Covered: Denny Randell & Sandy Linzer: 1964-1998

Here's another songwriting duo highlighted for my "Covered" series: Denny Randell and Sandy Linzer. I wouldn't be surprised at all if you have never heard of them. I hadn't either, until recently. But while they didn't write any massive hits, they have enough hits for a solid album.

Randell and Linzer were both born in 1941. They were introduced to each other in 1963, and immediately began co-writing songs. The first song here, "Dawn (Go Away)," was written by Linzer with Bob Gaudio, a member of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, and an impressive songwriter in his own right. I've already posted a "Covered" album for the Bob Crewe and Bob Gaudio songwriting team. 

Randell and Linzer wrote a lot of songs for Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, sometimes with Gaudio. I've included three such songs here (and a Franki Valli solo one). But "Working My Way Back to You" was also a hit for Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons in 1966. I included the 1979 version by the Spinners instead because that was a much bigger hit. In fact, it was the biggest hit this songwriting team ever had, reaching Number One in Britain and Number Two in the U.S. 

In a similar way, "Can't Get Enough of You Baby" was a small hit for Question Mark and the Mysterians in 1967, but not enough to make the U.S. Top Forty. I included the 1998 version by Smash Mouth instead, since that was a bigger hit, making the Top Forty chart.

Probably another success was the song "I Believe in You and Me." (Linzer wrote it with someone else.) Whitney Houston had a Top Five hit in the U.S. with it in 1996. But, frankly, I find Houston's typically histrionic over-singing hard to take. It turns out the song was first released by the Four Tops in 1982. So I've included that version instead. It wasn't a hit, but the singing is much better.

I've been posting a lot of "Covered" albums featuring songwriters who got started in the early or mid-1960s. Nearly all of them stopped having hits by the end of the 1970s, due to changing musical trends (except for later covers of their earlier songs). But Randell and Linzer were a rarity in that they kept writing more hits through the end of the 1980s. The last original hit here is "Talk It Over" by Grayson Hugh in 1989.

However, their songwriting partnership petered out at the end of the 1970s. The vast majority of the songs up to and including "Native New Yorker" in 1977 were written by both of them. But the songs that come after that were written by one of them or the other, usually with other songwriting partners (except for tracks 12 and 17, which I mentioned above are not the original hit versions). 

Both Randell and Linzer also worked in other aspects of the music business, for instance producing albums, and promoting and developing the musical careers of some acts. Both of them are still alive, and about 85 years old, as I write this in 2026.

This album is 57 minutes long. 

01 Dawn [Go Away] (Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons)
02 A Lover's Concerto (Toys)
03 Let's Hang On (Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons)
04 Attack (Toys)
05 Opus 17 [Don't You Worry 'bout Me] (Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons)
06 I'll Be Back Up on My Feet (Monkees)
07 Penny Arcade (Cyrkle)
08 Breakin' Down the Walls of Heartache (Johnny Johnson & the Bandwagon)
09 You Can Do Magic (Limmie & Family Cookin’)
10 Swearin' to God (Frankie Valli)
11 Native New Yorker (Odyssey)
12 Working My Way Back to You - Forgive Me Girl (Spinners)
13 Use It Up and Wear It Out (Odyssey)
14 I Believe in You and Me (Four Tops)
15 Fresh (Kool & the Gang)
16 Talk It Over (Grayson Hugh)
17 Can't Get Enough of You Baby (Smash Mouth)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/xSguvDEM

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/revo89NczNfZKK9/file

I guess it's pretty obvious that the cover is two photos put together in Photoshop, but I couldn't find any images of the two of them in the same frame. That's Sandy Linzer on the left, with the suit and tie, in 1977. I don't know the date of the Denny Randell photo on the right, but it's probably from the 1960s. 

Covered: Barry Mason & Les Reed: 1964-2002

Here's another album for my "Covered" series, highlighting the talents of singer-songwriters. This time, I'm tackling the songwriting team of Barry Mason and Les Reed.

I have to admit that I'm not terribly impressed by the songwriting of Barry Mason and Les Reed. But I'm posting this for two reasons. One, they wrote an undeniable number of big hit songs in the 1960s and 70s, so they shouldn't be forgotten. But also, they were part of a small group of professional songwriters working in Britain at the time, often writing songs with others, so they need to be included as part of that scene. At times, one or the other co-wrote songs with Geoff Stephens, Roger Greenaway, Roger Cook, Tony Macaulay, John Carter, Ken Lewis, Don Black, Mitch Murray, and Peter Callander. It's probable that you've heard of few to none of those songwriters. That was the case for me until I started making the "Covered" albums. But I'll bet you know a lot of their hit songs. I plan to post "Covered" albums for all of those other songwriters I just mentioned as well.

Both Mason and Reed were born in small towns in England in 1935. (Mason was born in Wigan and Reed was born in Woking.) Mason got started in profressional songwriting do to working as a producer. He later explained, "I met this boy called Tommy Bruce and I spent my last few pounds making a demo of him singing an old Fats Waller song, 'Ain't Misbehavin'' - and he had a hit. Suddenly, I was his manager, not knowing anything about the business. But the important thing was, I was in the business." 

However, Les Reed had the first big hit. "Tell Me When," written with Geoff Stephens, was a hit for the Applejacks in early 1964. Reed would go on to write many more songs with Stephens, though not as man as with Mason. Both of them worked with other songwriters from the start, and kept doing so. For instance, Mason co-wrote "She Just Satisfies" with Jimmy Page, future lead guitarist for Led Zeppelin. It was a failed solo single for Page in 1965.

