“I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party”
Rosanne Cash
Written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney
Billboard
#1 (1 week)
June 24, 1989
Much like last week’s final No. 1 single from Ricky Skags, Rosanne Cash’s final appearance atop the country singles chart is an interesting preview into what her nineties country sound could’ve been like.
Also similar to Skaggs, Cash’s influence is all over nineties country, from the literate lyrics of Mary Chapin Carpenter to the pop-country confections of Shania Twain. But you can hear her getting ready to leave the party on this surprisingly low energy Beatles cover.
Cash sounds resigned and disinterested as she’s getting ready to leave the party, which has a lot more fiddle and steel and twang than the parties she’d hosted up until that point. In a weird way, the backing track being so different from her earlier hits adds some poignancy, as it symbolizes the aggressive traditional turn the genre is taking.
Cash’s voice was lowering to a whisper just as the noise around her was cranking up. We got a preview of that with “Black and White,” a stark piano-ballad that snapped her streak of six consecutive No. 1 hits when in barely dented the top forty. It was her first country single to miss the top thirty since she made her major label debut a decade earlier.
Cash’s next album, Interiors, was ignored by country radio but remains among her most critically acclaimed efforts. Cash has become a folk and Americana darling since then, following a well-received effort at adult pop with The Wheel. Her direct interactions with country music have largely been limited to maintaining her father’s legacy, though her work remains rooted in her country music heritage. If you’ve got spare time and a good dictionary, all of her work this century is worth exploring.
“I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party” gets a B.
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Good analysis all around on this one. It felt like the kind of song an artist does for a Greatest Hits package to fulfill a record company contract before fleeing for the exits. That doesn’t mean it’s without appeal, but there doesn’t appear to be the kind of fire in the belly that punctuated past Rosanne Cash hits. It’s a satisfying listen and, ironically given that it was a Beatles cover, her most traditionally country sounding #1 besides “Tennessee Flat Top Box”. I always preferred the stark follow-up “Black and White”, even though I was not surprised it didn’t catch on at radio. I certainly never could have imagined it would end her radio run.
Here’s another instance where I got the timeline wrong as I assumed her divorce from Rodney Crowell came before she released “Interiors”, and the dark mood of that album was Rosanne’s primal scream as she was going through a divorce. It surprised me when I looked it up and saw that their divorce wasn’t until 1992. I wonder if anyone on Rosanne’s team really believed country radio would embrace anything from “Interiors”. It’s certainly hard to believe they would and I’m surprised her record company didn’t balk at the hard pivot. I’m guessing she consciously divorced country radio ahead of divorcing Rodney Crowell, and I’ll forever be disappointed that Rosanne Cash never got to be part of the 90s women of country movement. The year of 1989 was at times as bittersweet as it was exciting.
Grade: B
I have always been of two minds regarding Rosanne. I have never thought of her as being especially country, but I have liked most of her recorded output, especially her post-chart output with husband John Lowenthal. I have always filed her records in with my pop records, although some could easily described as jazz.
I very much liked “I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party” and would give it a B+. Strangely enough, my very favorite single by her remains her first hit,a duet with Bobby Bare, titled “No Memories Hangin’Around”. You would think that this would be an oil and water mix, but both are consumate pros and the song works on all level.
That’s such an interesting take on Cash! Which records do you feel are most reflective of her jazz work? I’d love to listen to them with that lens.
First off, I misspelled her husband’s name – it should read John Leventhal.
I don’t know that the acoustic jazz influence shows up that much in her commercial recordings but I have seen several live concerts online and on television where the influence is great, perhaps mostly due to Leventhal’s fine guitar playing and production. I was able to capture a recording at the 2010 Reeperbahn Festival in Hamburg, Germany where the sound fidelity made it worth saving the recording. The album RULES OF TRAVEL had several tracks that our local NPR Jazz station played – WUCF liked “Western Wall”. THE RIVER AND THE THREAD also has a jazz feel on some tracks
I thought Rosanne’s version of “I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party” was pretty good, because she had a fairly natural flair for this, having grown up listening not only to her father’s music, but that of the British Invasion itself.
And it’s one of those funny things that, besides this song, several other Beatles songs lend themselves to getting the C&W treatment: “I’ve Just Seen A Face” (bluegrass outfits have done this one, for obvious reasons); “What Goes On?”; “Run For Your Life”; “I’m A Loser”; “I’ll Cry Instead”; “Don’t Pass Me By”. The tough thing is to make it stick (as Rosanne did) because, after all, this is THE BEATLES we’re talking about, not Florida-Georgia Line (LOL).