Cathy, Come Home. The Twilights. 1968. Columbia.

 During the year 1975, while American teenager Garth Brooks split his extracurricular time between sports and family talent shows, providing entertainment with guitar and banjo, former members of Australian country-rock bands Mississippi and Axiom began recording together under the name Little River Band. Prior to his brief career with Axiom, lead singer Glenn Shorrock had performed as a founding member of mid-sixties Australian sextet The Twilights. Influenced by the British Invasion, The Twilights struggled for international recognition but, except for the occasional perk—an invitation from the Beatles to attend studio sessions for the recording of Penny Lane during a prize trip to London, for instance—the group returned to Australia having only absorbed a raw exposure to the briefest flash of a luminescent fraction of the planet’s most formidable pop musical talent. Their final single to chart in Australia, Cathy, Come Home, discloses what is both The Twilights’ strength and weakness. Written by lead guitarist Terry Britten—who went on to partner with Tina Turner for the outrageously, commercially successful What’s Love Go To Do With It and We Don’t Need Another Hero—Cathy, Come Home is exemplary sixties pop single dynamism, with only a minuscule fragment of originality. The robust rhythm section is lifted from pre-Tommy Entwistle-and-Moon Who records, and the gorgeous vocal harmony by co-lead singers Shorrock and Clem McCartney is inconceivable without the influence of The Hollies, who gave The Twilights its preceding single, What’s Wrong With The Way I Live? Once described by Australian music journalist Ed Nimmervoll as “human jukeboxes,” The Twilights were apparently gifted with a talent for replication yet lacked creative brio. By the mid-seventies, both recording artists and the mass pop audience were showing signs of fatigue following the whirlwind growth spurt in maturity experienced during the previous decade; between the eponymous Bob Dylan record and Nashville Skyline passed seven years, six years between Please Please Me and Abbey Road, and a mere five years between England’s Newest Hit Makers and Let It Bleed. The emergence of the singer-songwriter after the enormity of Dylan’s success slowed rock music’s tempo to an unchallenging middle range where bands like The Eagles, Wings, and Bread exerted a mellow energy conducive to receding into an ever expanding background. It took Little River Band three album releases before the band issued any chart topping singles, beginning in 1977. Already practicing veterans of the music industry, the combined members of Little River Band were adept practitioners of tweaking established pop genre conventions based on prevailing musical trends, consistently careful at masking individual personality traits. For his debut record, released in 1989, Oklahoma State University graduate and advertising major Garth Brooks capitalized from this same process, recreating country music as a sophisticatedly marketed hybrid entertainment that combined elements from pop country, classic and soft rock, and easy listening for a mass audience born into the promise of surplus menus resplendent with multiple crossgenre options. The benign and inconsequential pop music that once played on radios as we balanced our checkbooks is now helping to sell five thousand dollar concert tickets at repurposed urban football stadiums that can easily accommodate the population of El Paso, Texas. The West’s improvised escape from reality, though exorbitant in cost and casualties, is so far withstanding the external stresses of this, its protracted larval stage. Taken from 1998 4-CD Rhino Box Set Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts From The First PsychedelicEra, 1965-1968

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