I don't know how Mason and Reed met, but by 1964 they were writing songs together. Their first hit song together was "Here It Comes Again." The Fortunes took it to Number Four in Britain in 1965. After that, they began writing together more consistently, while still also working with other songwriters. In 1965, Reed had his first massive hit with "It's Not Unusual," which hit Number One in Britain and turned Tom Jones into a big star. It was co-written with Gordon Mills, a songwriter who also was Jones's manager. A year later, he had another banger with "There's a Kind of Hush," co-written with Geoff Stephens. Herman's Hermits had the big hit in 1966, but I chose to include a 1971 version by the Carpenters instead, since I put the Herman's Hermits version on a different "Covered" album. 

Their first really huge smash hit together was "The Last Waltz." Although Engelbert Humperdinck only had a Top Forty hit with it in the U.S., it Britain it went all the way to Number One in 1967. It stayed on top for five weeks, making it one of the best selling songs of the year.

I'm not a fan of "The Last Waltz." It's a sappy love song, oversung by Humperdinck, and overproduced, with lots of strings. I find it mystifying it dominated the charts for a portion of 1967, when that was one of the best years of hit music ever, in my opinion. I've included it because it's such a big hit, and so pivotal in their careers. But Mason and Reed began writing a lot of hit songs in that same style. I've elected to not include many of them, even when they were big hits, if I wasn't that impressed with them as songs.

Most of the songs here were co-written by Mason and Reed. I'll only mention the other exceptions. "Daughter of Darkness" was another one written by Mason and Stephens. "A Man without Love" was written by Mason with three other songwriters.n"Love Me Tonight" was written by Mason with two others. "Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)" was written by Mason and Tony Macaulay. I put the 1970 hit version by Edison Lighthouse and a "Covered" album for Macaulay, so I chose a interesting, non-hit version here. "There Goes My First Love" was written by Mason with Roger Greenaway.

Mason and Reed had most of their success in the mid-1960s until the mid-1970s, both together and with other songwriters. Their songwriting partnership faded away around the same time the hits slowed down. Reed moved into writing more for movie soundtracks and musical plays. Mason continued writing the occasional hit with other songwriters. He even co-wrote a Top 40 song as late as 2002, which is the last song here, "Tell Me Why." Reed died in 2019 at the age of 83. Mason died in 2021 at the age of 85.

Here's the Wikipedia link for Mason:

Barry Mason - Wikipedia

And here's the one for Reed:

Les Reed (songwriter) - Wikipedia  

This album is 51 minutes long.

01 Don't Turn Around (Merseybeats)
02 Tell Me When (Applejacks)
03 Here It Comes Again (Fortunes)
04 It's Not Unusual (Tom Jones)
05 Leave a Little Love (Lulu)
06 The Last Waltz (Engelbert Humperdinck)
07 Delilah (Tom Jones)
08 Kiss Me Goodbye (Petula Clark)
09 Les Bicyclettes de Belsize (Johnny Worth)
10 Love Me Tonight (Tom Jones)
11 A Man without Love (Engelbert Humperdinck)
12 Daughter of Darkness (Tom Jones)
13 There Goes My First Love (Drifters)
14 Good Love Can Never Die (Alvin Stardust)
15 There's a Kind of Hush (Carpenters)
16 Love Grows [Where My Rosemary Goes] (Freedy Johnston)
17 Tell Me Why (Declan Galbraith)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/hVs6Rga9

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/0Qd4g12HWY8WrK4/file

The cover image shows Barry Mason on the left and Les Reed on the right. I took two different pictures and put them together, using Photoshop. The Mason one is from 1966 and the Reed one is from 1967. Both were originally in black and white, but I colorized them with the use of the Kolorize program.

Covered: Van McCoy, Best Of: 1962-1985

Here's another artist for my "Covered" series. To remind you, this highlights the talents of songwriters by collecting cover versions of their songs. This time, the focus is on Van McCoy.

These days, McCoy is probably seen by many as a one-hit wonder, because he had one huge hit under his own name: "The Hustle." This instrumental was a huge hit in 1975. It went to Number One on the main U.S. singles chart, as well as on the soul chart. It reached at least the Top Ten in most other countries as well, including hitting Number Three in Britain. 

That was his only Top 40 hit in the U.S., so technically that makes him a "one-hit wonder" in that country. But he did have other hits in other countries. For instance, he had three more Top 40 hits in Britain. But more important, he had a very long and successful career as a songwriter and producer. The focus here will be just on the songwriting part though.

 

McCoy was born in Washington, D.C., in 1940. He started playing piano and singing in a church choir at a young age. He began writing songs at the age of 12. Eventually, he would have 700 of his songs recorded and released by himself or other musical artists. He started to study psychology at Howard University, but dropped out in 1960 to pursue a music career. 

 

He formed his own record company from the very start. He had a little success with his own recordings. His first single, "Mr. D.J.," was a minor hit in 1960. But he soon found more success writing and producing songs for others. He mostly concentrated on that, though he continued to release singles under his own name. His first really big hit as a songwriter was "Baby, I'm Yours." Singer Barbara Lewis took it to the Top Ten in 1965. He continued to write many more hits in the 1960s and 1970s. I've included the ones I liked the best here. Note these aren't necessarily all the biggest hits on the charts.

 

In the 1970s, he began focusing more on his own career. In the 1960s, he only released one album under his own name. But in the 1970s, he released ten. His solo career really took over after his 1975 hit "The Hustle." But he continued writing and producing songs for others as well. Unfortunately, his career was cut short, because he died of a heart attack on June 29, 1979, at the age of 39.

 

Here's his Wikipedia entry if you want to know more. It's surprisingly detailed compared to other similar entries:

 

Van McCoy - Wikipedia 

This album is an hour and nine minutes long. 

