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. 

Laughter, Love and Music, Bill Graham Memorial, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, CA, 11-3-1991, Part 1: Bobby McFerrin, Jackson Browne, Journey, Tracy Chapman, and More

On October 25, 1991 rock concert promoter Bill Graham died. The helicopter he was riding in went down in heavy fog as he returned home from a Huey Lewis and the News concert in Concord, California. Also killed were his companion, Melissa Gold, and his pilot, Steve Kahn. Federal investigators later said that Kahn was warned by air traffic controllers not to fly because of inclement weather. Just six days after that, a memorial rock concert for him was held in Golden Gate Park, in San Francisco. About 300,000 fans attended. There's enough music from this concert for four albums. Here's the first one.

Graham could be called a music promoter, and that much is true, but he was a lot more than just that. Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir called him "the most important non-musician in music." 

He's best known for owning the Fillmore and Winterland concert venues, but that's just a small part of the picture. There's no other promoter who has even come close to having the impact on music that he had, and I believe he's the only promoter inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He helped start and nurture the San Francisco music scene in the late 1960s, and helped a great many musical acts get their big breaks and then stay famous. 

Rabbi Robert Kirschner said of him, "There was a lot more to Bill than the Fillmore and Winterland and associations with the whole pantheon of rock 'n' roll in that era. He was also a visionary. He basically invented the whole idea of 'rock theater,' where you went to a concert for an immersion experience." His concerts were always special. For instance, when went to concerts at the Fillmore in the late 1980s, everyone who went could take home a free concert poster, as well as eat a free apple or two if they wanted. Who else would go the extra mile to improve a concert experience like that?!

And although he could be a ruthless businessman, he also was at the forefront of using music to promote social causes, especially to help fund charities. Neil Young had some moving words to say about that during this concert. "Bill Graham made us all look good. Gave us a chance to show you that we could do something good instead of just going on with our careers. He kept pushing us to do things for other people and making a place available for us to do it, so that there was no way out. Thank you, Bill."

There's a lot more that could be said about Graham and his remarkable career, but I'll direct you to his Wikipedia page for that:

Bill Graham (promoter) - Wikipedia

Suffice to say that he was beloved by many rock musicians, so they showed up for this memorial concert despite having only a couple of days to prepare. I'm sure many, many more would have wanted to play, but there was limited time available. Generally speaking, only the big name acts closest to him were chosen. 

For this first volume out of four, I gathered together all the musical acts that only performed a couple of songs each. Generally speaking, they are in the correct chronological order. However, Robin Williams, Journey, and Tracy Chapman all appeared after the next act, Santana, instead of before it. 

Also, note that I believe I've included all the music from the concert. The concert lasted about five and a half hours. The four volumes I've put together total four hours and fifteen minutes. The difference is the time between the acts.

There was just one non-musical performer at the concert, comedian Robin Williams. Normally, I like to keep things to just the music, but I've made an exception in this case to include his stand-up routine. But I stuck it at the end of this album, making it easier for you to keep it, skip it, or delete it. In fact, he performed just before Journey.

I've leave it to you to find out more about the performers if you want. But I have one comment to make about Journey. From 1977 until 1987, Steve Perry was the lead vocalist of that band. But in 1987, he felt burned out and quit the band. For the next several years, he retreated from the public eye and just tried to live a normal life. But he came out of semi-retirement for this concert. This end up being the last time Perry played with Journey.

You can find an entire article about it here:

https://ultimateclassicrock.com/last-journey-show-steve-perry/ 

Also, here's a Los Angeles Times about this memorial concert, written right after it took place:

Bay Area Plays Tribute to Graham : Memorial: About 300,000 gather for free concert at Golden Gate Park honoring the rock promoter who died 10 days ago in a helicopter crash. - Los Angeles Times 

All the music here is unreleased, I believe. I'm pretty sure the entire concert was broadcast on a local radio station, which is why we have an excellent sounding recording of all of it. 

This album is an hour and ten minutes long. 

