Covered: Bob Feldman, Jerry Goldstein & Richard Gottehrer: 1962-1982

Here's a rather unusual entry in my "Covered" series highlighting talented songwriters who were widely covered by others. This one focuses on the songwriting and production team of Bob Feldman, Jerry Goldstein, and Richard Gottehrer. You probably don't know their names, but I'll bet you know a bunch of their songs.

Bob Feldman and Jerry Goldstein were friends and neighbors growing up in Brooklyn, New York, in the 1950s. They began writing songs together, and released a single as "Bob and Jerry." In 1962, they met Richard Gottehrer, and he joined their songwriting team. Then the hits started coming. Their first really big smash was "My Boyfriend's Back" by the Angels, which made it all the way to Number One in the U.S. in 1963. The song was started by Feldman, after he overheard a girl talking to a boy she was rebuffing.

The three of them had their greatest success in the mid-1960s. As they were all young and musically talented, they decided to form their own rock band, which they called the Strangeloves. Although, weirdly, they claimed that they were three brothers from a sheep farm from Australia. Perhaps they thought being seen as Jewish kids from Brooklyn wasn't cool. In 1965, they had a Top Ten hit in the U.S. under the Strangeloves name with "I Want Candy," a song the three of them wrote with Bert Berns. (I've posted two Covered albums featuring him.) However, instead of including that version here, I've included the 1982 version by Bow Wow Wow, which was a Top Ten hit in Britain. They had two other Top 40 U.S. hits in 1965 as the Strangeloves: "Cara-Lin" and "Night Time." I've included the Strangeloves version of "Night Time," but I chose a version the Sorrows did of "Cara-Lin."

In addition to songwriting, the three of them also found success as producers. One of their biggest successes came early, with "Hang On Sloopy." They didn't have a hand in writing it (though Bert Berns did). But they were getting a big reaction performing it live in concerts. They wanted to release it as their next single, but their song "I Want Candy" was still rising in the charts. So they took the version they'd already recorded in the studio and had a then-unknown singer from another band, Rick Derringer, sing lead on it. That version, credited to the McCoys, hit Number One in the U.S.

This songwriting team was really good at the garage rock song that was all the rage in 1965 and 1966. When popular trends moved to psychedelic music in 1967, their success went way down. The Strangeloves faded away in 1968. The three of them gradually drifted apart. Each of them found success as producers. In 1966, Gottehrer co-founded Sire Records. It was a very successful independent record company for many years. In 1978, it essentially got swallowed up by Warner Brothers Records, though it still exists as a branch of that mega-company. Gottehrer went on to produce albums by the Go-Go's', Dr. Feelgood, Richard Hell, the Bongos, Marshall Crenshaw, Joan Armatrading, Link Wray, and many more.

As a songwriter, Goldstein was the only one of the three who continued to have big success into the 1970s. He became the producer for the band War from their very first album in 1970. He co-wrote most of their biggest hits while continuing to produce them, including "All Day Music," "Low Rider," and "Why Can't We Be Friends." In fact, he was so closely tied to the band War that in a 1990s lawsuit he won the right to the band name, forcing virtually all of the original members to record as the Lowrider Band instead. 

Feldman died in 2023 at the age of 83. Goldstein and Gottehrer are still alive as I write this in 2025.

Here are their Wikipedia pages, if you want to know more:

Bob Feldman - Wikipedia 

Jerry Goldstein (producer) - Wikipedia 

Richard Gottehrer - Wikipedia

This album is 56 minutes long.

01 What Time Is It (Jive Five)
02 My Boyfriend's Back (Angels)
03 I'm on Fire (Jerry Lee Lewis)
04 The Drifter (Ray Pollard)
05 Cara-Lin (Sorrows)
06 Sorrow (Merseys [Merseybeats])
07 Night Time (Strangeloves)
08 Say Those Magic Words (Birds)
09 Beat the Clock (McCoys)
10 Come On Down to My Boat (Every Mother's Son)
11 It's Nice to Be with You (Monkees)
12 All Day Music (War)
13 Low Rider (War)
14 Why Can't We Be Friends (War)
15 Summer (War)
16 I Want Candy (Bow Wow Wow)
17 You Got the Power (War)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/SYsxwH2r

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/yznTM351UNw7hYf/file

Feldman, Goldstein, and Gottehrer were the members of the band the Strangeloves in the mid-1960s. The cover photo is taken from a promotional photo of the band. They put out a lot of photos wearing these zebra-striped vests. From left to right: Richard Gottehrer, Bob Feldman, and Jerry Goldstein.

Donald Byrd - A New Perspective (On a New Perspective) (1964) (A MIKE SOLOF GUEST POST)

I'm not that into serious jazz, and that's still the case. But this is a guest post by Mike Solof, so here's a rare jazz album for this blog.

Donald Byrd released the album "A New Perspective" in 1964. As I write this in September 2025, it's one of about four of the best rated albums he did, according to the crowd-sourced reviews on rateyourmusic.com. However, it's also a controversial album. If you read some of those reviews, people tend to love it or hate it. That's because Byrd had the idea of overdubbing wordless gospel-styled vocals over the band's jazz improvisations. It's those vocals that divide people on the album. It so happens Mike just wanted to hear the instrumentation without those vocals, and he realized the technology now exists to wipe them away. So that's just what he did.

If it so happens you prefer the album with the vocals, no problem, just listen to the official version instead. 

There's more information in the PDF he's included in the download file, including profiles of the other jazz musicians who played on this. 

By the way, just to be clear, the real album title is just "A New Perspective," but Mike added the "On a New Perspective" part. 

This album is 33 minutes long. 

01 Elijah (Donald Byrd)
02 Beast of Burden (Donald Byrd)
03 Cristo Redentor (Donald Byrd)
04 The Black Disciple (Donald Byrd)
05 Chant (Donald Byrd)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/EYCdshNR

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/fCC4xpWqz9U0JI6/file 

The cover photo is the same as the original, with a couple of key changes. One, Mike asked me to add the word "no" before "voices," so I did, squeezing the other words a bit to make room. And the original was mostly in black and white (everything but the lettering), but Mike wanted it colorized, so I did that too, using the Kolorize program. 

Covered: Hank Williams, Volume 1: 1954-1995

It's time for more from my "Covered" series, highlighting widely covered songwriters. This one celebrates the music of Hank Williams, who has been called "the father of country music." I've found enough for two albums. Here's the first one.

There's no doubt that Williams was a pivotal musical figure. Rolling Stone Magazine ranked him number 74 on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time, which is saying a lot, considering that magazine doesn't pay much attention to country music. Encyclopedia Britannica called him "country music's first superstar" and an "immensely talented songwriter and an impassioned vocalist." AllMusic.com said that he "established the rules for all the country performers who followed him and, in the process, much of popular music."

So far with this "Covered" series, I've generally selected songwriters from the rock and roll era, meaning 1955 and after. But Williams was from earlier. His recording lasted from 1947 to 1953. He died in 1953 at only the age of 29. His cause of death is controversial, but it seems he died of a heart attack caused by misuse of drugs and alcohol. 

I eventually want to go back and make "Covered" albums of songwriter greats like him from earlier eras. However, in Williams' case, his music often doesn't appeal to those who don't like country music. So instead of just going with the big hit versions of his songs, I made a concerted effort to pick covers that I liked but also often weren't country versions, or at least weren't hard-core country versions. So if you're not a big country music fan, you might still want to give this a try. There are some country versions early on, but less so as this album goes on, and even less so on the second volume. 

This album starts in 1954 and proceeds chronologically after that, so everything from here is after his death. In fact, Williams had a lot of success with people covering his songs during his life, but those generally are the hard core country type songs I've tried to avoid here. A pivotal cover was "Cold, Cold Heart" by Tony Bennett in 1951. Bennett was reluctantly convinced to cover it, doing it in a pop style. It was a Number One hit on the U.S. singles chart. This caused people in the music business to start to realize that Williams' songs could be popular outside of just the country music charts, and many covers followed. However, I didn't include Bennett's version or many other hit cover versions from that time period because I don't think they've dated well. But some songs from the time, including "Cold, Cold Heart," will appear on the second volume, done in more modern styles.

By the way, I have to say that I was surprised to find out that Williams co-wrote "Jambalaya (On the Bayou)." I had assumed that was a traditional New Orleans / Cajun song going way back. But Williams wrote it with Moon Mulligan, another country star, in 1952, basing the melody on a little-known traditional love song called "Grand Texas." His version was a massive hit, spending 14 weeks at Number One on the U.S. country singles chart. It also is his most covered song, with at least 500 recorded versions. Good luck going to New Orleans and not hearing it played a bunch of times!

Here's the Wikipedia entry about Williams, if you want to know more:

Hank Williams - Wikipedia 

This album is 49 minutes long. 

