April 17th
Faron Young-Live Fast, Love Hard, Die
Young- single
Prefab Sprout
recorded a song called “Faron Young” on their 1985 “Steve Mc Queen” album. I
didn’t realise at the time, and didn’t know for a long time afterwards, that
Faron Young was the name of a country singer from the 1950’s. I didn’t know at
all what Paddy McAloon was singing about; “You give me Faron Young, four in the
morning.” Like all of Prefab Sprout’s work I loved the song-it was a single as
well.
Of course now, it would just be a matter of looking it up on the
internet, but then I merely put it down to McAloon’s Geordie accent and heard
it as, “you give me far on young, for in the morning.” (i.e. all separate
words). What it meant I didn’t know, and it didn’t seem to matter. I assumed it
was some typically cryptic Sproutian lyric. Would I have thought of the song
differently if I’d known what it was about? (Faron Young’s song “It’s Four in
the Morning” was the only record of his that made the U.K. charts (number 4 in
1975), though I must have missed it at the time, being preoccupied with the
latest waxings from Slade, T-Rex and The Sweet).
This track
however, stemmed from 1954. It’s quite ironic really.
Faron Young, by all
accounts, lived fairly fast. He grew up on a farm in Shreveport, Louisiana and
practised singing by serenading assorted cows whilst sitting on a fence and
strumming a guitar. Quite a picture.
At just 19 years old he signed his first
record contract and then had hit after hit. Elvis and Patsy Cline opened for
him during their early careers, so I guess he must have been pretty successful.
Faron even appeared in four low-budget films, including what must be the
classic, “Daniel Boone, Trailblazer”.
His film appearances even gave him the
temporary nicknames, The Singing Sheriff and The Hillbilly Heartthrob. I’d love
to see some of these films. I’ll have to keep my eyes peeled for them showing
up on a Wednesday afternoon on TCM or Channel 5.
Faron seemed to be a bit of a
mercurial character. Although well known for being generous, even feckless with
money, on the other hand he had a reputation as a master of the cruel, cutting
remark and swung from one mood to another in the blink of an eye. Even in the
hard drinking country world of the 50’s and 60’s, Faron had a reputation of,
not putting too fine a point on it, being a drunk.
By the late 60’s however,
the good times were slowly slipping away and everything gradually went downhill
for him. He ended up jumping off stage at a show and slapping a young girl in
the audience because he thought she had spat at him.
He tried to resurrect his
career, over and over again to no avail and became increasingly bitter at the
turn of events. He drank more and more, and by the early 1990’s he had
developed emphysema. On 6th December 1996 he shot himself with a ten
gauge shotgun and died the next day, in Nashville.
So he lived fast, loved hard
(possibly) but didn’t die young.
And, from the later photographs of him in the
80’s and 90’s, I suppose he didn’t leave a good looking corpse either.
Get/see/read "Totally Shuffled" here as a Kindle book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Totally-Shuffled-Listening-Music-Broken-ebook/dp/B00CJYZ3CA and here in paperback http://www.amazon.co.uk/Totally-Shuffled-Listening-Broken-iPod-The/dp/149495687X
No comments:
Post a Comment