01 talk by emcee (Dirty Dozen Brass Band)
02 talk (Dirty Dozen Brass Band)
03 My Feet Can't Fail Me Now (Dirty Dozen Brass Band)
04 talk by emcee (Bobby McFerrin)
05 talk (Bobby McFerrin)
06 Did I Hear You Say You Love Me (Bobby McFerrin)
07 talk (Bobby McFerrin)
08 The Star Spangled Banner (Bobby McFerrin)
09 talk by emcee (Jackson Browne)
10 For a Dancer (Jackson Browne)
11 talk (Jackson Browne)
12 World in Motion (Jackson Browne)
13 talk by emcee (Jackson Browne)
14 talk by emcee (Joe Satriani)
15 Always with Me, Always with You [Instrumental] (Joe Satriani)
16 talk (Joe Satriani)
17 The Crush of Love [Instrumental] (Joe Satriani)
18 talk by emcee (Joe Satriani)
19 talk by emcee (Aaron Neville)
20 Ave Maria (Aaron Neville)
21 talk by emcee (Aaron Neville)
22 talk by emcee (Journey)
23 talk (Journey)
24 Faithfully (Journey)
25 Lonely Road without You (Journey)
26 Lights (Journey)
27 talk by emcee (Tracy Chapman)
28 All That You Have Is Your Soul (Tracy Chapman)
29 Where the Soul Never Dies (Tracy Chapman)
30 talk by emcee (Tracy Chapman)
31 talk by emcee (Robin Williams)
32 Stand-Up Comedy Routine (Robin Williams)
33 talk by emcee (Robin Williams)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/BGA5GZ1u

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/XgCnvfog3Ukj8Gr/file

The cover image shows Steve Perry and Neal Schon of Journey at this exact concert. Perry is holding a microphone at the edge of the stage, and Schon is playing guitar. Oh, and I took the "Laughter, Love and Music" logo from a promotional poster for the event.

Covered: Geoff Stephens: 1964-2002

I recently posted a couple of "Covered" albums dealing with British professional songwriters from the 1960s and 1970s (as I write this in May 2026). As I said elsewhere, there was a circle of a dozen or more who often collaborated with each other, and wrote lots of pop hits. Here's another one from that group, Geoff Stephens.

Many of the other songwriters in this group that I've been discussing came up with the British Invasion, the musical trend that started around 1963. But Stephens was slightly older - he was 29 years old in 1963- and his music career began before that. He served in the military for a couple of years and held a series of odd jobs before getting serious about songwriting. His first song was covered by a musical act in 1961. 

His first hit was "Tell Me When" in 1964, co-written by Les Reed, another songwriter in that group. I've already posted the hit version by the Applejacks in the "Covered" album for Barry Mason and Les Reed. So I went with a different version here. Later that same year, he had an even bigger hit with a song he wrote all by himself, "The Crying Game." The version by Dave Berry went all the way to the Top Five in Britain, although it wasn't a hit. (Boy George eventually had a hit in the U.S. with it in 1992.) It had an unusual melody, showing surprising musical sophistication for a pop hit 1964.

He had an even bigger hit in 1966 with "Winchester Cathedral," performed by the New Vaudeville Band. It actually was recorded by session musicians. The lead vocalist was John Carter, another songwriter I've profiled with a "Covered" album." Stephens had a fondness for vaudeville/ music hall music from the 1920s and earlier, and wrote the song in that vein. It was such a massive success - hitting Number One in the U.S. and some other countries, and selling three million copies worldwide - that it started a mini-vaudeville trend for the next couple of years. Few British artists could resist performing at least one or two songs in that style, for some reason.

Sometimes, Stephens was the sole songwriter, as was the case with "Winchester Cathedral." But more often, he wrote with other members of that unnamed British professional songwriter group. For instance, "There's a Kind of Hush" was written with Les Reed, "Sorry Suzanne" was written with Tony Macaulay, "My Sentimental Friend" was written with John Carter, "Daddy Don't You Walk So Fast" was written with Peter Callander, and so on. As you can see, Stephens didn't favor just one songwriting partner. In fact, he had many more, including Roger Greenaway, Barry Mason, Don Black, and Mitch Murray. All of those other people have their own "Covered" albums, or their albums are coming.

Stephens had many more hits through most of the 1970s, until about 1978. In fact, one of his biggest hits was one of his last, since "Silver Lady" by David Soul went to Number One in Britain in 1977. (That one was co-written with Tony Macaulay, by the way.) But musical styles changed drastically in the late 1970s, with the rise of disco, punk, and new wave. So his hits stopped at that time, as was the case with most of the other songwriters in that group he'd been working with since the mid-1960s. 

Starting in the early 1980s, he mostly switched to writing songs for musicals. In doing so, he still collaborated with people from that same group, writing different musicals with Don Black, Les Reed, and Peter Callander. He died in 2020 at the age of 86.