01 Stop the Music (Shirelles)
02 Getting Mighty Crowded (Betty Everett)
03 Giving Up (Gladys Knight & the Pips)
04 Baby, I'm Yours (Barbara Lewis)
05 It’s Starting to Get to Me Now (Irma Thomas)
06 Where Does That Leave Me Now (Nancy Wilson)
07 Before and After (Chad & Jeremy)
08 Let It All Out (O'Jays)
09 Stop and Get a Hold on Myself (Gladys Knight & the Pips)
10 When You're Young and in Love (Marvelettes)
11 You're Gonna Make Me Love You (Sandi Sheldon)
12 The Way to a Woman’s Heart (Billy T. Soul)
13 I Get the Sweetest Feeling (Jackie Wilson)
14 So Soon (Aretha Franklin)
15 Lost and Found (Kenny Carlton)
16 Nothing Worse than Being Alone (Ad Libs)
17 Right on the Tip of My Tongue (Brenda & the Tabulations)
18 Let Me Down Easy (Derrick Harriott)
19 The Hustle (Van McCoy)
20 This Is It (Melba Moore)
21 Heavy Love (David Ruffin)
22 Baby Don't Change Your Mind (Gladys Knight & the Pips)
23 Sweet Bitter Love (Aretha Franklin)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/pgC1na27

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/6J8Pg2jDSyrxSmE/file

The cover photo dates to 1975. I assume it's from an awards ceremony, but I don't know the details. The original was in black and white, but I colorized it with the help of the Kolorize program.

Dionne Warwick - Dionne, Burt and Hal: The Definitive Songbook, Bonus Volume: Foriegn Language Versions, 1964-1967 (A Mike Solof Guest Post)

Here's the finale for guest poster Mike Solof's collection of all the songs Dionne Warwick sang that were written by Hal David and/or Burt Bacharach. This is a bonus volume. That's because, while Mike was putting his collection together, he noticed that Warwick sang a number of Bacharach-David songs in foreign languages. There weren't a lot, but it's enough for a short album. 

Everything here is from 1964 to 1967. She sang three songs in French, then two songs in German, and finally four songs in Italian. All were released as singles in those countries. So this is an interesting curiosity, especially if you speak any of those languages.

This album is 28 minutes long. 

01 Un Toit ne Suffit Pas [A House Is Not a Home] [French Version] (Dionne Warwick)
02 Reach Out for Me [French Version] (Dionne Warwick)
03 How Many Days of Sadness [French Version] (Dionne Warwick)
04 You'll Never Get to Heaven [If You Break My Heart] [German Version] (Dionne Warwick)
05 Walk On By [German Version] (Dionne Warwick)
06 A House Is Not a Home [Italian Version] (Dionne Warwick)
07 The Windows of the World [Italian Version] (Dionne Warwick)
08 Walk Little Dolly [Italian Version] (Dionne Warwick)
09 Walk On By [Italian Version] (Dionne Warwick)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/bD6LzqHD

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/Mcve2ptBTCaZJi9/file

The cover photo was taken near the Nice Jazz Festival in Nice, France, on July 11, 1987. Since this is a foreign language version album, we wanted a photo of her in one of the foreign countries here, though unfortunately you totally can't tell that from the photo.

Dionne Warwick - Dionne, Burt and Hal: The Definitive Songbook, Volume 2: 1965 (A Mike Solof Guest Post)

Here is the second volume collecting all the songs Dionne Warwick written by Hal David and/or Burt Bacharach. Like all the other albums in this series, this was mainly put together by guest poster Mike Solof.

Since I’m writing this on vacation, I’ll keep the comments short. Enjoy.

This album is 44 minutes long. 

019 Are You There [With Another Girl] (Dionne Warwick)
020 Don't Go Breaking My Heart (Dionne Warwick)
021 Don't Say I Didn't Tell You So (Dionne Warwick)
022 Forever My Love (Dionne Warwick)
023 If I Ever Make You Cry (Dionne Warwick)
024 Here I Am (Dionne Warwick)
025 Is There Another Way to Love Him (Dionne Warwick)
026 Wives and Lovers (Dionne Warwick)
027 Looking with My Eyes (Dionne Warwick)
028 In Between the Heartaches (Dionne Warwick)
029 Only the Strong, Only the Brave (Dionne Warwick)
030 Window Wishing (Dionne Warwick)
031 How Many Days of Sadness (Dionne Warwick)
032 That's Not the Answer (Dionne Warwick)
033 How Can I Hurt You (Dionne Warwick)
034 Long Day, Short Night (Dionne Warwick)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/dC4gq6mc

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/eODweEN1JWe1Yrp/file 

The cover photo was taken in Hyde Park, in London, in 1965. 

The Rising Sons - Ash Grove, Los Angeles, CA, 5-30-1965

The Rising Sons were a band in the mid-1960s that looked like they were headed for big things. But they broke up and never even released an album. However, the two main band members, Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder, both went on to have long successful solo careers. In 2021, I posted a short concert bootleg of this band recorded in 1966. Now, here's another one from 1965.

Given this band was only in existence from 1965 to 1966, and never achieved any commercial success, it's a miracle we have any live music from them at all. But it turns out there are multiple bootlegs with stellar sound quality, due to the fact that the often performed at the Ash Grove, a small club in Los Angeles, and the people running that venue often made soundboard recordings of the concerts there.

However, there was one big problem: these in-house recordings were often done in a sloppy manner, probably someone just turning the recording device on and walking away. As a result, the balances were usually off. For instance, with the Rising Sons concert I previously posted, the prominent harmonica playing by Taj Mahal was buried in the mix. That was the same problem here, with the harmonica sounded like it was recorded several rooms away from everything else. That's why, even though I had these recordings, I only posted the 1966 one.

Happily, now it's 2026, and audio editing technology has improved by leaps and bounds since 2021. The bad mix of that 1966 concert bugged me. So I went back and fixed the buried harmonica problem. Here's a link where you can get the fixed version:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-rising-sons-ash-grove-los-angeles.html

Then I did the same thing here: I used the MVSEP program to separate out just the harmonica from everything else. Then I boosted that volume relative to everything else. While I was at it, I made some other fixes. For instance, Taj Mahal did most of the singing, but sometimes he would sing little asides with his mouth away from the microphone. In many cases, I was able to fix those so you could clearly hear those bits. Now, in my opinion, the sound quality here is really impressive, especially for 1965, when bootleg recording was rare and usually poorly done.