01 There'll Be No Teardrops Tonight (Tony Bennett)
02 Long Gone Lonesome Blues (Marty Robbins)
03 Jambalaya [On the Bayou] (Brenda Lee)
04 Moanin' the Blues (Marty Robbins)
05 Hey, Good Lookin' (Ray Charles)
06 Weary Blues from Waitin' (Vince Martin & Fred Neil)
07 Your Cheatin' Heart (Ray Charles)
08 Kaw-Liga (Charley Pride)
09 Settin' the Woods on Fire (Little Richard)
10 I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry (Al Green)
11 Move It on Over (George Thorogood)
12 You Win Again (Rolling Stones)
13 Why Don't You Love Me like You Used to Do (Elvis Costello & the Attractions)
14 I Saw the Light (Etta James)
15 Honky Tonk Blues (Huey Lewis & the News)
16 Mind Your Own Business (Saffire, the Uppity Blues Women)
17 Honky Tonkin' (The The)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/CZJhCXUX

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/DLOTfNuLcZ1oCt7/file

I don't know what year the photo is from. The original was in black and white, but I colorized it with the help of the Kolorize program.

Covered: Jackie DeShannon: 1961-2017

Here's another entry in my Covered series highlighting the careers of great songwriters. This time, it's Jackie DeShannon.

DeShannon is more famous as a performer than a songwriter. But she's in a rather strange position, because she had some big hits as a performer that she didn't write, especially "What the World Needs Now Is Love," and some big hits as a songwriter for other musical acts, especially "When You Walk in the Room" and "Betty Davis Eyes." The one big hit she both wrote and had the hit performance was "Put a Little Love in Your Heart."

DeShannon was born in rural Kentucky to parents who were farmers but also very musically inclined. So her music career began remarkably early. She was singing songs on local radio stations by the time she was six years old, and hosting her own radio show and making occasional local TV appearances by the time she was eleven! She signed her first record contract at the age of 16, and began putting out singles, but without much success at first. 

At the time, successful female songwriters were very few and far between. But in 1960 she had enough success to get connected to another female songwriter, Sharon Sheeley. Together, they co-wrote DeShannon's first hit song, "Dum Dum" by Brenda Lee. They also wrote some other hit songs over the next couple of years, like "Heart in Hand" and "Breakaway."

In 1963, she co-wrote the song "Needles and Pins" with Jack Nitzsche and Sonny Bono. She didn't get songwriting credit on it, but she claims she was a full participant in its creation. I believe her. It was common for aspiring musicians to get screwed out of songwriting credits in those days (and probably still today), and I'll bet that went double for women. At any rate, her version of the song was the first one released. It barely made the U.S. singles charts, but went all the way to Number One in Canada. Instead, the Searchers had a Number One hit with it some months later. That suggested there was a problem with her record company, not with her version. Later in 1963, she wrote "When You Walk in the Room" by herself. Again, her version went nowhere and the Searchers had a bit hit with it.

In 1965, she finally had a big hit as a performer, with "What the World Needs Now Is Love," written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. From that point on, she almost had two music careers at once. She put out many albums and singles, often with her singing cover songs. At the same time though, she wrote successful songs for other musical acts that she usually never released herself. Examples would be "Come and Stay with Me," a hit she wrote for Marianne Faithfull, and "Don't Doubt Yourself, Babe," which she wrote for the Byrds. 

She wrote hundreds of songs in many musical genres, and made professional sounding demos of them to give to other musicians. Decades later, several albums of these demos have been released. I think if she would have focused on putting on these songs she wrote herself, she would have had a much more successful performing career. It seems to me though that her record company was more interested in her songwriting, so they didn't encourage that.

In 1969, she had another huge hit with "Put a Little Love in Your Heart," which she co-wrote. It reached the Top Five in the U.S. singles chart. After that, musical trends were changing. There was much more of a focus on singers writing their own songs. For instance, Carole King made the transition from writing hits for others to performing her own hit songs. DeShannon made a similar transition, putting out many albums in the 1970s which mostly consisted of her own songs. Again though, in my opinion, her record companies badly bungled her career. Archival releases decades later show dozens of really good songs she wrote and recorded that weren't released at the time. 

Her performing career slowly wound down. In 1978, she stopped putting out albums. She would only release two more much later, in 2000 and 2011. She also never really toured much. She probably didn't need to, with all the money she made from songwriting. In 1974, one of her albums contained a song she co-wrote, "Betty Davis Eyes." It didn't get any attention at the time, and wasn't released as a single. But in 1981, Kim Carnes had a massive hit with it. It went to Number One in the U.S., and was the best selling song of the year.

For this album, I've concentrated entirely on cover versions, with not even a single song performed by DeShannon. I've already posted a couple of albums by her at this blog, and I'll probably post more in the future, so this isn't the place for more of that. Most of these are the original versions, often the hit versions. But I made some exceptions, especially when I had to choose versions other than the DeShannon ones, for instance with "Put a Little Love in Your Heart." 

Here's her Wikipedia page if you want to know more:

Jackie DeShannon - Wikipedia 

An interesting fact I just saw on that page is that the Led Zeppelin song "Tangerine" was actually written by Jimmy Page about DeShannon. The two of them dated around 1965 when Page was a session guitarist. 

This album is 49 minutes long.  

01 Dum Dum (Brenda Lee)
02 Woe Is Me (Helen Shapiro)
03 Heart in Hand (Brenda Lee)
04 I Shook the World (Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans)
05 Needles and Pins (Searchers)
06 Breakaway (Irma Thomas)
07 When You Walk in the Room (Searchers)
08 Come and Stay with Me (Marianne Faithfull)
09 Don't Doubt Yourself, Babe (Byrds)
10 With You in Mind (Marianne Faithfull)
11 Put a Little Love in Your Heart (Dorothy Morrison)
12 Bad Water (Doris Duke)
13 Boat to Sail (Carpenters)
14 Santa Fe (Van Morrison)
15 Bette Davis Eyes (Kim Carnes)
16 Splendor in the Grass (Ladybug Transistor)
17 He Did It (Samantha Fish)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/e2eqJ5kb

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/Nf8kBkKT8PbNtQ1/file

The cover photo is from 1967. 

Covered: Don Covay: 1961-1994

Here's another lesser known songwriter celebrated in my Covered series. This time, it's Don Covay.

Covay was born in South Carolina in 1936, but spent the latter half of his childhood in Washington, D.C. In 1957, he started out as a chauffeur and opening act for Little Richard. He had dreams of being a famous soul singer, but for years he drifted from record label to record label with poor sales.

His first success came into 1961, writing the song "Pony Time." He own version only reached the lower part of the singles charts. But then Chubby Checker covered it later that year and it went all the way to Number One. That established a pattern: while he kept his own solo career going for decades, other singers usually had much more success with his songs. 

In the mid-1965, he was signed to Atlantic Records and associated labels. Atlantic had a relationship with Stax Records, so Covay was able to co-write songs with Steve Cropper and other soul music greats there, like David Porter and Booker T. Jones. For instance, "See-Saw" and "Sookie Sookie" were co-written with Cropper. (I have different versions of both of those songs in my Covered albums for Cropper.) 

Probably Covay's most celebrated song is "Chain of Fools." Aretha Franklin had a big hit with it in 1967, but he'd actually written it about 15 years earlier after seeing a chain gang of prisoners working by the side of a road. Rolling Stone Magazine put it on their list of the top 500 songs of all time. 

He was the instigator being the brief soul supergroup "Soul Clan," consisting of himself, Solomon Burke, Joe Tex, Ben E. King & Arthur Conley. He wrote the band's one hit single. However, that was just a one-off. After that, his career declined for a few years. But he had a minor revival with a few hits in the early 1970s. I've included one of those as the only song here credited just to him, "I Was Checkin' Out, She Was Checkin' In."

But musical tastes were quickly changing in the late 1970s, with the rise of disco, punk, and new wave. After a few years of declining sales, Covay quit the music business altogether. But he had some later revivals. For instance, in 2000, he put out his first new album in over 20 years, "Adlib," filled with famous guest star appearances. He died of a stroke in 2015 at the age of 78.

I tried when I could to use the original hit versions. But some of these were never hits, just songs that I thought were worthy of inclusion. And I did occasionally avoid the hit versions for various reasons. For instance, I only wanted one song mainly sung by Covay, so I used the Rolling Stones version of "Mercy, Mercy" when in fact Covay had a hit with it in 1964.  

Here's his Wikipedia entry:

Don Covay - Wikipedia 

This album is an hour and 16 minutes long. 

01 Letter Full of Tears (Gladys Knight & the Pips)
02 There's a Party Goin' On (Wanda Jackson)
03 Pony Time (Chubby Checker)
04 Long Tall Shorty (Kinks)
05 Mercy, Mercy (Rolling Stones)
06 Don't Drive Me Away (Ben E. King)
07 Tonight's the Night (Solomon Burke)
08 I Don't Know What You've Got but It's Got Me (Little Richard)
09 Three Time Loser (Wilson Pickett)
10 Love Bug (Lena Horne)
11 Chain of Fools (Aretha Franklin)
12 See Saw (Cliff Bennett & the Rebel Rousers)
13 Soul Meeting (Soul Clan [Don Covay, Solomon Burke, Joe Tex, Ben E. King & Arthur Conley])
14 I'm Gonna Take What He's Got (Etta James)
15 Demonstration (Otis Redding)
16 Sookie Sookie (Tina Britt)
17 She Said Yeah (Joe Tex)
18 This Old Town [People in This Town] (Staple Singers)
19 The Usual Place (J. Geils Band)
20 I Was Checkin' Out, She Was Checkin' In (Don Covay)
21 Watch the One Who Brings You the News (Millie Jackson)
22 Thunder (Jimmy Witherspoon)
23 Back to the Streets (Soul Summit)
24 It's Better to Have [And Not Need] (Huey Lewis & the News)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/Bte4uSCp

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/PiuCVec2exVUilI/file

I don't know any details about the cover image, but it looks to date from the early 1960s. The original was in black and white, but I colorized it using the Kolorize program. 