Here's his Wikipedia page:

Geoff Stephens - Wikipedia 

Because Stephens often wrote with other songwriters who have their own "Covered" albums, sometimes I've resorted to using non-hit versions, so the same versions don't appear on two different albums. So, for instance, I have "Sorry Suzanne" here by the Glass Bottle, instead of the hit version by the Hollies. "Smile a Little Smile for Me" is an outliner, because I chose a late cover for the same reason. The hit version was in 1970. Without that one, this album would end in 1980. 

This album is one hour long. 

01 Tell Me When (Jaybirds)
02 The Crying Game (Dave Berry)
03 Semi-Detached Suburban Mr. James (Manfred Mann)
04 Winchester Cathedral (New Vaudeville Band)
05 My World Fell Down (Ivy League)
06 There's a Kind of Hush (Herman's Hermits)
07 Boy (Lulu)
08 Sunshine Girl (Herman's Hermits)
09 Lights of Cincinnati (Scott Walker)
10 My Sentimental Friend (Herman's Hermits)
11 Sorry Suzanne (Glass Bottle)
12 Knock, Knock, Who's There (Mary Hopkin)
13 Daughter of Darkness (Tom Jones)
14 Daddy Don't You Walk So Fast (Wayne Newton)
15 You Won't Find Another Fool like Me (New Seekers)
16 Doctor's Orders (Carol Douglas)
17 Silver Lady (David Soul)
18 It's Like We Never Said Goodbye (Crystal Gayle)
19 Like Sister and Brother (Frank Hooker & Positive People)
20 Smile a Little Smile for Me (Chris von Sneidern)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/bm3YSnFy

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/pEoVVFc3lzQ7Bfp/file

I don't know anything about the cover image except that it's "circa 1970." The original was in black and white. I colorized it with the use of the Kolorize program.

Covered: Mitch Murray & Peter Callander: 1962-2004

A few days ago, I posted a "Covered" album featuring Barry Mason and Les Reed. They were part of a small circle of professional songwriters in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. Here's another songwriting duo from that same circle: Mitch Murray and Peter Callander.

Murray was the first of the two to have songwriting success. He wrote the song "How Do You Do It" in 1962, when he was 22 years old. Producer liked it so much that he gave it to the Beatles for their very first single. The Beatles recorded it, but they wanted to release one of their own songs instead, which they did with "Love Me Do." So the song went to Gerry and the Pacemakers, who took it all the way to Number One in the British singles chart in early 1963. I went with the Beatles version, even though it wasn't released until 1995.

Murray had more hits over the next couple of years, with many of them being recorded by "British Invasion" bands. In 1964, he wrote the popular book "How to Write a Hit Song." Sting of the Police, who was 12 years old at the time, loved the book and later said it inspired him to start writing his own songs. Murray also had a minor hit of his own, "Down Came the Rain," in 1965, under the name "Mister Murray." I didn't include it though because it's a novelty song that doesn't bear repeat listening. (The twist is that the verses are sung normally, but the choruses are sung in an unexpectedly strange voice.)

Meanwhile, Peter Callander trained to be a professional chef, but soon switched to songwriting instead. He began having musical acts record his songs starting in 1963, though he was less successful at first. He wrote some songs with Les Reed, another songwriter I mentioned above, until he met Murray in 1965. They mostly wrote together from that point on, with Murray generally writing the melodies and Callander the lyrics.

Their first big success together was "Even the Bad Times Are Good" by the Tremeloes in 1967. From that point on, they generally had at least one sizable hit each year, including some I didn't put here because I didn't like them so much. They finished strong, with two Number One hits in both the U.S. and Britain in 1974, "The Night Chicago Died" and "Billy, Don't Be a Hero." 

But their songwriting partnership seems to have ended shortly thereafter, and so did their success. I didn't find any songs they wrote after that point worthy of inclusion. The last song here, "A Fool Am I," is from 2004, and recorded by Agnetha Faltskog, one of the singers in ABBA. But it was originally a minor hit for Cilla Black in 1966. The other songs are all the original hit versions from 1974 or earlier, with the exception of the Beatles one I mentioned above.

Murray soon switched careers from music to comedy. He did comedy T.V. shows, funny voices for recordings, and gave humorous speeches. That last skill led to him writing several best-selling books about how to give funny speeches. He is still alive and 86 years old as I write this in 2026. I don't what happened to Callander after the 1970s. He died in 2014 at the age of 74.

Here are their Wikipedia pages:

Mitch Murray - Wikipedia

and

Peter Callander - Wikipedia   

This album is 51 minutes long. 