This recording is actually a combination of four different concerts. Most of it, tracks 1 through 20, is from May 30, 1965. But I had a few extra bits from partially recorded sets on other nights, so I added those in at the end. Tracks 21 through 24 are from May 29th. Tracks 25 to 30 are from May 31st. And the last two tracks, 31 to 32, are from June 29th.

All the studio recordings by this band were finally released an album in 1992, with the title "Rising Sons Featuring Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder." But quite a few of the songs here were not recorded for that album, including an original by band member Jesse Lee Kincad, called "I'll Always Be There." (There actually were two versions of that song in these recordings, but I only included one. It was the only case of there being a duplicate.) 

These concerts used to be available at Wolfgang's Vault. But that site stopped working a few months ago. And they never spread very far. For instance, none of this music can be found at SoulseekQT as a type this, and SoulseekQT has an amazing amount of stuff. So hopefully this post will put this music into wider public circulation. 

If you aren't familiar with this band, you should check this out. Their sound doesn't seem that unique today, but that's because so many other bands went on to make music in a similar vein in later years. According to AllMusic, Rising Sons' "languid, bluesy, folksy sort of sound anticipated future recordings by outfits like Moby Grape, Buffalo Springfield, the Grateful Dead, and even the southern rock Allman Brothers, and the country-rock Byrds."

This album is an hour and 21 minutes long. 

01 Crawling King Snake (Rising Sons)
02 talk (Rising Sons)
03 It's All Over Now (Rising Sons)
04 talk (Rising Sons)
05 Statesboro Blues (Rising Sons)
06 talk (Rising Sons)
07 Walking the Dog (Rising Sons)
08 talk (Rising Sons)
09 Hambone - Band Introductions (Rising Sons)
10 Meet Me in the Bottom (Rising Sons)
11 talk (Rising Sons)
12 Baby, What Do You Want Me to Do (Rising Sons)
13 talk (Rising Sons)
14 I'm a King Bee (Rising Sons)
15 talk (Rising Sons)
16 I'll Always Be There (Rising Sons)
17 Fanny Mae (Rising Sons)
18 Corrina, Corrina (Rising Sons)
19 talk (Rising Sons)
20 Dust My Blues (Rising Sons)
21 talk (Rising Sons)
22 Too High to Fall (Rising Sons)
23 talk (Rising Sons)
24 Hush Hush (Rising Sons)
25 Who Do You Think You Is (Rising Sons)
26 talk (Rising Sons)
27 Blues in Three-Four Time [Instrumental] (Rising Sons)
28 talk (Rising Sons)
29 So Fine (Rising Sons)
30 Little Red Rooster (Rising Sons)
31 talk (Rising Sons)
32 Grown So Ugly (Rising Sons)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/Fv7xM9z6

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/LRYE8EbaSG5vtjx/file

The cover photo is from a photo shoot either in 1965 or 1966. The original was in black and white, but I colorized it with the help of the Kolorize program. Taj Mahal is the Black man wearing a hat, and Ry Cooder has a hand on his shoulder.

Various Artists - The Big TNT Show, Moulin Rouge, Los Angeles, CA, 11-30-1965

A few days ago (writing this in February 2026), I posted the audio to the "TAMI Show" concert. As I mentioned in my write-up, that's one of the all time great 1960s concerts, which was made into a movie in 1964. The people who made that movie basically repeated the formula in 1965 with this one, "The Big T.N.T. Show." Although this concert isn't as famous as the TAMI Show, I'd argue the star power and performances here are even better.

Just like the TAMI Show, what sets this apart from other musical shows on TV and the like is that there was no lip-syncing. Everything was done live in front of an audience. Actually, each act performed their set three times, and then the film footage from the best versions were used for the movie. 

By the way, technically "T.N.T." was an acronym for "Tune n' Talent," but clearly they just wanted to call it "T.N.T." for the "explosive" connotation, and then made up an acronym for it.

The idea was to use the most popular music acts popular with kids at the time. Musical trends had changed a lot in the year since the TAMI Show. One big change was that folk-rock was suddenly all the rage. So this concert had some folk music acts that had been lacking in the TAMI Show. In addition to folk rock like the Lovin' Spoonful and the Byrds, Joan Baez and Donovan performed in solo acoustic mode. One curiosity is that Baez sang "You Lost that Lovin' Feeling," which didn't seem like her type of song at all. But the music in the show was directed by legendary producer Phil Spector, and that's a song he actually co-wrote, so my guess is he got her to sing it.

Additional, some classic soul acts were included, like Ray Charles, Bo Diddley, Ike and Tina Turner. Country was represented by Roger Miller, and pop by Petula Clark. It was a very diverse line-up, with no repeats from the TAMI Show. 

It seems like this movie was commercially successful, as was the TAMI Show. So it's a shame no similar film was made in 1966 or after. However, I read one mention that the movie wasn't as successful as the TAMI Show. This was blamed on the fact that it was edited and released so quickly that there wasn't time for proper production. Remarkably, the movie was in the theaters by the end of 1965, less than a month after the concert!

Also, perhaps, with musical trends changing so fast, it grew too difficult to bring these many big stars together for one concert. These sorts of variety concerts with lots of acts performing short sets were rapidly fading away at the time, replaced by having just a couple of acts performing much longer sets.

Just as I did with the TAMI Show, I converted the video to audio format, then chopped it into mp3s. The sound quality was a little bit better with this one, so I didn't have to make any adjustments. 

