When Johnny went to America....

 As many music fans of a certain age will know, Johnny Hallyday was the once and future king of rock 'n' roll in France, shooting to stardom in 1960 and staying the course right through to his death in 2017. This extraordinary longevity is often thought to have come at the cost of international success, with many believing that Hallyday deliberately turned his back on an international career in order to remain king at home, but that wasn't quite how it really was...

Two years into his career and with his bilingual, million-selling cover of Chubby Checker's "Let's Twist Again" ("Viens danser le twist") still on the French airwaves, Hallyday flew to Nashville in February 1962 to record his first American album with producer Shelby Singleton. The latter arraned for a crack session crew to back the singer, among them pianist Floyd Cramer, saxophonists Boots Randolph and Bill Justis, bassist Bob Moore, drummer Buddy Harman, and guitarists Jerry Kennedy, Grady Martin and Harold Bradley, alongside Ray Stevens on organ and Charlie McCoy on harmonica. In four days of sessions, sixteen songs were recorded: fourteen covers of American rock 'n' roll hits, a new song gifted to the singer by Gene Pitney, "Garden Of Love" (Pitney would not record it himself until later) and an English-language version of his recent French chart topper "Retiens la nuit" ("Hold Back The Night"). The latter track was left off the eventual album, although it did pop up on the B-side of Hallyday's first American single, "Shake The Hand Of A Fool".

 

Issued in March, the single attracted a little attention from radio in San Bernadino and charted in both Colorado Springs and Seattle, which was enough to get it into the bubbling under charts in both Cash Box (#110) and Music Vendor (#132) magazines, although it never went any higher in either publication. It did rather better in Canada, charting in both Vancouver and Montreal, but it was not the launching pad for which Hallyday had hoped.

In France the first release was an EP entitled Johnny à New York, presumably because New York was rather better-known than Nashville to French record buyers. The record offered wall-to-wall covers of songs that were already rock 'n' roll classics in versions by Ray Charles ("I Got A Woman"), Gene Vincent ("Be Bop A Lula"), Chuck Berry ("Maybelline") and Fats Domino ("Blueberry Hill") but while Hallyday's French-language versions of similar material had been hugely successful, this venture into the language of Shakespeare (or at least, the language of Chuck Berry) proved less popular. The record certainly charted - Disco Revue magazine placed it as high as #3, but sales were some way below the level that the singer usually enjoyed.

 

Meanwhile, back in the States, Philips followed up the single with the release (in both mono and stereo) of the album Johnny Hallyday Sings America's Rockin' Hits, which more or less did exactly as it said on the tin. In addition to the four tracks from the EP and the A-side of the US single, the contents included songs made famous by Ricky Nelson ("Hello Mary Lou"), Shirley and Lee ("Feel So Fine"), Bobby Vee ("Take Good Care Of My Baby"), Bobby Darin ("Bill Bailey"), Johnny Burnette ("You're Sixteen"), Jerry Lee Lewis ("Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On") and Paul Anka ("Diana"), although it would be fair to say that not all of them could truly be described as rock 'n' roll. Along with the single's B-side, three further recordings failed to make the cut, although all three would appear in various parts of the world over the coming months.

 

                        (US edition)                                                            (UK edition)

The album was also issued in France and appeared around the world in a bewildering array of variations. The UK edition kept the same track listing but had a totally different cover, while the Australian version included a cover of Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog" in place of "Whole Lotta Shakin...". "Hound Dog" also popped up on the Chilean version, where it replaced "Bill Bailey", while the Argentine version contained added all four of the leftovers ("Garden Of Love" and  cover of George Jones' "Tender Years" were the other two) to the twelve on the standard LP to make a sixteen-track album. Various versions of the album also appeared in Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Peru and Spain as Hallyday's international campaign gathered steam.

In an effort to give the album a boost in the American market, Philips issued the contents of the French EP across two standard-issue 45s, with "I Got A Woman" and "Be Bop A Lula" paired on the first and "Mabelline" joining "Blueberry Hill" on the second. "Be Bop A Lula" picked up a little radio action in Miami, which was enough to lift it to #118 in Music Vendor magazine, but alas, no higher, while the second single failed to register anywhere. 

 

Johnny returned to Nashville in May for a second set of sessions, cutting a further sixteen songs for a proposed follow-up album. The songs were a mix of original material (some self-penned, some written by the likes of Charles Aznavour and Georges Garvarentz (who had written "Retiens la nuit") and covers of recent American and British hits. Two of the stronger cuts, a cover of Tony Richards' "Caravan Of Lonely Men" and the Margie Singleton-Jerry Kennedy composition "Hey Little Girl" were pressed into service as the fourth US single, with the A-side picking up interest from radio in Tulsa, in Colorado Springs and in Salt Lake City but it was not enough to get the record into the charts. 

 

In July, Hallyday appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, although the performance was pre-recorded at the Moulin Rouge in Paris. The show featured the singer delivering two of his earlier French hits, "Hey pony" (Chubby Checker's "Pony Time") and "Kili watch" (originally recorded by Belgian band The Cousins) as well as snapping his fingers in a rather atypical rendition of "You're The Top" with Connie Francis and Italian singer Johnny Dorelli.

 

Despite the television exposure, the album resolutely failed to click with American audiences and Hallyday's American campaign drew to a disappointing close. Reworking much of the Nashville material into French, he charted in France with "Serre la main d'un fou" ("Shake The Hand Of A Fool"), "Dans un jardin d'amour" ("Garden Of Love") and "Tes tendres années" ("Tender Years"), while the abandoned May sessions provided him with "Pas cette chanson" (Ben E. King's "Don't Play That Song (You Lied)"), continuing a winning streak that would run for another 55 years. Although he would record in America many more times over the years, and would continue to make sporadic recordings in English (notably "They Call Him A Man", issued on a UK 45 to coincide with his appearance on The Royal Command Perfomance in 1965), he never again made a serious attempt on the American market. 

Which is not to say that he gave up on an internaitonal career. Indeed, it may be that America's loss was the world's gain. During the decades that followed, there would be albums in Spanish and Italian, and singles in Turkish, German and Japanese. Far from being simply "King in France", Hallyday would spend the next two decades charting all over the world: a glance at the international charts in Billboard and Cash Box, and in the various chart books that proliferated in pre-internet days shows chart strikes in 16 countries: Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Denmark, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey and Yugoslavia, not counting his success in his native land or those two minor chart strikes in the US in 1962. Not bad at all for someone who was believed to have ignored the international marketplace... and proof that you don't need to be "big in America" to enjoy an international career. 

You can read more about Johnny's American recordings - and the rest of his early sixties repertoire - when my book is released at the end of February. Feel free to pre-order a copy here: BOOK