01 How Do You Do It (Beatles)
02 I'm Telling You Now (Freddie & the Dreamers)
03 I Like It (Gerry & the Pacemakers)
04 Leave a Little Love (Lulu)
05 I Love Her (Paul & Barry Ryan)
06 Even the Bad Times Are Good (Tremeloes)
07 The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde (Georgie Fame)
08 Suddenly You Love Me (Tremeloes)
09 Hitchin' a Ride (Vanity Fare)
10 Ragamuffin Man (Manfred Mann)
11 Turn On the Sun (Nana Mouskouri)
12 Daddy Don't You Walk So Fast (Daniel Boone)
13 I Did What I Did for Maria (Tony Christie)
14 The Night Chicago Died (Paper Lace)
15 Billy, Don't Be a Hero (Bo Donaldson & the Heywoods)
16 Black Eyed Boys (Paper Lace)
17 A Fool Am I (Agnetha Faltskog)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/mP1ECLeF

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/gAMYG7WgvV5FX86/file

For the cover image, I found two photos of Murray and Callander together, in a recording studio in February 1968. I liked Murray from one and Callander from the other, so that's what I used. Callender is the one with the light colored shirt and blue tie.

Various Artists - Playboy After Dark (CBS Television City, Los Angeles, CA), Volume 11: April to May 1970

Sadly, this is the eleventh and final volume of my compilation of "Playboy After Dark" T.V. show episodes. There's a lot of excellent music here, but the show got cancelled after just two seasons.

This last volume mostly consists of performers from earlier episodes coming back. Perhaps Playboy head Hugh Hefner already known the show was going to be cancelled so he wanted to have a last hurrah with some of his favorite acts. I think Spanky Wilson and Sue Raney are the only ones who weren't repeat guests. The Cowsills performed another time, but lip-synced their performance then, so I didn't include that. But they played live here.

The first act here, Bill Medley, was half of the Righteous Brothers duo. He didn't have much success with his solo career in this era, but in 1987 he would have a Number One hit in the U.S. with "(I've Had) The Time of My Life" in a duet with Jennifer Warnes.

Like most of the volumes for the second season, there are some songs with "[Edit]" in their titles. As I explained in previous volumes, that's mostly from talking over the music during the last songs of each episode, especially thanks to a voice-over advertisement for the airline company T.W.A. 

There are a number of songs here that weren't put on record, similar to earlier volumes. That's especially true for the duets and other collaborations. For instance, I couldn't find any evidence of Billy Preston performing "It's Your Thing" on any record - a big hit for the Isley Brothers around this time - much less doing it with Joanne Vent, Bill Medley, and Blinky!  

I hope you enjoyed all the volumes in this series. And I hope now that I've done this, the music from this show will be appreciated by a wider audience. 

This album is an hour and three minutes long. 

01 Hold On, I'm Coming (Bill Medley)
02 You've Lost that Lovin' Feelin' (Bill Medley & Sammy Davis, Jr.)
03 Here's That Rainy Day - My Funny Valentine (Sammy Davis, Jr.)
04 For Once in My Life (Sammy Davis, Jr.)
05 It's Your Thing [Edit] (Billy Preston, Joanne Vent, Bill Medley & Blinky)
06 Them Changes [Edit] (Buddy Miles)
07 Dreams (Buddy Miles)
08 Alfie (Spanky Wilson)
09 Bring Me Sunshine (Spanky Wilson)
10 You've Made Me So Very Happy (Lou Rawls)
11 All God's Children Got Soul (Lou Rawls)
12 Where Is Love (Cowsills)
13 Two by Two (Cowsills)
14 Games People Play (Sue Raney)
15 Whoever You Are, I Love You (Sue Raney)
16 Poor Boy [Edit] (Cowsills)
17 A Lot of Livin' to Do (Hal Frazier with Buddy Rich)
18 Workout [Instrumental] (Buddy Rich)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/uvnZesz3

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/omCInq9OR6LQQ0h/file

The cover image shows Lou Rawls. It's a screenshot I took from one of the videos of the episodes presented here. 

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.

Various Artists - Playboy After Dark (CBS Television City, Los Angeles, CA), Volume 10: April 1970

Here's another volume of music I compiled from episodes of the "Playboy After Dark" TV show. This is the tenth. There's only one more after this.

There's a lot of variety on this album, with country, soul, jazz, and rock. Some highlights are B.B. King, Billy Preston, and Linda Ronstadt making her second appearance. 