Here's the Wikipedia article:

The Big T.N.T. Show - Wikipedia 

Here's an interesting article that discusses both this movie and the TAMI Show:

https://cavehollywood.com/the-t-a-m-i-show-and-the-big-t-n-t-show-out-on-blu-ray-dvd/

This album is an hour and 30 minutes long. 

01 [I Can't Get No] Satisfaction [Instrumental Version] (David McCallum)
02 What'd I Say (Ray Charles)
03 Downtown (Petula Clark)
04 Do You Believe in Magic (Lovin' Spoonful)
05 You Didn't Have to Be So Nice (Lovin' Spoonful)
06 Hey Bo Diddley (Bo Diddley)
07 Bo Diddley (Bo Diddley)
08 500 Miles (Joan Baez)
09 There but for Fortune (Joan Baez)
10 Georgia on My Mind (Ray Charles)
11 Let the Good Times Roll (Ray Charles)
12 talk (Donovan)
13 You've Lost that Lovin' Feeling (Joan Baez)
14 Be My Baby (Ronettes)
15 Shout (Ronettes)
16 Dang Me (Roger Miller)
17 talk (Roger Miller)
18 Engine Engine No. 9 (Roger Miller)
19 King of the Road (Roger Miller)
20 talk (Roger Miller)
21 England Swings (Roger Miller)
22 talk (David McCallum)
23 Turn, Turn, Turn [To Everything There Is a Season] (Byrds)
24 The Bells of Rhymney (Byrds)
25 Mr. Tambourine Man (Byrds)
26 You're the One (Petula Clark)
27 My Love (Petula Clark)
28 talk (David McCallum)
29 Universal Soldier (Donovan)
30 Summer Day Reflection Song (Donovan)
31 Bert's Blues (Donovan)
32 Sweet Joy (Donovan)
33 Shake (Ike & Tina Turner)
34 A Fool in Love (Ike & Tina Turner)
35 It's Gonna Work Out Fine (Ike & Tina Turner)
36 Please, Please, Please (Ike & Tina Turner)
37 Goodbye, So Long (Ike & Tina Turner)
38 Tell the Truth (Ike & Tina Turner)
39 1-2-3 [Instrumental Version] (David McCallum)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/dTkPhgcn

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/Kjs0z43hqpeffYb/file

The main picture in the cover art shows Tina Turner in this exact concert. The original was in black and white, but I colorized it with the help of the Kolorize program. The text and design at the top and sides are taken from a concert poster. I did some repositioning and cleaning up for those areas.

Dusty Springfield - Live in Concert: 1964-1966

Dusty Springfield was one of the most popular singers in Britain in the 1960s and early 1970s. For instance, in 1966, she won both the Melody Maker and N.M.E. polls for best female singer. But despite that popularity, there are shockingly few live recordings from her, even though she toured a fair amount. One official live album, "Live at the Royal Albert Hall," has been released. But, in my opinion, that was from the worst time in her career for a live album, 1979, at the height of the disco era and at a down era for her career. True, there are lots of recordings of TV and radio broadcasts, and I've compiled those as best I could. But in terms of actual concert recordings, there's almost nothing, especially from her 1960s and early 1970s peak era.

I decided to try to change there. When it comes to unreleased concert recordings, there also is very, very little. But I did find a few things from 1964 to 1966. Putting them together, it's just enough for a relatively short live album.

The first section of this concert comes from a concert in Melbourne, Australia, in 1964. She was part of a package tour of Australia with Johnny O'Keefe, Gene Pitney, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and Brian Poole and the Tremeloes. An hour long concert was filmed for Australian TV. Decades later, this has been released on DVD only, under the title "The Liverpool Sound." I was able to find most of that, but not quite all. I'm missing the first song, "I Only Want to Be with You." So, for that, I used a live performance of that song she did for the Ed Sullivan Show. This Australian concert makes up the first 13 minutes of this album, tracks one through eight. The last song, "When the Saints Go Marching In," was the finale, where each of the lead singers got to sing a verse.

The other two sections here come from annual N.M.E. concerts. "N.M.E." stands for "New Musical Express," one of the main music-centric publications in Britain in that era. They had a yearly poll winners concert that brought together the biggest names in music at the time. I've already posted the full 1965 concert, which you can get here:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2022/01/various-artists-nme-poll-winners.html

I have all of what's available of the 1964 and 1966 concerts, and I'd like to post those soon. Springfield wasn't featured in the 1964 one. But I've included her 1965 and 1966 performances here. Tracks nine through 13 are from the 1965 concert, and tracks 14 to 18 are from the 1966 concert. All of these N.M.E. concerts remain unreleased. Springfield's short 1965 set is repeated on the N.M.E. concert I linked to above, but I think there's value in putting all her concert recordings from the era together here.

Luckily, there are no repeats of songs from these three sources. That's probably because they were about a year apart each, so she had different hits to promote each year. When it comes to sound quality, this isn't amazing, but it's about as good as you could expect for the era. Like the Australian concert, the N.M.E. concerts were broadcast on T.V., so that's why we have recordings that survive.

This album is 32 minutes long. 

001 I Only Want to Be with You (Dusty Springfield)
002 talk (Dusty Springfield)
003 Stay Awhile (Dusty Springfield)
004 The Love of a Boy (Dusty Springfield)
005 talk (Dusty Springfield)
006 Shake It Up (Dusty Springfield)
007 talk (Johnny O'Keefe, Gene Pitney, Brian Poole & Dusty Springfield)
008 When the Saints Go Marching In (Johnny O'Keefe, Gene Pitney, Brian Poole & Dusty Springfield)
009 talk (Dusty Springfield)
010 Dancing in the Street (Dusty Springfield)
011 talk (Dusty Springfield)
012 Mockingbird (Dusty Springfield)
013 I Can't Hear You [No More] (Dusty Springfield)
014 talk (Dusty Springfield)
015 In the Middle of Nowhere (Dusty Springfield)
016 You Don't Have to Say You Love Me (Dusty Springfield)
017 talk (Dusty Springfield)
018 Shake (Dusty Springfield)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/PkcQGKmR

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/xmJw8otVzVvSA3I/file

The cover photo is from 1965, but I don't know the details beyond that.