Covered: Dan Penn & Spooner Oldham, Volume 1: 1960-1968

If you don't know of Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham, you should. The allmusic.com website says, "Dan Penn is one of the major figures in soul music, composing many of the genre's standards," and he co-wrote most of those songs with Spooner Oldham. So this songwriting duo is the subject of the next albums in my "Covered" series highlighting great songwriters. I've found enough for two albums. Here's the first one.

Dan Penn has been the main figure in this duo, with Spooner Oldham playing a supportive role. Penn was born in 1941 in rural Alabama. He co-wrote his first hit in 1960, "Is a Blue Bird Blue" by Conway Twitty, while he was still in high school. However, after that, he struggled in the music business for a few years. Penn (who is still alive and performing as I write this in 2025) has an excellent, soulful voice. However, he wasn't able to find success as a performer.

But in the early 1960s, he began collaborating with Oldham, after the two of them were in an early band together. The earliest song here co-written by them is "Strangest Feeling," written in 1963. Oldham was also born in rural Alabama, two years after Penn. The two of them became very involved with writing, recording, and producing songs in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, especially at the FAME studio there. 

Things changed drastically for Penn and Oldham in 1966, when they co-wrote the song "I'm Your Puppet." The version by James and Bobby Purify was a big hit. When the royalty checks started coming in, Penn decided he could make a living just from songwriting. So he put his struggling career as a performer on the backburner. However, he usually made demos of the songs he wrote, and they often rivaled or even surpassed the hit versions. (A couple albums of these demos would be released decades later.)

Penn both wrote lyrics and music for his songs. However, aside from his first hit "Is a Blue Bird Blue," he almost never wrote a song by himself. He said he liked the instant feedback of songwriting collaboration. Most of his hits were co-written with Oldham (while Oldham only had one hit without him, "Lonely Women Make Good Lovers"). But he wrote with many others, and had some big hits with them. For instance, he only briefly wrote with Chips Moman in 1967, before they decided they clashed too much. But during that time, they co-wrote two of the greatest soul songs of all time, "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man" and "The Dark End of the Street."

1966 to 1968 was a particularly productive time for Penn and Oldham. If you look at the below song list, they wrote one classic song after another. 

I found an interview with singer-songwriter Elvis Costello in which he expressed his admiration for Penn and Oldham. I wrote down a bit of what he said: "They wrote this extraordinary group of songs, and they made no acknowledgement of all the road signs that people erect to try to separate music. You can't really tell where the country and the soul and the rock and roll and the gospel stops and begins."

Costello further praised Penn's singing ability. "Dan is one of the greatest singers American pop music has ever created. Dan Penn is Elvis Presley if he had better taste. Dan Penn is every bit as good a singer as Elvis Presley and some, 'cos he has humility and restraint." I've included one song sung by Penn here, "Strangest Feeling," and another one on Volume 2. Hopefully that can give you a sense of his singing talent.

All the songs here are the original hit versions, in rough chronological order. Only a couple weren't at least minor hits at the time, most especially "Strangest Feeling," which was one of those demos I mentioned above that weren't released until decades later. 

Here's the Wikipedia page for Dan Penn:

Dan Penn - Wikipedia 

And here's the one for Spooner Oldham:

Spooner Oldham - Wikipedia 

This album is 43 minutes long. 

01 Is a Blue Bird Blue (Conway Twitty)
02 Strangest Feeling (Dan Penn)
03 I'm Living Good (Ovations)
04 I'm Your Puppet (James & Bobby Purify)
05 It Tears Me Up (Percy Sledge)
06 You Left the Water Running (Otis Redding)
07 I Can't Stop [No, No, No] (Arthur Conley)
08 Do Right Woman, Do Right Man (Aretha Franklin)
09 Out of Left Field (Percy Sledge)
10 The Dark End of the Street (James Carr)
11 Happy Times (Box Tops)
12 Nine Pound Steel (Joe Simon)
13 Cry like a Baby (Box Tops)
14 Sweet Inspiration (Sweet Inspirations)
15 I Worship the Ground You Walk On (Etta James)
16 Everything I Am (Plastic Penny)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/uRC6i55G

alternates:

https://bestfile.io/en/MT0xwo5fFZ371pP/file

The cover image is taken from a photo of a band called the Pallbearers, from around 1964. Both Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham were members. So, using Photoshop, I cut on their parts of the photo and rearranged them so their heads were close together. Also, it was black and white photo, but I colorized it with the help of the Kolorize program.

Oldham is on the left in the grey jacket. Penn is on the right with the black jacket. 

Covered: Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart: 1959-1987

Next up for my Covered series highlighting the careers of great songwriters is the duo of Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, usually just known as Boyce and Hart. These guys definitely knew how to write catchy songs. They were sometimes successful performing their own music, including having one big hit, but mostly they wrote songs for others.

Boyce was the first to have songwriting success. In 1959, when he was about 20 years old, he wrote the song "Be My Guest," and wanted rock star Fats Domino to sing it. He waited hours outside of Domino's hotel room, and got him to promise to listen to a demo of the song, which Domino actually did. It was a big hit later that year, selling over a million copies. 

Boyce and Hart first met later in 1959. Hart was the same age and was trying to make it as a singer, without much success. Not much happened for a few years, except for Boyce writing another big hit, "Pretty Little Angel Eyes" by Curtis Lee, in 1961. Gradually, Boyce and Hart started writing songs together. Their first big success as a duo was "Come a Little Bit Closer" by Jay & the Americans, which may or may not have reached Number One in the U.S. in 1964, depending on the chart. 

In late 1965, things really got cooking for Boyce and Hart when they got involved with the very start of the Monkees TV show. In fact, at first the duo practically was the Monkees! For the first season of the TV show, and the band's first album, they produced and recorded nearly all of the songs, using their own backing band, and wrote many of the songs as well. The actual Monkees starring in the show only replaced the guide vocals sung by the duo with their own for the final product. However, after the debut album came out, the band's musical supervisor Don Kirshner fired the duo, after claiming they were secretly using studio time for their own projects. That may well have been true. But they continued to write songs for the Monkees, despite no longer being involved with the production and recording. Every Monkees album released in the 1960s had at least one song by them, except for "Head."

Their success with the Monkees, including writing many of their biggest hits, gave them the prominence to have success as a recording duo. Their biggest hit on their own was "I Wonder What She's Doing Tonight," which was released at the end of 1967. It didn't have a big chart peak, only reaching Number Eight in the U.S., but it sold a million copies, which was typical of songs at or near the very top. They also had two more songs make the U.S. Top Forty, "Out and About" and "Alice Long [You're Still My Favorite Girlfriend]." I've included all three of those, as well as one more song they performed together that I like, "We're All Going to the Same Place."

Commercially, the duo peaked in the late 1960s, when they were writing hit after hit for the Monkees, themselves, and other musical acts. But musical trends were changing fast, and their style didn't fit in so well with the 1970s and after. They still did have occasional successes - the last five songs here are from after 1970 - but not so many. And some of those songs I chose at the end were actually written much earlier but not hits until later. "Hurt So Bad," written by Teddy Randazzo, Bobby Weinstein, and Bobby Hart, was a hit for Little Anthony and the Imperials in 1965. But I chose a 1980 version that was a hit for Linda Ronstadt in 1980. Similarly, "Under the Moon of Love," written by Tommy Boyce and Curtis Lee, was a minor hit for Curtis Lee in 1961. But in 1976, the band Showaddywaddy had a Number One hit with it in Britain.

In the mid-1970s, Boyce and Hart joined Davy Jones and Micky Dolenz for a reunion of the Monkees, essentially replacing the two missing original Monkees members. They put out a new album in 1975, but for legal reasons they weren't allowed to call themselves the Monkees, so they went by the name "Dolenz, Jones, Boyce and Hart." But the earlier magic was gone, and their album didn't have much success. I chose not to include any songs from that album. In the 1970s, both Boyce and Hart tried releasing their own solo albums, but to even less success.

Hart is still alive as I write this in 2025. However, Boyce died in 1994. He was suffering from depression, and then had a brain aneurysm, which put him in a lot of pain. So he shot himself with a gun.

Here's a Wikipedia entry about the duo, if you want to know more: 

Boyce and Hart - Wikipedia 

Strangely, Boyce has his own Wikipedia entry, here, but Hart does not:

Tommy Boyce - Wikipedia 

This album is an hour and one minute long. 

