susie
Wake up little Susie, well
Whatta we gonna tell your mama
Whatta we gonna tell your pa
Whatta we gonna tell our friends when they say “ooh-la-la”
Wake up little Susie
Wake up little Susie
Wake up little Susie
Well, we survived it, but it was close. Had it not been for my girl friend’s sweet mama, who liked me and wanted to trust me, we probably would not have. As a widow, she had her hands full supporting her family with no help during an era in which working mothers were more of a rarity than an everyday pattern. I still remember feeling terrible about the pain we had caused her. She kept saying two things to both of us: “I expect better from both of you” and “I’m not going to let you two do this to me.”
We never did that one again, but it wasn’t even a year later that we went our separate ways, as young couples often do. Still, the lesson lingered. It came across as Lesson #1 in my “Recovery from Personal Selfishness” notebook. At age 19, other lessons were still out there – just waiting for me like potholes on the road of life. But I will always associate The Everly Brothers and “Wake Up, Little Susie” with opening the door on the fact that no relationship works well, if both people do not take personal responsibility for building and maintaining trust.
If you’ve never heard “Wake Up, Little Susie,” here’s a link to the original 1957 version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X7b2E_Jq-k
Thank you, Everly Brothers, for being serendipitous buddies in bringing that first lesson home to me so concretely, even if that was not your intention.
And “Rest In Peace, Phil Everly,” but don’t forget to wake up if there’s anyplace else you need to be at a certain time.
The Pecan Park Eagle 
Leave a comment