Covered: Shel Silverstein - Volume 1: 1963-1972

Here's the next songwriter in my Covered series: Shel Silverstein. To say Silverstein was a colorful character is putting it mildly. Among his many talents was songwriting. I've found enough good covers of his songs for two volumes. Here's the first one.

Silverstein was born in Chicago in 1930, and raised there. He went to college, then spent a few years in the U.S. army. After that, he started to get known for his cartoons published in magazines. He especially had many of his cartoons published in Playboy Magazine, from the 1950s into the 1970s. He developed another creative career as the author of children's books. He eventually sold 20 million books. His most acclaimed books include "The Giving Tree," "Where the Sidewalk Ends," and "A Light in the Attic." He also had success writing for plays, movies, and TV shows.

So he was a creative Renaissance Man. But out focus here is on his songwriting. He was a music performer too, and released many albums, with the first one coming out in 1959. But he had a gruff voice with limited range. Also, it seems he very rarely performed in public, probably because he had so many other creative projects going on to want to go on long tours. So he was much more successful having others cover his songs.

His songwriting career started fairly slowly. He only had a few successes for most of the 1960s. But that changed drastically in 1969, when Johnny Cash had a huge hit with "A Boy Called Sue." That was such an unusual song, with lots of comedy, that many other musical acts went looking for other songs he'd written. It turns out his biggest fans were the band Dr. Hook. Their debut album "Doctor Hook," released in 1972, consisted entirely of songs written by Silverstein. And their second album, "Sloppy Seconds," released later in 1972, also consisted entirely of his songs! Those albums gave Dr. Hook their first two big hits, "Sylvia's Mother" and "The Cover of the Rolling Stone."

That takes us to the end of 1972. I'll write more about him in the second and last volume.

This album is 46 minutes long. 

01 Hey Nelly Nelly (Judy Collins)
02 In the Hills of Shiloh (Modern Folk Quartet)
03 25 Minutes to Go (Johnny Cash)
04 The Mermaid (Glen Yarbrough)
05 Boa Constrictor (Johnny Cash)
06 The Unicorn (Irish Rovers)
07 A Boy Named Sue (Johnny Cash)
08 Once More With Feeling (Jerry Lee Lewis)
09 One's on the Way (Loretta Lynn)
10 I Call That True Love (Dr. Hook)
11 The Taker (Kris Kristofferson)
12 Freakin' at the Freakers' Ball (Dr. Hook)
13 On Susan's Floor (Gordon Lightfoot)
14 Sylvia's Mother (Dr. Hook)
16 The Cover of Rolling Stone (Dr. Hook)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/Vdghqyqe

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/YfWSztH9v8E8ui0/file

The cover image is from 1972.

The Small Faces - BBC Sessions, Volume 1: 1965-1966

Back in early 2021, I posted two BBC albums for the Small Faces. (Technically, they were just "Small Faces," but I can't help use the "the.") I have deleted those today, because I'm doing a complete overhaul, and turning two albums into three. Here's the first one.

This overhaul wouldn't have happened had it not been for Prof. Stoned and his music blog. I highly recommend you check it out, here:

Prof Stoned: Rare & Deleted 

He shares my interest in BBC recordings from the 1960s and early 1970s. An official BBC album has been released for this band, simply titled "The BBC Sessions." But Prof. Stoned has dug deep and found more and more that that album missed. Eventually, I noticed there was enough for this overhaul. So all the songs I'm adding for the first time are thanks to that blog.

As it so happens, the vast majority of the tracks on this first volume are from the official BBC album. The only exceptions are tracks 4 ("You Really Got a Hold on Me") and 14 ("My Mind's Eye"). Everything here is from BBC studio sessions, though the two unreleased tracks were performed before small audiences. (I've removed the crowd noise on those, using MVSEP.) As usual, you can look at the mp3 tags for each song for more details about where and when the songs were recorded.

If you look at the song list, you'll see several songs with "[Edit]" in their titles. That's due to the usual problem from that era of BBC DJs talking over the music. I always like removing that talking, using the UVR5 or MVSEP programs. But Prof. Stoned feels otherwise, so if you want hear the DJs, check out his Small Faces collection.

Since all but two songs are officially released, the sound quality is excellent. The sound quality is a bit rougher for those, but still acceptable. Also, one song here, "Jump Back," is also on the stray tracks album "Grow Your Own," because the only recording the band did of it is from one of their BBC sessions. 

This album is 37 minutes long.

01 Whatcha Gonna Do about It (Small Faces)
02 Jump Back (Small Faces)
03 Baby Don't You Do It [Don't Do It] (Small Faces)
04 You Really Got a Hold on Me [Edit] (Small Faces)
05 Shake [Edit] (Small Faces)
06 Sha-La-La-La-Lee (Small Faces)
07 You Need Love [You Need Loving] [Edit] (Small Faces)
08 Hey Girl (Small Faces)
09 E Too D [Edit] (Small Faces)
10 One Night Stand [Edit] (Small Faces)
11 You Better Believe It [Edit] (Small Faces)
12 Understanding (Small Faces)
13 All or Nothing (Small Faces)
14 My Mind's Eye (Small Faces)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/aWZsVwNH

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/2ogab1BGpkuo6n4/file

The cover art photo comes from an appearance on the "Two of a Kind" TV show in 1967.

Jimi Hendrix & Various Artists - Jimi Hendrix as Session Musician, Volume 1: 1964-1966

Here's something a little different from me. It's a collection of songs where Jimi Hendrix was a supporting player rather than the main artist. I've never done a collection of "session musician" appearances like this before, because normally I don't think that's interesting enough to make an album. But Hendrix is one of the greatest musicians who ever lived, in my opinion, so even these sorts of performances are worthy of hearing, in my opinion.