01 Be My Guest (Fats Domino)
02 Pretty Little Angel Eyes (Curtis Lee)
03 Come a Little Bit Closer (Jay & the Americans)
04 Peaches 'N' Cream (Ikettes)
05 [Theme From] The Monkees (Monkees)
06 Action, Action, Action (Keith Allison)
07 [I'm Not Your] Stepping Stone (Paul Revere & the Raiders)
08 The Last Train to Clarksville (Monkees)
09 I Wonder What She's Doing Tonight (Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart)
10 She (Del Shannon)
11 Out and About (Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart)
12 Words (Monkees)
13 I Wanna Be Free (Keith Allison)
14 Alice Long [You're Still My Favorite Girlfriend] (Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart)
15 Valleri (Monkees)
16 We're All Going to the Same Place (Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart)
17 Tear Drop City (Monkees)
18 Something's Wrong with Me (Austin Roberts)
19 Keep On Singing (Helen Reddy)
20 Under the Moon of Love (Showaddywaddy)
21 Hurt So Bad (Linda Ronstadt)
22 Dominoes (Robbie Nevil)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/YWEcVX4i

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/q01I8u3QJF4SfvS/file

I don't know the details of the cover photo, but based on the clothes, I'd guess it's from around 1967. That's Boyce on the left and Hart on the right (with the red jacket).

Covered: Henry Mancini: 1959-1998

I have so much material for Covered series albums that I'm going to try to make another concerted effort to post a lot more of them. So here's another, focusing on the songwriting of Henry Mancini.

Mancini is a bit of a left field choice for the Covered series, since he mostly composed instrumental music for movies, and is far removed from rock and roll. But he was responsible for so many classic songs that I feel I can't leave him out. The intro to his Wikipedia article sums him up well, stating that Mancini "was an American composer, conductor, arranger, pianist and flutist. Often cited as one of the greatest composers in the history of film, he won four Academy Awards, a Golden Globe, and twenty Grammy Awards, plus a posthumous Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995."

Mancini was born in 1924 and grew up in rural Pennsylvania. After graduating from high school, he studied at the prestigious Julliard School of Music in New York City for two years. But then he was drafted in the U.S. Army and fought in World War II from 1943 to 1945. After the war, he became a pianist and arranger for the Glenn Miller Orchestra (which continued despite the fact Miller died in World War II). In 1952, he got a job writing music for movies for Universal Pictures, a major movie studio in Hollywood. 

However, he didn't really become famous until after he left that company in 1958 to become an independent composer and arranger. One of his first jobs was writing the theme for a new TV show called "Peter Gunn." His song, the "Peter Gunn Theme," was a big hit for Duane Eddy, and has since become an often covered classic. It won an Emmy award and two Grammys, and put Mancini in high demand writing for more TV and movie projects.

Mancini typically only wrote music, usually instrumentals. But sometimes he would work with another songwriter who would write the lyrics. His next major hit, "Moon River," was such a case, with the lyrics written by famed songwriter Johnny Mercer. The version sung by actress Audrey Hepburn in the movie of the same name in 1961 went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song, as well as Grammys for Song of the Year and Record of the Year.

After that, Mancini kept steadily releasing music for decades, including scores for dozens of movies. He recorded over 90 albums on his own, from big band to jazz to light classical. He became, and remains, one of the biggest names in the "easy listening" genre. 

For this album, I tried to boil the selections down to just his very best known songs, so that even people who aren't typically into can easy listening style can enjoy this. For instance, I find it hard to believe there's anyone out there who doesn't enjoy hearing the highly creative "Pink Panther Theme." Like that song, the vast majority of songs here are instrumentals. "Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet" wasn't actually written by him, but his arrangement changed the song so drastically that I've included it here anyway.

Most of Mancini's best known songs date from the 1960s. After that decade, he switched more to arranging songs written by other people, though he did sometimes write his own material. Some of the songs near the end of this album are covers of songs from much earlier in his career. I generally tried to avoid Mancini's own versions, as I usually do with these Covered albums. But I have two songs by him here since I couldn't find good versions of those ones otherwise.

He was still composing and arranging, though less prolifically, when he died of pancreatic cancer in 1994 at the age of 70 years old. His music made such a cultural impact that in 2004 he was the subject of a U.S. postage stamp. 

This album is 42 minutes long.

01 Peter Gunn Theme (Ray Anthony & His Orchestra)
02 Moon River (Audrey Hepburn)
03 Baby Elephant Walk (Lawrence Welk & His Orchestra)
04 Theme from Hatari (Henry Mancini & His Orchestra)
05 A Shot in the Dark (Shirley Scott)
06 The Shadows of Paris (Elsie Bianchi)
07 Pink Panther Theme (Those Fantabulous Strings)
08 Slow Hot Wind (Sergio Mendes & Brasil 66)
09 Two for the Road (Peggy Lee)
10 Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet [A Time for Us] (Johnny Mathis)
11 Send a Little Love My Way (Anne Murray)
12 Newhart (Henry Mancini)
13 Days of Wine and Roses (Ella Fitzgerald & Joe Pass)
14 Dreamsville (Dave Grusin with Diana Krall)
15 Charade (Monica Mancini)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/YcfTBdHW

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/nDvHfXT0X64bFSQ/file

The cover photo dates from 1985. I don't know any other details.

Susan Maughan - BBC Sessions (1964-1971)

I have to admit that, until I put this album together, I'd never even heard of British singer Susan Maughan. I can't say I'm a big fan of her music either. However, I have access to some really rare and unreleased recordings from the BBC radio show "Top of the Pops," and I'm trying to post albums by just about any reasonably good music acts who had an album's worth of such recordings, and Maughan qualifies. So here we are with her BBC album. 

All but three of the songs here are officially unreleased. Those three, tracks 10 through 12, come from a rare various artists compilation called "British Beat Girls Live on Air: 1965-1970." I believe everything else has been unbootlegged until now.

There were many British female singers on the pop charts in Britain in the early and mid-1960s, virtually all of them singing cover songs only. Most had one or two hits, if that, and then quickly faded away. The music blog https://albumsiwishexisted2.blogspot.com/ has put together compilations for many of them who weren't famous enough to have official greatest hits albums. Maughan never got to be an especially big star. She had one big hit in Britain, a cover of "Bobby's Girl," which went all the way to Number Three in the British charts in 1962. She had two smaller hits in 1963. That made up most of her chart success, although she continued to release singles and albums into the 1970s. However, unlike many other singers with a similar amount of success, she had enough BBC sessions survive to make an album. 

"Survive" is a key word in that previous sentence. The vast majority of "Top of the Pops" recordings that survive date from the middle of 1964 and after, because that's when the BBC started sending albums of the show to affiliate stations outside of Britain, and most of those survived in excellent condition. Maughan's commercial peak was from 1962 to 1963, so I'll bet more BBC sessions from those years took place but didn't survive. For instance, I couldn't find a worthy sounding version of her big hit "Bobby's Girl," although one or two rough TV broadcasts of it survive on YouTube.

That said, what is included here is interesting if you into 1960s pop music, like I am. All the Top of the Pops recordings date from 1964 and 1965, with one exception, which I will explain shortly. Those make up everything but the final two tracks. Since she didn't have many hits of her own, she sometimes did hits by others, such as "I'm into Something Good," "Downtown," "Yeh Yeh," "It's Not Unusual," and even "Blowin' in the Wind." As far as I can tell, she never released any versions of those songs I just mentioned on record, though I could have missed some things.

The last two songs come from much later, 1971. After putting all her Top of the Pops sessions together, I checked to see if I could find any other BBC performances. I only found one, "You've Made Me So Very Happy," from a BBC TV show in 1971. The final track, "I Saw a Rainbow," is from a Top of the Pops session in 1971 as well. Maybe her career had a minor revival that year.

This album suffers somewhat from the usual problem of Top of the Pops recordings from the era: annoying BBC DJ Brian Matthew talking over the beginnings and ends of songs. Luckily for Maughan, only five of her songs here had that problem, which is a lower percentage than usual. Those are the ones with "[Edit]" in their names. I did my usual thing of using the UVR5 program to remove the DJ talking while keeping the music. 

Here's a Wikipedia link, if you want to know more about her:

Susan Maughan - Wikipedia 

This album is 43 minutes long. 

01 Little Things Mean a Lot (Susan Maughan)
02 I'm into Something Good (Susan Maughan)
03 That Other Place (Susan Maughan)
04 Make Him Mine (Susan Maughan)
05 Downtown [Edit] (Susan Maughan)
06 Yeh Yeh (Susan Maughan)
07 Don't Be Afraid [Edit] (Susan Maughan)
08 You Can Never Get Away from Me (Susan Maughan)
09 It's Not Unusual (Susan Maughan)
10 When She Walks Away (Susan Maughan)
11 Blowin' in the Wind [Edit] (Susan Maughan)
12 That Other Place (Susan Maughan)
13 Poor Boy (Susan Maughan)
14 Here It Comes Again (Susan Maughan)
15 Your Girl [Edit] (Susan Maughan)
16 You've Made Me So Very Happy (Susan Maughan)
17 I Saw a Rainbow [Edit] (Susan Maughan)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/aWdPSgGE 

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/lHLnk7g4oicgWcx/file

The cover photo was taken backstage at Earl's Court, in London, in January 1964.

