Trivia / Ricky Nelson

• Approval of God: In his memoir Chronicles, Vol. 1, Bob Dylan praises Nelson's covers of his songs, saying that he made them sound like songs he'd written himself. Dylan also appreciatively mentions the Shout-Out to him in "Garden Party".
• Cast the Expert: He starred as a faded Teen Idol in the 1966 Burt Bacharach and Hal David TV musical On the Flip Side.
• Channel Hop: He went through quite a few different labels in his career. His debut Cover Version of Fats Domino's "I'm Walkin'" was released by Verve, which was still mainly a Jazz label at the time. Ozzie Nelson, who'd studied law before going into show business, got Ricky out of his Verve contract and signed him up with Imperial Records, which was also Domino's label. Ozzie, who didn't really like Imperial's management, then worked out an unprecedented 20-year contract with Decca Records in 1963, based on annual cash advances, rather than royalties. Unfortunately, Rick's career tanked shortly afterwards, though the Decca deal gave him the freedom to experiment musically. Eventually's Decca's American parent label MCA took over releasing his music, but the lack of success following up "Garden Party", with both sides blaming each other, led to Rick leaving in 1975. From there, he had short-lived tenures with Epic Records and Capitol Records. His final studio album while he was alive featured re-recorded versions of his Greatest Hits and was released by Silver Eagle Records (famous for cheesy late night TV ads for similar albums).
• Creator Backlash:
  • He never really liked "Poor Little Fool", his first #1 hit, only recording it because songwriter Sharon Sheeley told him that Elvis Presley had been planning to record it before he left to join the Army (not true; the story was a Batman Gambit by Sheeley to convince Nelson to do the song), and hiding it away as an album cut, only to have some DJs in the Midwest discover it and start playing it. He refused to do the song on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.
  • He also didn't like the proto-Rock Star Song "Teen Age Idol", feeling like the lyrics came off as egotistical, but Ozzie insisted he release it as a single.
• Creator Couple: Besides playing herself as his wife on Ozzie & Harriet, Kris Harmon Nelson also played his wife in the movies Love and Kisses (written and directed by Ozzie Nelson) and The Over-the-Hill Gang.
• Died During Production: He signed with Curb Records in late 1985 and was in the midst of working on a new album at the time of the fatal plane crash. A Rockabilly throwback album, it's never been released, but three of the songs have leaked, including a Cover Version of "One After 909".
• Follow the Leader: Ostensibly he was this to Elvis Presley in his early career, though Nelson actually considered Presley's Sun Records labelmate Carl Perkins his primary influence. Nelson and Presley eventually became friends, and Elvis hired Nelson's former guitarist James Burton for his touring band in The '70s. Nelson was also friendly with Colonel Tom Parker, hiring Parker's protégé Greg McDonald as his manager in The '70s. There was even some talk of Parker managing Nelson full-time after Elvis died.
• Follow-Up Failure: After scoring a comeback hit with "Garden Party" in 1972, his next single was the Dylanesque "Palace Guard", but it failed to stir up much interest and stalled out at #65, marking his last Billboard chart entry.
• He Also Did:
  • His dad Ozzie Nelson played rhythm guitar on "Hello Mary Lou".
  • The Face on the Cover photo for the 1971 album Rudy the Fifth was taken by Adam-12's Kent McCord, who'd played one of Rick's frat brothers on Ozzie & Harriet.
• Missing Episode: His 1978 album Back to Vienna was rejected by his then-label Epic Records. On it he'd worked with famed rock Renaissance Man Al Kooper (most famously the organist on "Like a Rolling Stone"). Everyone who's heard the album has described it as "an Al Kooper album with Rick Nelson on lead vocals", since the mix of Progressive Rock, Jazz and Soul influences, with eccentric lyrics, was much more in line with Kooper's past work than anything Nelson had ever tried; there's also a bit of a detectable Steely Dan influence. All the album tracks eventually found their way onto compilation albums decades later.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: The story that Nelson's fatal plane crash happened because he was freebasing cocaine on the plane came about because of an early news story about the crash that said that investigators were considering it as a possibility. No evidence was ever discovered for it, and the investigation concluded that the cause was the plane's faulty heater catching on fire (both pilots survived and gave detailed, but contradictory, accounts about the heater being on fire). The one grain of truth in the legend was that the autopsy of Nelson's body found a small amount of cocaine in his system.
• Revival by Commercialization: "Lonesome Town" got a big boost when it was included on the Pulp Fiction soundtrack. It's also a popular Cover Version choice, done by everyone from The Cramps to Paul McCartney to Bob Dylan.
• Screwed by the Network: Decca Records hindered Nelson's career at several points. They stopped promoting him even as he made a good faith effort to update his musical style, then when he started to regain an audience in his country-rock phase, they didn't capitalize on it, still treating him as a singles-based artist instead of shifting their focus to albums. After "She Belongs to Me" became his first Top 40 hit in 5 years in 1969, they didn't ask for an album to accompany it, then after "Garden Party" hit the Top 10 three years later, they dragged their heels before agreeing to an album, which got released after the single's chart run was winding down, killing some of the momentum of the comeback.
• Similarly Named Works: After "For You" hit the Top 10 in 1964, his label Decca Records released it on an album called Rick Nelson Sings "For You", but his former label Imperial Records, seeing a chance to cash in via some Schmuck Bait, answered with a repackaged release of his older material called Rick Nelson Sings For You, minus the quotation marks.
• Uncredited Role: The Jordanaires did backing vocals on a bunch of his hits, but due to their connection with Elvis Presley and Ricky's friendship with Elvis, there was an agreement not to credit them.
• What Could Have Been:
  • "Travelin' Man" was written for Sam Cooke but rejected by his manager.
  • A stark 1958 rendition of "Gloomy Sunday" that Rick's associates considered his single greatest vocal performance didn't get released because Ozzie thought the song was too morbid. It finally saw the light of day after Rick's death.
  • Around 1981, Paul McCartney offered to produce a Rockabilly-themed album for Nelson. Amazingly, Capitol Records nixed the proposal, apparently out of spite, since McCartney had just left EMI for Columbia Records.
  • His aforementioned signing with Curb Records shortly before his death. Given Curb's success in the Country Music field, and the trend of rockers from The '50s and The '60s reviving their careers in country at the time, it's easy to picture Nelson sustaining a country career had he lived.
  • He was also looking to revive his acting career before he died, filming several TV pilots that didn't get picked up, but for which test audiences responded positively to him, suggesting that Nelson just needed to find the right vehicle for a small-screen comeback.