Note that this is not complete by any means. I deliberately left off some songs I found with Hendrix playing guitar on them. That's because I only wanted to include songs where he made a notable impact, typically with a guitar solo. I found enough music for three volumes. For this first volume, I found all but three of the songs on the "West Coast Seattle Boy" Hendrix box set. The other three are tracks 9, 14, and 15. That box set does a good job collection his earlier session work. But the later two volumes mostly come from other sources.  

I could write pages about Hendrix's pre-fame history, and the tracks here. But if I do that, I probably would never get around to posting these volumes. So instead, I'll keep it short. Luckily, there's a good Rolling Stone article about his songs as a session musician before he became a star. I highly recommend you give this a read:

Jimi Hendrix: 10 Great Pre-Fame Tracks

I'll quote the intro to that article here:

"Before he was experienced, Jimi Hendrix was a hard-working sideman, playing studio session dates and backing bands across the so-called Chitlin' Circuit and beyond during the first half of the Sixties. After his discharge from the 101st Airborne Division following his brief spell as a paratrooper, the chance to dive headlong into rhythm and blues behind pros like Little Richard, King Curtis, and the Isley Brothers served as a valuable apprenticeship - though a decidedly unglamorous one. ... Despite the challenges, a letter Hendrix sent to his father during this period reveals his steely resolve to realize his destiny. 'I still have my guitar and amp and as long as I have that, no fool can keep me from living,' he writes. 'Although I don't eat every day, everything’s going all right for me. It could be worse than this, but I’m going to keep hustling and scuffling until I get things to happening, like they’re supposed to for me.' This baptism by fire forged the singular style that would make his name cultural shorthand for musical virtuosity." 

Hendrix actually began performing on the Chitlin' Circuit in late 1962, mostly in the South. At various points, he backed up lots of famous soul music stars, including Wilson Pickett, Slim Harpo, Sam Cooke, Ike & Tina Turner, and Jackie Wilson. However, this album begins in 1964, because that's the first time he managed to be included on released records.

In June 1966, Hendrix finally felt confident to form his own band, Jimmy James and the Blue Flames. Performing in small clubs, he quickly made an impression. From there, he got an opportunity to move to Britain and do some recording. He left the U.S. in September 1966. Success quickly followed, with his first hit single, "Hey Joe," released near the end of the year. So that's where this volume ends, at the end of 1966.

Most everything here are failed, obscure singles. However, "Mercy, Mercy" was a significant hit. (It's interesting to note that Hendrix sometimes played that song in 1967, after he became famous.) I deliberately avoided live recordings as much as possible. If you're interested in that, I've posted an album gathering songs Hendrix sang when he was a part of Curtis Knight and the Squires in late 1965. Here's a link to that one:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2020/03/jimi-hendrix-with-curtis-knight-squires.html 

This album is 46 minutes long. 

01 Testify (Isley Brothers)
02 Mercy, Mercy (Don Covay)
03 Can't Stay Away (Don Covay)
04 Have You Ever Been Disappointed (Isley Brothers)
05 I Don't Know What You Got But It's Got Me (Little Richard)
06 My Diary (Rosa Lee Brooks)
07 Utee (Rose Lee Brooks)
08 The Little Old Groove Maker (Jimmy Norman)
09 I'm a Fool for You, Baby (Curtis Knight with Jimi Hendrix)
10 Dancing All Around the World (Little Richard)
11 Help Me [Get the Feeling], Part 1 (Ray Sharpe)
12 I'm So Glad (Frank Howard & the Commanders)
13 [My Girl] She's a Fox (Icemen [Lonnie Youngblood & Jimi Hendrix])
14 Soul Food [That's A What I Like] (Lonnie Youngblood with Jimi Hendrix)
15 Wipe the Sweat [Instrumental Version] (Lonnie Youngblood & Jimi Hendrix)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/msRGNEov

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/Cp32kOQTpNlMFtL/file

The cover photo shows Curtis Knight and the Squires from 1966 or thereabouts. Can you tell on your own which one is Hendrix? He's the one on the left, with the toothy smile. This picture was in black and white, but I colorized with the help of the Kolorize program. 

Covered: Joe South: 1962-2005

Lately, I've had so much music I'm discovering, especially from "Midnight Special," "Ultrasonic," Live at the Record Plant," and "PBS Soundstage," that my Covered series highlighting worthy songwriters has fallen by the wayside. Again. But I'm going to make more of a concerted effort to post more of these, since a have a big number ready to go. Here's an album celebrating the songs of Joe South.

Joe South's songs were very popular for a few years in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He was born in 1940 in Atlanta, Georgia, and his music has an obvious southern influence. He began a career as both a performer and a songwriter in the late 1950s, when he was in his late teens. For many years, he only had minor success with both of those pursuits. The first song here is from 1962, and the second is from 1965. But then he hit his stride in 1968, when more people started covering his songs, and sometimes having big hits with them. For instance, Deep Purple had a big hit with "Hush" in 1968 (which was pretty atypical for them compared to their usual hard rock sound).

Then, in 1969, he had a big hit of his own, "Games People Play." It just missed the Top Ten in the U.S. singles chart, and since then is probably considered his signature song. Then he had another in 1970, with "Walk a Mile in My Shoes," which also just missed the Top Ten. I've chosen to include the Joe South version of "Games People Play." But the main point of this series is to focus on cover versions, so that's the only song I've included that's performed by him. 

In 1970, he also had his biggest success as a songwriter with "(I Never Promised You A) Rose Garden." It was first released by Billy Joe Royal in 1967, and there were a couple more covers after that. But when Lynn Anderson released her version in 1970, it went all the way to Number One in the country chart, and Number Three in the main U.S. singles chart, and became one of the best selling songs of the year. 