The Beatles - The Beatles Uncovered, Volume 14: Mike's Mixes (1964-2007) (A MIKE SOLOF GUEST POST)

I didn't know if I would have time to post this before leaving for my vacation, but I managed to get the packing done in time. So here's another guest post by Mike Solof, another one of his great Beatles remix albums.

The last volume in this series was a bit weird, kind of Mike's B-team choices to go with unlucky Volume 13. But for this volume, he's back to his usual. 

And speaking of usual, Mike has included a PDF with detailed notes on all the songs and their edits, as he usually does. So please give that a read for more information on this album. 

This album is 59 minutes long. 

01 I'm Losing You [Mike's Mix 2025] (John Lennon with Cheap Trick)
02 And I Love Her [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
03 Sour Milk Sea [Mashup Version] [Mike's Mix 2025] (George Harrison, the Beatles & Eric Clapton)
04 Here Comes the Sun [Mike's Mix 2025, Version 2] (Beatles)
05 You've Really Got a Hold on Me [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
06 What You're Doing [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
07 Got to Get You into My Life [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
08 Rain [Take 5, Actual Speed] [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
09 This Song Is about You [Mike's Mix 2025] (Ringo Starr & the Roundheads)
10 I Should Have Known Better [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
11 Any Time at All [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
12 It s All Too Much [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
13 Yellow Submarine [Mostly Song Writing Demo] [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
14 I'm Only Sleeping [Edit of Takes 1 & 2] [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
15 I Want You [She's So Heavy] [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
16 Love You To [Take 7, Rehearsal and Commercial Version] [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
17 Band on the Run [One Hand Clapping Version] [Mike's Mix 2025] (Paul McCartney & Wings) 

https://pixeldrain.com/u/fKuWH4uz

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/5KP7ajM4CZ69ThF/file

The cover photo is something Mike found on the Internet, another AI-generated "what if" picture of John and Paul. 

The Beatles - The Beatles Uncovered, Volume 13: Mike's Mixes (1963-1969) (A MIKE SOLOF GUEST POST)

It's time again for another volume of Beatles remixes by guest poster Mike Solof. 

This one is different than all the previous ones. Basically, Mike decided to use the "unlucky 13" volume to include all the mixes that he was less than totally psyched about. If you read the PDF Mike always includes with these albums, he is surprisingly harsh about his own album. But I listened to this, and it's perfectly fine. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and it's hard to go wrong with any mix of any Beatles song, in my opinion. But because this is like the outtakes from earlier albums he made, it's shorter than usual. Also, he didn't include song-by-song explanations in his PDF.

This album is 41 minutes long.

01 Because [Mike's Mix 4 2025] (Beatles)
02 Baby's in Black [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
03 Can You Take Me Back [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
04 Good Night, Take 10 [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
05 Got to Get You into My Life [Mike's Mix 2 2025] (Beatles)
06 Birthday [Mike's Mix 2024] (Beatles)
07 Hey Bulldog [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
08 I Don't Want to Spoil the Party [Mike's Mix 2024] (Beatles)
09 Dig It [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
10 Dizzy Miss Lizzy [Mike's Mix 2024] (Beatles)
11 Eleanor Rigby [Mike's Mix 2024] (Beatles)
12 For No One [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
13 I'll Cry Instead [Mike's Mix 2024] (Beatles)
14 Roll Over Beethoven [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
15 Rock and Roll Music [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
16 With a Little Help from My Friends, Take 10 [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
17 Things We Said Today [Mike's Mix 2024] (Beatles)
18 Please, Please Me [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/6785v1eV 

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/8DjvSgMg1Z5Q0jV/file

The cover is an image Mike creating using AI. It plays off the whole "Paul is dead" rumor.

Covered: John D. Loudermilk: 1956-2002

Here's another album for my "Covered" series, highlighting the talents of songwriters who got covered a lot. This one is for John D. Loudermilk.

Loudermilk is probably best known for three big hits: "Indian Reservation," a Number One hit in the U.S. for Paul Revere and the Raiders in 1971, "Ebony Eyes," a Number One hit in Britain for the Everly Brothers in 1961, and "Tobacco Road." That last one wasn't as big of a hit, although the Nashville Teens did have a hit with it in 1964. But its one of those songs lots of musical acts love to cover. Wikipedia says it "has since become a standard across several musical genres." 

However, he wrote many more hits than just those three, and his songs have been widely covered. He had a reputation for writing songs that were a little bit quirky and different from the usual.

Loudermilk was born in 1934, and grew up in a musical environment in North Carolina. In fact, two of his cousins made up the Louvin Brothers, a very famous country music duo. The first big hit of one of his songs, "A Rose and a Baby Ruth," happened in 1956, while he was 21 years old and still going to college. After that, he tried having his own career as a performing musician, and he ended up releasing many singles and albums. However, he only saw modest success that way. He had two songs that barely made it into the Top Forty in the U.S., "Sittin' in the Balcony" in 1957, and "Language of Love" in 1961, and some smaller hits. He found much more success having other musical acts record his songs. 

Most of his successes came in the late 1950s and all through the 1960s. He wrote many hits for many different musical acts. This album includes most of his best known songs, but there are plenty more that I didn't include. For instance, he wrote lots of country hits, and I was more selective with those since I'm not such a big country fan. 

Most of the songs here are the original hit versions, if they were hits. I've included a couple of lesser known songs performed by Loudermilk himself, "Road Hog" and "The Jones'," to show some of the diversity of his songwriting talent. The last really big hit he had was "Indian Reservation" in 1971. The four songs that come after than on this album are covers of songs that generally were first released a lot earlier.

It seems he retired from songwriting in the 1970s, and apparently was able to live on royalty checks. That freed him up to pursue passion projects, and he had many. For instance, in the 1990s, he devoted himself to traveling, studying ethnomusicology, chasing hurricanes, and doing research on Native American burial mounds! 

Here's the Wikipedia entry about him, if you want to know more:

John D. Loudermilk - Wikipedia 

But here's a better article that sums up his career:

LifeNotes: Songwriting Great John D. Loudermilk Passes - MusicRow.com 

This album is 50 minutes long.

01 A Rose and a Baby Ruth (George Hamilton IV)
02 Angela Jones (Johnny Ferguson)
03 Ebony Eyes (Everly Brothers)
04 Road Hog (John D. Loudermilk)
05 [He's My] Dreamboat (Connie Francis)
06 Norman (Sue Thompson)
07 Watch Your Step (Brooks O'Dell)
08 Windy and Warm (Ventures)
09 Abilene (George Hamilton IV)
10 Tobacco Road (Nashville Teens)
11 Bad News (Johnny Cash)
12 This Little Bird (Marianne Faithfull)
13 I Wanna Live (Glen Campbell)
14 The Jones' (John D. Loudermilk)
15 Indian Reservation [The Lament of the Cherokee Reservation Indian] (Paul Revere & the Raiders)
16 Break My Mind (Wreckless Eric)
17 You Call It Joggin' [I Call It Runnin' Around] (Mose Allison)
18 Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye (Maria McKee)
19 Turn Me On (Norah Jones)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/h2wgDDB2

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/Y1UEO9WQYOuk47p/file

There are very few color photos of Loudermilk from when he was young. So I had to resort to using the cover photo from the album "Blue Train." I don't know when the photo was taken because it's an archival album.

Elkie Brooks - BBC Sessions, Volume 1: 1964-1977

I recently got a request from a commenter for a BBC album by Elkie Brooks. I was happy to see that, because I had already made three BBC albums for her. It's just that there's a very big backlog on getting albums posted, generally speaking. So here's the first one. It's a collection of BBC studio sessions.

This is a rather strange album in terms of which years the music is from. Elkie Brooks had a solo career as a singer in the 1960s, without much success. Then she was a part of the band Vinegar Joe from 1971 to 1974. That band had two lead singers, her and Robert Palmer. (I've already posted two BBC Vinegar Joe albums, by the way.) Then she resumed her solo career in 1975. So this album has a big time gap. The first ten songs are from 1964 to 1966, and the last five are from 1976 and 1977.

The first song here, "Nothing Left to Do but Cry," is the only one not done for the BBC. It's from the US TV show "Shindig!" In 1964, they did a rare episode from London, and she was a part of that. The next nine songs are from the "Top of the Pops" radio show. All of these have been officially released, on the obscure various artists album "British Beat Girls Live on Air: 1965-1970." The first six songs are from two 1965 sessions and the last three are from a 1966 session. A bunch of these had BBC DJ Brian Matthew talking over the beginnings and ends of songs. So I used the UVR5 audio editing program to wipe out the talking while keeping the music. Those are the four songs with "[Edit]" in their titles.