A couple of songs have "[Edit]" in their titles. This is due to the usual problem with this series, of people talking over the music. (Especially the T.W.A. advertisements I keep mentioning.) So I fixed those in the usual way, with the help of the MVSEP program. 

By the way, Barbara McNair is a rare case of one of the performers for this show who also posed naked for Playboy Magazine. But it's not like she had to do that in order to get on the show. She'd had an established career starting in the late 1950s, as a singer and an actress for plays, T.V., and movies. She was signed to Motown Records from around 1966 to 1969. She even had her own T.V. show from 1969 to 1971, called "The Barbara McNair Show." 

Her career would take a hit in 1972, however, when she was arrested for heroin possession, because she signed for a package sent to her house containing heroin. However, charges against her were later dropped, and her husband was charged instead. It seems like her husband was a seriously bad dude. He was murdered in 1976. It was alleged he was involved in the Mafia, and was killed at the same time he was trying to put a hit out on someone else.

You can read her Wikipedia entry here:

Barbara McNair - Wikipedia 

The music is unreleased. The sound quality is excellent. 

This album is an hour and ten minutes long. 

01 Nobody Knows (Dillards)
02 Hey Boys (Dillards)
03 My Shining Hour (Carmen McRae)
04 I Love You More than You'll Ever Know (Carmen McRae)
05 Bending the Strings [Instrumental] [Edit] (Dillards)
06 Stand by Your Man (Lola Falana)
07 It Takes a Little Longer (Sonny Charles)
08 Friendship Train (Sonny Charles)
09 Walk a Mile in My Shoes [Edit] (Sonny Charles & Lola Falana)
10 Until It's Time for You to Go (Barbara McNair)
11 Son of a Preacher Man (Barbara McNair)
12 So Excited (B. B. King)
13 The Thrill Is Gone (B. B. King)
14 Lovesick Blues (Linda Ronstadt)
15 Long, Long Time (Linda Ronstadt)
16 Sing, Sing, Sing (Country Joe & the Fish)
17 The 'Fish' Cheer - I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag (Country Joe & the Fish)
18 Everything's All Right (Billy Preston)
19 You've Made Me So Very Happy (Sammy Davis, Jr.)
20 God Bless the Child (Blinky)
21 Let's Get Together (Joanne Vent & Muscatel)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/UK1WoH6B

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/Ox0RbnXqeJIZP7N/file

The cover image of Linda Ronstadt is a screenshot I took from a video of one of these episodes. 

Various Artists - Playboy After Dark (CBS Television City, Los Angeles, CA), Volume 9: February to March 1970

Here's another volume of music I compiled from episodes of the "Playboy After Dark" TV show. By this point, we're well into the second and final season of the show.

This volume starts with a medley of songs by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. It's a particularly interesting performance because it had stripped down instrumentation, with minimal drums. 

I especially psyched that this includes two songs by Evie Sands. I still am mystified that she never became a big star. She had a great voice and was ridiculously beautiful (just look at the cover image). She even played an impressive guitar solo on her appearance on the "Johnny Cash Show" around this time. But she was signed to a crappy record company in the 1960s, and repeatedly had hit singles stolen from her by other acts who would hear her songs, quickly record their own versions, and get proper promotion. I posted a "best of" a few years ago to help draw more attention to her underappreciated career, which you can find here:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2018/11/evie-sands-best-of-evie-sands-1965-1974.html

There's almost no live recordings of her from this era, other than this one and the "Johnny Cash Show" appearance I mentioned above. It's especially nice to see her play a cover of "Light My Fire" here, because she never released any version of that one.

The Grass Roots performed on this show a year earlier. Unfortunately, that performance was lip-synced. But they played live for some reason on this, their second appearance. I believe they never released a version of the Motown classic "Dancing in the Street."

If anyone knows the name of the instrumental performed by Les McCann, please let me know so I can fix the title. 

It's nice this ends with a performance by jazz legend Sarah Vaughan. I'm pretty sure she never recorded "Didn't We," a song by Jimmy Webb, but only played it in concert around this time period. Similarly, R.B. Greaves, who is best known for his hit "Take a Letter Maria," never released "Danny Boy" on record.

Note that three songs have "[Edit]" in their titles. Those are more cases of talking over the music, especially advertisements for the airline company T.W.A. on the last song of each episode. I got rid of that in the usual way, with the help of the MVSEP program. 

This album is an hour and one minute long. 