After all this success in just a couple of years, his future looked very promising. But then tragedy struck. Tommy South, his brother, committed suicide. Tommy had been in Joe's backing band, and they two of them were very close. Joe irrationally blamed himself for the suicide. He sank into a deep depression that lasted for years, and started taking heavy drugs to cope. His time as a promising songwriter basically ended at that point, as he lost his inspiration for many years. He later said, "I really kicked myself around for years... one of the main hang-ups was I just refused to forgive myself. You know, you can go through drug treatment centers, and it's not a permanent healing until it's a spiritual healing." He finally turned his life around in the late 1980s, but musical trends had largely passed him by, and he never released any new albums after 1975. All the songs here were written before that 1971 tragedy, though some of them were covered many years later. 

He died of a heart attack in 2012, at the age of 72. Here's his Wikipedia entry if you want to know more: 

Joe South - Wikipedia 

This album is 50 minutes long.

01 You're the Reason (Arthur Alexander)
02 I've Got to Be Somebody (Billy Joe Royal)
03 Hush (Deep Purple)
04 Games People Play (Joe South)
05 Down in the Boondocks (Billy Joe Royal)
06 These Are Not My People (Johnny Rivers)
07 Don't It Make You Want to Go Home (Brook Benton)
08 Walk a Mile in My Shoes (Elvis Presley)
09 [I Never Promised You A] Rose Garden (Lynn Anderson)
10 Redneck (Swamp Dogg)
11 Yo-Yo (Osmonds)
12 Don't Throw Your Love to the Wind (Jody Miller)
13 Birds of a Feather (Johnny Nash)
14 I Knew You When (Linda Ronstadt)
15 Children (Stephanie Finch)
16 The Greatest Love (Kelly Hogan)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/Cs7VpEZz

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/SgxQeTnbykRnLm9/file

I took the cover photo from the cover of an album called "The Joe South Story." I don't know the details. But it was one of very few I could find that was in color and showed him when he was young. 

Covered: Teddy Randazzo & Bobby Weinstein: 1960-2024

Here's another album in my "Covered" series. This time, the focus is on the songwriting team of Teddy Randazzo and Bobby Weinstein. Chances are you haven't heard of them. But I'd also bet that you're very familiar with some of their songs, such as "Goin' Out of My Head," "It's Gonna Take a Miracle," "Pretty Blue Eyes," and "Hurt So Bad."

Randazzo was born in New York City in 1935, and Weinstein was born there four years later. (I've noticed an unusual number of talented songwriters from this era were born in New York City, with many of them being Jewish. In this case, Randazzo was ethnically Italian and Weinstein was Jewish.) Both of them got involved with rock and roll bands. Randazzo had more success, being a member of the Three Chuckles. They had a Top Twenty hit in 1954, and appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show several times. In 1957, they began writing songs together. Their first big success was "Pretty Blue Eyes," which was a Top Ten hit for Steve Lawrence in 1960.

Randazzo had the good looks of a potential star, and kept a solo career going for several more years, but didn't have any big hits. However, he and Weinstein found more and more success as songwriters. Their biggest success of all was probably "Goin' Out of My Head." Little Anthony and the Imperials first had a Top Ten hit with it in 1964. But it's endured strongly, with over 400 cover versions, some of them hits as well. It's now in the top 50 of the most recorded and best selling songs of all time. Randazzo and Weinstein wrote many more songs for Little Anthony and the Imperials, even arranging and producing entire albums for them. Another big hit for that band was "Hurt So Bad," which was written by Randazzo, Weinstein, and Bobby Hart of the Boyce and Hart songwriting team. (I've already posted a "Covered" album for them, which includes a Linda Ronstadt version of that song.)

Most of the hits by Randazzo and Weinstein were in the 1960s. "It's Gonna Take a Miracle" was first a hit for the Royalettes in 1965. However, I've included a 1982 version by Deniece Williams because that was a bigger hit, reaching the Top Ten. It seems the songwriting partnership faded in the 1970s. Randazzo continued writing some hits in that decade, particularly for the soul groups the Manhattans and the Stylistics. However, I've only included one, "A Million to One" by the Manhattans in 1971.

Randazzo moved to Hawaii and had some limited success as a producer and songwriter there. He died in 2003 at the age of 68. Weinstein became a music executive, eventually becoming the president of the National Academy of Popular Music. He died in 2022 at the age of 82.  

Here's the Wikipedia entry for Randazzo:

Teddy Randazzo - Wikipedia 

And here's the entry for Weinstein:

Bobby Weinstein - Wikipedia 

This album is 46 minutes long. 

01 Pretty Blue Eyes (Steve Lawrence)
02 Let the Sunshine In (Dee Dee Sharp)
03 Goin' Out of My Head (Little Anthony & the Imperials)
04 I'm on the Outside [Looking In] (Little Anthony & the Imperials)
05 Can't Stop Running Away (Ian & the Zodiacs)
06 Hurt So Bad (Little Anthony & the Imperials)
07 Trick or Treat (Teddy Randazzo & All 6)
08 Don't Tie Me Down (Little Anthony & the Imperials)
09 Buttercup Days (Kane Triplets)
10 Sweet Cream Ladies, Forward March (Box Tops)
11 I'm Hypnotized (Little Anthony & the Imperials)
12 Yesterday Has Gone (Cupid's Inspiration)
13 Rain in My Heart (Frank Sinatra)
14 A Million to One (Manhattans)
15 It's Gonna Take a Miracle (Deniece Williams)
16 Where's the Love (Vivian Buczek)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/AeftLAgu

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/user/files/EM9pT1qmY7eaGeM/file

Photos of Teddy Randazzo and Bobby Weinstein are extremely rare. Luckily, I found one of them hugging each other. It's from when they were older. That's Randazzo on the left and Weinstein on the right.

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.

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.