Brooks had a lot of vocal talent, but she didn't have any hits, so by 1967 she was no longer popular enough to make a prominent BBC radio show like "Top of the Pops." So it wasn't until 1976 when there was another BBC session (or at least one that survived). She performed four songs for DJ John Peel's show. Peel generally liked to promote up and coming musical acts, not those who were stars already. But in 1976, still had yet to be involved with a single hit, so I guess she was still up and coming.

That all changed in 1977, however. She finally had her first hit with "Pearl's a Singer," after more than ten years of failed singles. That made her a star, and many more hits soon followed. But while "Pearl's a Singer" is the last song here, the rest will have to wait for a later volume in this series. 

This album is 45 minutes long. 

01 Nothing Left to Do but Cry (Elkie Brooks)
02 Getting Mighty Crowded (Elkie Brooks)
03 The Way You Do the Things You Do (Elkie Brooks)
04 Yeh Yeh [Edit] (Elkie Brooks)
05 All My Life (Elkie Brooks)
06 Breaking Point [Edit] (Elkie Brooks)
07 I Put a Spell on You (Elkie Brooks)
08 Love's Just a Broken Heart [Edit] (Elkie Brooks)
09 Baby Let Me Love You (Elkie Brooks)
10 Bye Bye Blues [Edit] (Elkie Brooks)
11 Jigsaw Baby (Elkie Brooks)
12 Lilac Wine (Elkie Brooks)
13 Try a Little Love (Elkie Brooks)
14 Where Do We Go from Here [Rich Man's Woman] (Elkie Brooks)
15 Pearl's a Singer (Elkie Brooks)  

https://pixeldrain.com/u/3hQd3mfg

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/oEuU29weTGQCjEV/file

The cover photo is from August 1964. 

Covered: Tony Hatch: 1960-2016

Here's another "Covered" album highlighting a key British pop songwriter from the 1960s: Tony Hatch. He's best known for writing "Downtown" and many other big hits sung by Petula Clark, but his musical legacy goes well beyond that.

Tony Hatch decided he wanted to become a musician at a very young age while growing up in Middlesex, England. After attending choir school in London, he got a job at a music production company when he was only about 15 years old. Starting as a tea boy, he quickly found himself writing songs and producing. His first hit song was "Look for a Star," which was a hit for four different singers in 1960. He wrote that under the alias "Mark Anthony," which he used until 1964. Although he wrote and produced a lot, he didn't have more big successes until 1963, when "Sugar and Spice" was a big hit for the Searchers (under yet another alias) and "Forget Him" was a big hit for Bobby Rydell. (I've included the version of the latter by Gary Lewis and the Playboys, as I like that one better.)

Things drastically changed for Hatch in 1964. He began working with Petula Clark, and had his biggest songwriting success with her straight away with "Downtown." It became one of the biggest hits of the year, hitting Number One in many countries, including the U.S. (though it was kept out of the top spot in Britain due to "I Feel Fine" by the Beatles). Clark was already a veteran hit maker in Britain, having first sung for the BBC in 1942 at the age of seven! But by 1964 she was 32 years old and already starting to seem washed up when "Downtown" broke her in the U.S. and many other countries and totally revitalized her career. Over the next three years, she had nine more Top Twenty hits in the U.S., with most of them written by Hatch.

In fact, Hatch wrote so many hits for Clark that I made an effort to find other versions by other singers, so this didn't end up practically a Petula Clark "best of" album. I found alternate versions for a few, such as "The Other Man's Grass Is Always Greener," "My Love," and "I Couldn't Live without Your Love," but I generally found the Clark versions were the best versions, so I ended up with eight hits sung by Clark.

But Hatch was a very busy guy, because writing and producing songs for Clark was just one of his many jobs in the 1960s. He produced singles and albums for many other musical acts, including everything the Searchers recorded from 1963 to 1967, when they were one of the most popular acts in Britain. He also recorded some lounge music style albums on his own, and even did some singing, though he didn't have any hits that way. He also got involved making music for TV shows and movies. His first big success in that domain was writing the theme to the TV show "Crossroads" in 1964. I've also included "Man Alive" from 1965 and "Neighbors" from 1985 as other similar successes. He even briefly was in the Lower Third, a band led by David Bowie in 1965! (They broke up not long after failing a BBC audition.)

Hatch was never romantically connected to Clark (she was married and had children at the time), but Hatch discovered another female singer, Jackie Trent, and they soon were romantically linked. It turned out that Trent had serious songwriting talent as well as being a pretty vocalist. Hatch and Trent co-wrote "Where Are You Now (My Love)" which hit Number One in Britain in 1965. After that, many hits were co-written by them, including: "I Couldn't Live Without Your Love, "Who Am I," "What Would I Be," "Colour My World," "Don't Sleep in the Subway," "You've Got to Be Loved," "Joanna," and "The Two of Us." They got married in 1967 and stayed married until 2002. Their song "The Two of Us" wasn't a hit in Britain, but a duet version they did together was a Number One hit in Australia in 1967.

Hatch's hits petered out around 1970. However, his career as an entertainer kept going strong. He and Trent focused more on writing for musicals, movie soundtracks, and TV shows. In the 1970s, he also became a panelist on the TV show "New Faces," and kept doing that for many years. He and Trent also hosted their own TV shows together, "Words and Music" and "It's a Musical World." 

In 2020, he was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to music and charity. He is still alive and 85 years old as I write this in 2025.

Here's a Wikipedia article if you want to know more:

Tony Hatch - Wikipedia 

This album is an hour and seven minutes long.

01 Look for a Star (Garry Mills)
02 Sugar and Spice (Searchers)
03 Downtown (Petula Clark)
04 Crossroads (Tony Hatch Orchestra)
05 Forget Him (Gary Lewis & the Playboys)
06 I Know a Place (Petula Clark)
07 Man Alive (Tony Hatch Sound)
08 Round Every Corner (Petula Clark)
09 Where Are You Now [My Love] (Jackie Trent)
10 You're the One (Vogues)
11 A Sign of the Times (Petula Clark)
12 Roundabout (Connie Francis)
13 Heart (Barry & the Remains)
14 Color My World (Petula Clark)
15 Major to Minor (Settlers)
16 Who Am I (Petula Clark)
17 You've Got to Be Loved (Montanas)
18 The Two of Us (Jackie Trent & Tony Hatch)
19 Don't Sleep in the Subway (Petula Clark)
20 Joanna (Scott Walker)
21 The Other Man's Grass Is Always Greener (Vikki Carr)
22 Look at Mine (Petula Clark)
23 My Love (Sonny James)
24 Neighbours Theme (Barry Crocker)
25 I Couldn't Live without Your Love (Mari Wilson)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/S3iEsBeT

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/GnrWVOBNq98u4gR/file

The cover photo is from 1974. 

Covered: Jesse Stone: 1942-1985

Until a few days ago (writing this in May 2025), I had never heard of Jesse Stone. But I found out about him while research possible additional subjects for my Covered series on well-covered songwriters. What really caught my eye was that he was the one who wrote the song "Shake, Rattle and Roll." That was one of the most pivotal songs that launched the popularity of rock and roll music. Rolling Stone Magazine has rated it as 127 on their list of the 500 greatest songs of all time.

But while Stone is best known for that song, he wasn't a songwriting one-hit wonder. Ahmet Ertegun, the head of Atlantic Records, the most important R&B record company in that era, once stated that "Jesse Stone did more to develop the basic rock and roll sound than anybody else."

Stone's music career went way back. He actually came from a family who put on minstrel shows, and began performing at the age of four! His first big success as a songwriter came with the song "Idaho," which sold over a million copies in 1942. That's not really a style of song I like, but I've included it since it was a pivotal song in his career. Things got more interesting as the rock and rock era dawned in the early 1950s. Another big success for him was "Money Honey" by the Drifters, which Rolling Stone Magazine also put on their list of the top 500 greatest songs of all time. "Flip, Flop and Fly" by Big Joe Turner and "Don't Let Go" by Roy Hamilton were also especially big hits.

Stone had his own career as a singer, as well as a producer and arranger. He had a fine voice, but never had any hits of his own. He certainly stood out for being a successful Black songwriter in the 1950s when there were very few others. (Although Otis Blackwell comes to mind as another key exception.) His success as a songwriter petered out in the early 1960s as musical styles change. Most of these songs are the original versions, except for the last three, which came significantly later. He died in 1999 at the age of 97.

Here's the Wikipedia entry on him:

Jesse Stone (musician) - Wikipedia

This album is 47 minutes long. 

01 Idaho (Benny Goodman with Dick Haymes)
02 Cole Slaw [Sorghum Switch] (Louis Jordan)
03 Losing Hand (Ray Charles)
04 Money Honey (Drifters)
05 Shake, Rattle and Roll (Bill Haley & His Comets)
06 As Long as I'm Moving (Ruth Brown)
07 Razzle-Dazzle (Bill Haley & His Comets)
08 Flip, Flop and Fly (Big Joe Turner)
09 Crazy, Crazy Party (Cues)
10 Don't Let Go (Roy Hamilton)
11 Love Is A-Breakin' Out (Roberta Sherwood)
12 Red Hot Love (Billy Williams)
13 Private Eye (Buddy Wilkins)
14 Like a Baby (Elvis Presley)
15 Smack Dab in the Middle (Ray Charles)
16 Your Cash Ain't Nothing but Trash (Steve Miller Band)
17 Liptstick, Powder and Paint (Shakin' Stevens)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/AhbgKxJs

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/BtYyaOvcEyjyV9q/file

I don't know much about the cover photo except that it looks to be a promotional photo from the 1950s. It was originally in black and white, but I colorized it using the Krea AI program.

