April Stevens and the End of an Era That Deserves Some Respect
April Stevens wasn’t exactly a one-hit wonder. If she had been, “Deep Purple” would have been enough.
“Deep Purple,” which Stevens recorded as a duet with her brother Nino Tempo, reached №1 on the Billboard chart on Nov. 16, 1963. Six days later, as it was finishing up its week, President John F. Kennedy was killed.
The following week, Dale and Grace’s “I’m Leaving It All Up To You” took over №1 on the charts, followed by the Singing Nun’s “Dominique” for four weeks and Bobby Vinton’s “There I’ve Said It Again” for a couple more.
The week after that, the №1 record was “I Want To Hold Your Hand” by the Beatles, which ended one rock ’n’ roll era and super-powered the next.
April Stevens, who died April 17 at the age of 93, was therefore one of the last winners in what is annoyingly and inaccurately known as rock ’n’ roll’s fallow interlude — the years between Buddy Holly’s death in February 1959 and the Beatles coming ashore in early 1964.
In a much later interview with Gary James of classicbands.com, Stevens expressed some disappointment that she and her brother couldn’t sustain a career once the British Invasion overpowered radio playlists. She wasn’t alone in that frustration, and while radio was following what young music fans wanted, we lost some quality music as well as some quality artists.
“Deep Purple” isn’t a bad illustration.
It was an old Mitchell Parish standard from the golden age of pop music, reinvented with a sound we hadn’t heard before and haven’t really heard since. A wistful ballad became an uptempo exercise in harmony, with Stevens and Tempo swooping up and down the scales, turning the word “sigh” into “sigh-e-yi-e-yi-e,” interjecting spoken phrases and punctuating it all with harmonica riffs by Tempo, who until that day apparently had never played the harmonica.
Rock ’n’ roll artists had rearranged standards before, from Conway Twitty’s rockabilly take on “Danny Boy” to the Marcels’ overhaul of “Blue Moon,” which drove Oscar Hammerstein into a rage.
“Deep Purple” came off as a reinvention, a different way to hear a great song.
Stevens and Tempo both would later say the arrangement was an accident, necessitated by Tempo not having learned the lyrics. It’s also true that the year before “Deep Purple,” Stevens and Tempo had a minor hit with the standard “Sweet and Lovely,” in a similar style.
After “Deep Purple” they gave the same treatment to “Whispering,” which reached №11 on the charts, and “Stardust,” which hit №20.
The problem was that the style itself was so different it came off to many listeners and programmers as a novelty. Which it wasn’t. “The Chipmunk Song” was a novelty. “Deep Purple” was performed in a style. Unfortunately for Stevens and Tempo, that style was so singular that it came off as “oh, they’ve plugged another song into the harmony thing.”
Nino Tempo, who is still around at the age of 88, was also carving out his own career while this was happening. He had been a sideman for the likes of Bobby Darin and Frank Sinatra, which eventually led him to become a member of the famous L.A. session ensemble The Wrecking Crew. He played on Phil Spector productions, among many others, and by the 1970s he formed his own mostly instrumental group.
He and Stevens continued performing into the ’70s, often in Europe. She told Gary James that late in the decade they decided to wind it up, adding she was sorry they didn’t push it a little harder.
She never returned to singing professionally.
Besides the fact “Deep Purple” was a splendid record that sounded great on the radio, it also reminds us that when rock ’n’ roll and top-40 radio shifted to the mid-1960s model, we lost some of the breadth of popular music. An offbeat record like “Deep Purple” was a real option for radio in 1963. In 1966, maybe not.
It’s not that later 1960s music was bad — quite the contrary — or that no unusual records cracked the charts. Louis Armstrong, Dean Martin, Paul Mauriat and Sinatra all had major hits during the Motown/British Invasion years. But in general, the 1958–1964 years were more adventurous. Patsy Cline could bump up against “Rama Lama Ding Dong.” If a song was catchy, even if it didn’t fit a category, it had a shot.
“Deep Purple” won a Grammy for Stevens and Tempo in 1964 as best vocal performance of a rock ’n’ roll song. It beat out “Teen Scene” by Chet Atkins, which is just as well, and it also correctly beat “It’s My Party” by Lesley Gore and “I Will Follow Him” by Little Peggy March. The fifth nominee, “Our Day Will Come” by Ruby and the Romantics, would been an okay choice.
Then as now, of course, the Grammys didn’t always get things completely right. Among 1963 releases, “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes didn’t get a nomination. Nor did “Heat Wave” by Martha and the Vandellas, or “Surfin’ USA” or “Surfer Girl” by the Beach Boys, or “In Dreams” by Roy Orbison, or “Da Do Ron Ron” by the Crystals.
None of that takes away from “Deep Purple.” It does remind us what was going on then — and April Stevens was an indelible part of it.
