“The saddest days of my life”: The brutal feud that led to The Everly Brothers’ on-stage break-up
The life of The Everly Brothers was almost defined by doubles. Most obviously, in the fact that they were a double act, but also that they each led something of a double life. Their shared substance abuse issues were concealed, and before the cracks really started to show, Phil and Don Everly were received as one of the most dulcet duos in pop, recording sugary hits like ‘Wake Up Little Susie’, ‘Bye Bye Love’, and ‘All I Have To Do Is Dream’.
They were seen as a wholesome counterpart to the counterculture movement, but behind closed doors they were caught up in a whirlwind of substance abuse. “Ritalin made you feel energised.” Don would later comment. “You could stay up for days. It just got me strung out. I got so far out there, I didn’t know what I was doing.”
Although their struggles were well obscured, in part by an industry more determined to maintain their clean cut image in the press than offer any help, both brothers were addicted to amphetamines. Don’s condition was said to be the worst of the two and culminated in a spell in hospital following a nervous breakdown. This sense of secrecy, label pressure, and life going awry led to a rift.
Phil would later lament, “What we needed was to take a long vacation, to get off the merry-go-round. There were too many people making too much money off us, keeping us going. Things were too confused. We should have taken a long rest. But in those days, we couldn’t.” Even a sobering stint in the Marine Corps reserves to avoid the Vietnam War draft following Don’s first divorce in 1961 wasn’t enough.
They were soon thrust back into the limelight, and that led to a return to pills, and a return to problems. “The tensions between Don and I … well, we’re just a family that is like that, I guess. Everything that was happening then contributed to it. But you could just as easily say that the tension between us existed from day one, from birth. And will go on forever,” Phil told Rolling Stone.
Indeed, tensions between the pair were rife throughout the 1960s, but they managed to stifle them. All the same, it was increasingly clear that they weren’t the charming force that they once seemed. They were subsumed by the explosion of Beatlemania, and that made matters worse in a creative sense. Don had received shock therapy for his addiction issues and fear that he would never be able to write again.
They managed to survive the decade veering between relics and ‘hot again’ heroes heading up extensive runs in Las Vegas. But they didn’t want to just survive. They felt that they had been pivotal pioneers of rock ‘n’ roll, and unlike some of their more bitter peers, they did not loathe what they had begotten.
They tried to mingle with the hip scene. “We went to the Bitter End, and there was Joni Mitchell, whom I had already fallen in love with via records. My life changed. I wanted to play these places, too. I wanted to be a part of this music scene,” Don recalls. They even became friends with Jimi Hendrix and sampled some of Owsley’s famous LSD, but the fact they couldn’t break into this market only heightened the brotherly tension.
Oddly enough, after a decade of blaming each other, but surviving, they were somewhat back on the up when they announced their final performance together would be taking place at The John Wayne Theatre at Knott’s Berry Farm across two days in 1973. The fateful finale would be a fiery culmination.
What happened at The Everly Brothers’ final concert?
Despite the difficulties, it should have been a celebration of their work together, but their on-stage fallout eclipsed everything. The first performance went smoothly, but the second, crucially the final one before they’d take some well-needed space from each other, was by and large a disaster.
Don had staggered out to the stage, clearly inebriated, and slurred his way through songs. Warren Zevon was playing keys during the performance, which he later described as an “embarrassing” affair. “I’d seen Don perform with the flu and a temperature of 103,” he said. “I’d never heard him hit a sour note or be anything short of professional in front of an audience. But, this night, he walked onstage dead drunk, he was stumbling and off key, and I remember Phil trying to restart songs several times.”
The crowd, having expected a joyous send-off, booed and jeered at Don, who responded by lashing out at them and his appalled brother onstage. Phil’s frustrations made him smash his guitar and walk off, telling the promoter he could not return. Bizarrely, the belligerent Don tried to keep the show going, uttering the now-infamous line: “The Everly Brothers died ten years ago.”
“I was half in the bag that evening, the only time I’ve ever been drunk onstage in my life,” Don later admitted to Rolling Stone. He said he knew it was the beginning of the end and drank tequila and champagne to toast their demise.
“People thought that night was just some brouhaha between Phil and me. They didn’t realise we had been working our buns off for years,” he said. “We had never been anywhere without working; had never known any freedom. We were strapped together like a team of horses. It’s funny; the press hadn’t paid any attention to us in ten years, but they jumped on that. It was one of the saddest days of my life.”
After the explosive actions of both brothers, a hiatus only intended to last a handful of years went on for nearly ten. They would reunite on stage at the Royal Albert Hall in 1983, but sadly, audiences often remembered their destructive breakup on stage.
“We’re not going to work ourselves into a frenzy this time,” they would announce in 1986, but the more telling prognostication about their forthcoming obscurity, came from a rather more curious comment by Don, “My personal life now is sort of strange. I really don’t know what to say about it, hardly.”
“We just open our mouths and we sing,” he would later add. But the problem was, they were never really settled enough to keep that simple fact in clear focus.