The Swinging Blue Jeans - BBC Sessions (1963-1970)

I'm prioritizing the posting of rare BBC sessions from the 1960s and 70s lately, especially the ones that are completely unreleased. Here's another case, the Swinging Blue Jeans.

The Swinging Blue Jeans were one of the many British bands that rode the wave of the British Invasion sound in the early 1960s. They started in 1957, and after some personnel changes, they found themselves honing their concert abilities at the Star Club in Hamburg, Germany, at the same time as the Beatles. In late 1963, a cover of the song "Hippy Hippy Shake" reached Number Two in the British singles charts, and suddenly they were stars. They had two more hits in Britain in 1964: "Good Golly, Miss Molly" and "You're No Good," and another in 1966, "Don't Make Me Over."

But all their hits were covers. Unfortunately, the band didn't have big success writing their own songs, although they did put some on their albums and B-sides. Like many bands of their time, they were unable to keep up with changing trends when psychedelic music became all the rage in 1967. So it's not surprising that their BBC sessions petered out that year. However, they never really quit. They made one last BBC appearance in 1970 under a new name, "Music Motor," but their latest single failed to make the charts and they disappeared again. The band is still touring as I write this in 2025, though they no longer have any original members.

Here's a Wikipedia link:

The Swinging Blue Jeans - Wikipedia 

The vast majority of the songs here are from the "Top of the Pops" BBC radio show. None of those have been officially released, although I found a grey market collection of them while searching the Internet. Unfortunately though, those BBC sessions don't include their two biggest hits, "Hippy Hippy Shake" and "Good Golly, Miss Molly." The problem is the Top of the Pops show only started making records of each weekly show and sending them to overseas stations in mid-1964, which is how the recordings survive, and those two songs were hits before that. I would guess it's highly likely they were performed on the BBC, but those versions were lost. 

So I dug deeper, trying to find other versions I could include. I found an unreleased live performance of "Good Golly, Miss Molly" along with "Shake, Rattle and Roll" for the 1964 N.M.E. Poll Winners concert. So I included those. I also stumbled across a 1963 BBC performance, "It's Too Late Now." It survived because it was done for the short-lived BBC radio show "Pop Go the Beatles." All of those shows survived due to the intense interest in the Beatles. But I still couldn't find a good version of "Hippy Hippy Shake" version anywhere. Finally, I discovered that one best of collection included an alternate version recorded in the studio. There was a lot of dead air before the song started, but I left in a bit of the studio chatter to show it indeed is different.

While the Swinging Blue Jeans were never going to rival better known British Invasion bands, they were better than many, and their music is full of that elusive 1960s vibe, which I really like.

This album is 58 minutes long.

01 It's Too Late Now (Swinging Blue Jeans)
02 Hippy Hippy Shake [Alternate Version] (Swinging Blue Jeans)
03 Shake, Rattle and Roll (Swinging Blue Jeans)
04 Good Golly, Miss Molly (Swinging Blue Jeans)
05 It's So Right [Edit] (Swinging Blue Jeans)
06 You're No Good (Swinging Blue Jeans)
07 Johnny B. Goode [Edit] (Swinging Blue Jeans)
08 I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Cry Over You (Swinging Blue Jeans)
09 It Isn't There (Swinging Blue Jeans)
10 One of These Days (Swinging Blue Jeans)
11 Ol' Man Mose (Swinging Blue Jeans)
12 So Much in Love [Edit] (Swinging Blue Jeans)
13 Good Lovin' [Edit] (Swinging Blue Jeans)
14 Crazy 'bout My Baby (Swinging Blue Jeans)
15 Lovey Dovey [Edit] (Swinging Blue Jeans)
16 You Don’t Love Me (Swinging Blue Jeans)
17 I've Got a Girl [Edit] (Swinging Blue Jeans)
18 Don't Make Me Over (Swinging Blue Jeans)
19 What Can I Do Today [Edit] (Swinging Blue Jeans)
20 Tremblin' [Edit] (Swinging Blue Jeans)
21 Bye Bye Baby [Edit] (Swinging Blue Jeans)
22 Don't Go Out into the Rain (Swinging Blue Jeans)
23 It's Alright [Edit] (Swinging Blue Jeans)
24 Open Up Your Heart [Edit] (Swinging Blue Jeans [Music Motor])
25 Happy [Edit] (Swinging Blue Jeans [Music Motor])

https://pixeldrain.com/u/UBh2ic3L

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/UDrhoNB7xu3hTVb/file

I don't know anything about the cover photo except that it's from around 1965.

Covered: Neil Sedaka & Howard Greenfield, Volume 1: 1958-1970

I have to admit that, until very recently, I hadn't given much thought to the musical career of Neil Sedaka. I just assumed he was one of many pop stars that had hits mostly or entirely written by others from the 1960s, like Bobby Darin or Bobby Dee. But it turns out that he not only wrote most of his hits, but he wrote plenty of hits for others. Most of his songwriting was done with Howard Greenfield, who avoided the spotlight and didn't have a recording career of his own. I found enough for two volumes. Here's the first one.

Neil Sedaka grew up in a middle class Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York. From a young age, he developed a talent for playing classical music on the piano. He even won a piano scholarship for the prestigious Julliard's School of Music as a teenager, and he's retrained an interest in playing classical music his entire life. While only 13 years old, he met another teenager living in the same apartment building, Howard Greenfield, who already was an aspiring lyricist and poet. 

The two started writing show tunes, but they soon got turned on to pop music. In 1958, they got hired to be professional songwriters for a company that eventually moved their offices to the Brill Building, a building in New York City where as tremendous number of hit songs were written. But Sedaka also got signed by a record company as a recording artist. He began having hits almost immediately. Eventually, he would sell over 25 million records on his own. Soon, much of Sedaka's time was taken up with promoting and touring to support his recordings. His songwriting with Greenfield continued. But Greenfield had more free time, so Sedaka was okay with Greenfield cowriting with others when Sedaka was too busy. In particular, Greenfield often wrote songs with another professional songwriter named Jack Keller.

The point of my "Covered" series is to focus on songwriting careers. So I've tried hard to avoid having lots of songs here performed by Sedaka. I managed to include only one in this volume, "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do." But I didn't have that self-imposed rule, probably more than half of the songs here would have been performed by him. Sometimes I had to look hard to find good versions of songs that he had a hit with. But there are plenty of songs here that were first hits for others, such as the four performed by Connie Francis.   

From 1958 to 1963, Sedaka and Greenfield had hit after hit after hit, both recorded by Sedaka and by others. I've only included some of the best and most popular ones here. But then in 1964, their songwriting style fell out of fashion, when the Beatles and Bob Dylan drastically changed things. For much of the rest of the 1960s, they struggled. 

However, they still did find some successes. For instance, Greenfield wrote some popular TV show themes with Jack Keller (who I already mentioned above). That's represented by the inclusion of "Theme from Bewitched" here. They also had some successes with songs recorded by the Fifth Dimension. That includes "Puppet Man," which appears on Volume 2. They also had a quirky minor hit in 1970 with "Rainy Day Bells," which has a throwback sound to an earlier era. It was supposedly recorded by the comedic basketball team the Harlem Globetrotters. But in fact it was recorded by some professional soul singers.

But still, by 1970, it looked like most of the successful years of both Sedaka and Greenfield were behind them, due to changing musical trends. However, they would come back with many successes in the 1970s, which will be dealt with in Volume 2. 

Here are the Wikipedia pages of both:

Neil Sedaka - Wikipedia 

Howard Greenfield - Wikipedia

This album is 42 minutes long.

01 Stupid Cupid (Connie Francis)
02 Since You've Been Gone (Clyde McPhatter)
03 My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own (Connie Francis)
04 Stairway to Heaven (Gary Sherbert)
05 Everybody's Somebody's Fool (Connie Francis)
06 Fallin' (Wanda Jackson)
07 Where the Boys Are (Connie Francis)
08 Oh Carol (Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons)
09 Venus in Blue Jeans (Jimmy Clanton)
10 Breaking Up Is Hard to Do (Neil Sedaka)
11 Foolish Little Girl (Cookies)
12 Calendar Boy (Dee Dee Sharp)
13 Get Rid of Him (Dionne Warwick)
14 It Hurts to Be in Love (Gene Pitney)
15 Theme from Bewitched (Warren Barker)
16 Workin' on a Groovy Thing (5th Dimension)
17 Rainy Day Bells (Globetrotters)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/4jCdUgiy

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/haQxxsNreehnreo/file

The cover image is a composite that I made. The picture of Sedaka is from 1962. I don't know when the picture of Greenfield was taken, but clearly it's from when he was young. (He's the one with the visible tie.) Both pictures I started with were in black and white. But I converted them to color with the use of the Kolorize program. 

