Angel of the Morning

by

Merrilee Rush

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Like so many one-hit wonders, Merrilee Rush had a deeper music career than could be surmised from her brief intersection with popular taste. Though she had only one major chart hit and two albums (this one and a self-titled release in 1977), she's continued her involvement with music to this day with tour spots and regular gigs in her native Pacific Northwest.

In contrast to studio-manufactured artists who hurry an album to milk a freak hit single, Rush was a bona fide musician who'd spent time in a number of bands before finding chart success. Her good fortune to cross paths with Chip Taylor's enduring composition, "Angel of the Morning," gave her the chance to record an entire album for Bell Records, reproduced here with nine bonus tracks.

There's nothing here that matches the ephemeral radio-readiness of "Angel of the Morning," but there are plenty of songs that capture the same Summer of '68 vibe. There's still a helping of the previous summer's glowing optimism, but freckled by the blanched heart of growing social turmoil. Highlights include a waifish cover of "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)," the dramatic Poppy Family styled lost-love of "Sandcastles," and the quiet isolation of Chip Taylor's "Working Girl." The arrangements are sophisticated, with production by Chips Moman that deftly mixes rock, pop, country and folk.

This deluxe CD augments the original album with bonuses that include "Reap What You Sew" (the original B-side of "Angel of the Morning"), a towering Vanilla Fudge like cover of The Four Tops "Reach Out" (and its country-inflected flip, "Love Street"), and follow-on singles "Everyday Livin' Lives," "Sign on for the Good Times" and "Angel on My Shoulder," as well as their B-sides. Closing the disc is Rush's final recording for the Bell label, a Quincy Jones produced cover of "What the World Needs Now" that was featured on the soundtrack album for "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice" in place of Jackie DeShannon's version.

If you love the hit single, you'll be overjoyed to find this album's worth of similarly toned material that holds to the same level of imagination and quality.

I was surprised to learn recently that Merrilee Rush's wondrous one hit was actually NOT the original and that singer Evie Sand's take had shown hit potential but--in a classic rock hard luck tale--that singer's her record company went bust shortly after her version's release. I was equally surprised to learn that Juice Newton's 1981 version was actually the most popular of all. So Merrilee's wasn't the first, nor did sell the most, BUT it does seem to be the one most firmly lodged in our collective unconscious, the one that shows up in movie soundtracks and anthology releases, the one that people remember (fondly) as being kinda shocking for AM radio back in the day. By the time Juice's version came out, such expressions of casual carnality weren't nearly as juicy.

If "Angel" seemed a daring expression of "free love" ideals for the time, it's at least interesting to note that a countervailing sentiment is embodied in other tracks, namely which includes such ANTI-free love statements as " You say you love me, but you don't know me" and in a more direct counterpoint to "Angel of the Morning" there's the line "when morning brings the light/the words you say tonight, you might be sorry for." Stack THAT sentiment up against "Angel's" "if morning echoes say we've sinned/Well, it was what I wanted now." For that matter, listen to downright free love skepticism of "Sign Up For the Good Times," the very title of which is a criticism of the 60s free love ethos. And the rather morose "Working Girl" with its theme of on-the-job harrassment captures the 60s Zeitgeist in another way. If any tune from that era could have served as a PSA for better anti-sexual harrassment regs, this was it.

When you get right down to it though, even the title tune was pretty ambivalent. Maybe it was DARING but was it all that radical really? There is a kind of melancholy about "Angel of the Morning" that suggests that it's more an expression of resignation than liberation. "Morning's echo" may indeed say they've sinned and they could very well find out that they are in fact "victims of the night." This tune really wasn't quite the joyous celebration of free love that some of the hippie bands of the era were proffering. Come to think of it, "Angel..." actually has more in common with C&W "cheatin'" songs than with any hippie ideals. And the vocal has a kind of countryfied twang that is absent on other tracks. I was surprised, in fact, to learn that Merrilee stemmed from the Northwest and not the Deep South.

Interesting how the liner notes (and some of the reviews on this page) suggest Merrilee Rush was a strong singer. Even by 60s pop standards, I don't think there's much of a case to be made for actual vocal prowess. "Angel of the Morning" is double tracked, and quite effectively so, but if you listen to either of those vocal tracks carefully, you'll have to admit that they are only truly effective TOGETHER and that they serve to beef up a charming but rather thin voice. Other tracks sweeten the vocal with a bit of echo or by making the back up vocals a bit more prominent than they might have been with a more powerhouse voice. To her credit, she does show a fairly sharp sense of phrasing on a number of tracks.

So Merrilee was hardly Janis Joplin or Grace Slick or Tracy Nelson, but then, they didn't have that many Top 40 hits either. One thing that I can't help wondering about is just how Merrilee Rush the PERFORMER really did sound. Apparently, she and the Turnabouts had actually built up something of a following in her native Northwest. But what did THEY actually sound like? The band is scarcely to be found on the album. When she does get a chance to rock out a little bit on this record (a "rocky" but refreshingly "unheavy" take on "Hush," for instance, or on the reworking of the Four Tops "Reach Out" bonus track, she does demonstrate an effective rasp and a real sense of phrasing (to compensate for notes not held or volume not sustained). On those tracks, she's reminiscent of later singers like Bonnie Tyler or Kim Carnes, although she actually uses the rasp more for coloration more skillfully than either of those two 80s icons.

But as someone else has pointed out, on the more commercial stuff, she sounds more like Nancy Sinatra or Jackie DeShannon. My guess is that that's what Bell Records wanted and what they got. I suspect that the bar room/dance hall Merrilee Rush--the one who started out more as a keyboardist that a vocalist--was quite a different animal, and probably quite a bit less tame. When she cuts loose a bit on "Hush" or "Reach Out" you get the sense you're dealing with a whole different (and much less docile) animal than on "Working Girl," say.

Quite a little time capsule we've got her.