COVERED: Luther Dixon: 1957-1972

I'm trying to use my Covered series to shine a spotlight on some talented songwriters who aren't widely known. Luther Dixon definitely qualifies as little known. I didn't select a lot of songs written or co-written by him. All I came up with was one relatively short album. But he wrote a fair number of classics. For instance, two of his songs, "Tonight's the Night" by the Shirelles and "Big Boss Man" by Jimmy Reed, have been included on a Rolling Stone Magazine list of the 500 greatest songs of all time.

Dixon was born in Florida in 1931, but grew up in New York City. He was probably lucky his family made the move, since there was more economic opportunity for a Black man in a northern city back in that era of segregation. There were very few successful Black professional songwriters in the 1950s. But while Dixon started out as a member of a doo-wop group, he quickly discovered he preferred songwriting and producing to performing. His first big success was "Why Baby Why," a hit for Pat Boone in 1957. 

 

In 1959, he found a ideal job working as a producer for an up-and-coming record label, Scepter Records. What made the job ideal was that he was given great independence to produce and record as he liked. He soon began working with the Shirelles, and largely pioneered the classic "girl group" sound with his song "Tonight's the Night." (That, presumably, is why Rolling Stone put that song in its top 500 list.) He had a lot of success in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Two of his songs, "Boys" and "Baby, It's You," were recorded by the Beatles. That second one was co-written by  Burt Bacharach.

 
However, the Beatles were also largely to blame for a drastic change in musical tastes away from his 1950s style, along with Bob Dylan and others. He did have some hits in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but few compared to what he'd accomplished before. He died in 2009 at the age of 78. Here's his Wikipedia entry if you want to know more about him:

Luther Dixon - Wikipedia

Generally speaking, I included the original hit versions of each song, in rough chronological order. However, "Baby, It's You" was first a big hit for the Shirelles in 1961, but I already included that version on a Burt Bacharach and Hal David "Covered" album. So instead I used the version by Smith, which also was a big hit in 1969.

This album is 43 minutes long. 

01 Why Baby Why (Pat Boone)
02 Sixteen Candles (Crests)
03 So Close (Brook Benton)
04 Lovin' Up a Storm (Jerry Lee Lewis)
05 Tonight's the Night (Shirelles)
06 Big Boss Man (Jimmy Reed)
07 A Hundred Pounds of Clay (Gene McDaniels)
08 Mama Said (Shirelles)
09 Irresistible You (Bobby Darin)
10 Soldier Boy (Shirelles)
11 Boys (Beatles)
12 Sha La La (Manfred Mann)
13 With This Ring (Platters)
14 Soul Serenade (Aretha Franklin)
15 Baby It's You (Smith)
16 I Don't Wanna Cry (Ronnie Dyson)
17 Funk Factory (Wilson Pickett)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/Hzg8N4eA

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/JUCGAftRRNsKQZT/file

I don't know when or where the cover photo is from. I was lucky to find a good photo of Dixon at all. But I'd guess it's from the 1950s or early 1960s. The original was in black and white, but I converted it to color with the use of the Palette program.

Covered: Norman Gimbel: 1953-1986

It occurred to me the other day that I have dozens of albums in my Covered series ready to go, but I rarely seem to get around to posting them. So I'm going to make more of an effort to post these. I haven't gotten that much feedback on them, but I think they're pretty unique and interesting. So here's an especially interesting and unique songwriter: Norman Gimbel.

Who would have ever imagined that the same person involved in writing "The Girl from Ipanema" also helped write "Killing Me Softly with His Song" and the theme to the "Happy Days" TV show? That's range. I just found his obituary in the New York Times (he died in 2019 at the age of 94), and that called him "wildly versatile," adding that "Any attempt to categorize [his] musical leanings would be complicated." 

Gimbel was first and foremost a lyricist. He rarely wrote songs on his own. Typically, someone else would write the music while he would write the lyrics. But he also had a specialty of taking interesting songs in foreign languages and coming up with English lyrics for them. 

A typical case was "The Girl from Ipanema." It was written in 1962, with music by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Portuguese lyrics by Vinicius de Moraes. In early 1963, Jobim was recording the song in New York City with Joao Gilberto and Stan Getz when they came up with the idea of doing an English version. Gimbel was rushed in to come up with English lyrics on the spot. Gilberto's wife Astrid Gilberto happened to be the only Brazilian there who could speak English well, so she was drafted to sing the song, even though she had no professional singing background whatsoever. The result was a classic that shall be played in elevators until the end of time.

That collaboration worked so well that Gimbel ended up writing English lyrics to many of the biggest bossa nova classics from Brazil, like "How Insensitive (Insensatez)," "Meditation (Meditacao)," "So Nice (Summer Samba)," and "Drinking Water (Agua de Beber)." "Sway" is another classic that was originally in Spanish. "Bluesette" is a case where he wrote lyrics to an instrumental hit by Toots Thielemans.

But Gimbel just didn't have the skill of writing new lyrics for already existing songs. He often worked with other songwriters to create songs from scratch. His first song here is from 1953, and he stayed active songwriting well into the 2000s. He often co-wrote songs for TV shows, movies, and plays. Five of his songs were nominated for Academy Awards or Golden Globes or both. He won an Academy Award in 1979 for "It Goes like It Goes," the theme to the movie "Norma Rae."

In the 1970s, Gimbel often collaborated with Charles Fox on songs (though not exclusively). This led to the writing of "Killing Me Softly with His Song," which Rolling Stone Magazine has put on a list of the top 500 songs of all time. In the early 1970s, Gimbel and Fox signed an aspiring female musician, Lori Lieberman, to a management contract, promising to write songs for her. Lieberman went to see Don McLean in concert. She was so inspired by one of his songs ("Empty Chair," not "American Pie," though he played that too), that she wrote lots of notes for a potential. Excited, she immediately called Gimbel on the phone and shared her ideas. Gimbel honed them into lyrics, including coming up with the "Killing me softly with his song" line. He later said, "Her conversation fed me, inspired me, gave me some language and a choice of words." He then passed the lyrics to Fox, who wrote the music. 

So far, so good. But the controversy is that Gimbel and Fox took full songwriting credit, even though clearly Lieberman had an essential role in creating the song. Lieberman released a version of the song as a single in 1972 (produced by Gimbel and Fox), but it went nowhere. When Roberta Flack released her version in 1973, it went to Number One on the singles chart in the U.S., and Lieberman got nothing for it. (Flack's version was probably much more successful because she came up with a very different arrangement, even changing some of the melody and the chords.) Adding insult to injury, in later decades, both Gimbel and Fox denied that Lieberman had a role in writing the song, and also denied that it was inspired by a Don McLean concert, even though they'd already been quoted many times admitting both things. Presumably they got scared about being sued by Lieberman for a cut of the profits, but it turned out she never sued them.

You can read the whole story here. It paints Gimbel and Fox in a pretty bad light, especially since Gimbel was married yet having a secret affair with the much younger Lieberman at the time:

Killing Me Softly with His Song - Wikipedia

Also, here's his Wikipedia entry, if you want to read more about him in general:

Norman Gimbel - Wikipedia

Anyway, Gimbel may have done some ethically dubious things, but there's no doubt he was a great lyricist. Fox later said of him, "Norman had the extraordinary ability with his lyrics to capture the human condition with never an excessive word to describe a feeling or an action." He then pointed out how Gimbel could often conjure an entire song with its first line, and he offered examples: "Tall and tan and young and lovely," "Strumming my pain with his fingers," and "If it takes forever, I will wait for you."

This album is an hour and seven minutes long.

01 Ricochet [Rick-O-Shay] (Teresa Brewer)
02 Canadian Sunset (Sam Cooke)
03 The Girl from Ipanema (Astrud Gilberto, Stan Getz & Joao Gilberto)
04 I Will Follow Him (Peggy March)
05 How Insensitive [Insensatez] (Astrud Gilberto)
06 Bluesette (Vikki Carr)
07 Meditation [Meditacao] (Doris Day)
08 I Will Wait for You (Connie Francis)
09 So Nice [Summer Samba] (Astrud Gilberto & Walter Wanderley)
10 Watch What Happens (Lena Horne & Gabor Szabo)
11 Drinking Water [Agua de Beber] (Frank Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim)
12 I Got a Name (Jim Croce)
13 Killing Me Softly with His Song (Roberta Flack)
14 Wonder Woman (John Bahler)
15 Happy Days (Pratt & McClain)
16 Sway (Bobby Rydell)
17 Making Our Dreams Come True (Cyndi Grecco)
18 Ready to Take a Chance Again (Barry Manilow)
19 Different Worlds (Maureen McGovern)
20 It Goes like It Goes (Jennifer Warnes)
21 Only Love (Nana Mouskouri)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/P2BYQLtv

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/MpTyosybz70Db69/file

Gimbel was very private and rarely photographed. The best I could find was a black and white photo from a 1984 awards ceremony. I colorized it using the Palette program, then improved it with the Krea AI program.