01 Yesterlove (Smokey Robinson & the Miracles)
02 My Girl Has Gone (Smokey Robinson & the Miracles)
03 The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage - Tracks of My Tears (Smokey Robinson & the Miracles)
04 In My Time (Noel Harrison)
05 But You Know I Love You (Evie Sands)
06 Light My Fire [Edit] (Evie Sands)
07 Shame and Scandal in the Family (Lloyd Haynes)
08 She Believes in Me (John Stewart)
09 Shackles and Chains (John Stewart)
10 Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head (Johnny Mathis)
11 Aquarius - Let the Sunshine In (Johnny Mathis)
12 The Lady and the Outlaw [Edit] (John Stewart)
13 Instrumental (Les McCann)
14 Compared to What (Les McCann)
15 Walkin' through the Country (Grass Roots)
16 Dancing in the Street (Grass Roots)
17 [There's] Always Something There to Remind Me (R. B. Greaves)
18 Danny Boy (R. B. Greaves)
19 Didn't We [Edit] (Sarah Vaughan)
20 There Will Never Be Another You (Sarah Vaughan)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/vYoiMQPc

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/m0BqV3Yakpx0YUN/file

The cover is a screenshot of Evie Sands I took from a video of one of these episodes.

Covered: Randy Newman, Volume 3: 1999-2025

Here's the third and final volume of the "Covered" series for Randy Newman.

Newman's usual solo albums have been released less frequently as he gets older, which is usually the case for songwriters. By now, 2026, he averages about one album a decade. But unlike a lot of aging songwriters, he's kept his standards high. Pretty much every album he's made has been critically praised. 

But he's been much busier and prolific with his other career, composing soundtracks for Hollywood movies. I mentioned in the write-up for "Volume 2" that his career got a big boost starting in 1995, when he composed the soundtrack for the first "Toy Story" movie. That led him to a new line of work making soundtracks for blockbuster movies for kids, such as the other "Toy Story" movies (including "Toy Story 6," released in 2026), "Cars," "A Bug's Life," "Monsters, Inc.," and more. Most of those are a mix of songs with lyrics and background music. I didn't find a lot of songs from these movies sung by others that fit this collection, but there are a few in this volume. 

Some others are from earlier in his career. For instance, "Burn On," a 1972 song based on a true incident of the Cuyahoga River, which runs through Cleveland, Ohio, catching fire in 1969 due to excessive pollution. 

All the songs in all three volumes were officially released, except for the last two on this volume. "I'm Dead (But I Don't Know It)" is from Randy Newman's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 2013. It's sung by Newman and Don Henley. The album ends with "I Love L.A.," one of Newman's better known songs. I had trouble finding a worthy version, until I found this one. It comes from the 2025 Grammy Awards ceremony, and features a bunch of stars singing together.

This album is 49 minutes long. 

01 When She Loved Me (Sarah McLachlan)
02 If I Didn't Have You (Billy Crystal & John Goodman)
03 Every Time It Rains (Joe Cocker)
04 Rider in the Rain (Reckless Kelly & Joe Ely)
05 Texas Girl at the Funeral of Her Father (Kim Richey)
06 Marie (Allison Moorer)
07 Our Town (James Taylor)
08 Burn On (Mason Williams)
09 I Will Go Sailing No More (Los Lobos)
10 Almost There (Anika Noni Rose)
11 Down in New Orleans (Dr. John)
12 Losing You (Mavis Staples)
13 It's Lonely at the Top (Big Bad Voodoo Daddy)
14 I'm Dead [But I Don't Know It] (Don Henley & Randy Newman)
15 I Love L.A. (Dawes, John Legend, St. Vincent, Brittany Howard, Brad Paisley & Sheryl Crow)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/ZoccZuhY

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/zKj0ZEWCA6LlgOM/file

The cover image is from 1995.

Covered: Randy Newman, Volume 2: 1973-1999

Here's the second out of three "Covered" albums for singer-songwriter Randy Newman.

As I mentioned in "Volume 1," in the early 1970s, Newman was considered a cult albums, very critically acclaimed, but with not much commercial success for his own career. Even the many covers of his songs were rarely hits, though there were exceptions, especially "Mama Told Me (Not to Come)," which was a Number One hit in the U.S. for Three Dog Night in 1970.

But things changed drastically for him in 1977, with the song "Short People." To pretty much everyone's surprise, his version was an massive novelty hit. It made it all the way to Number Two in the U.S., kept out of the top spot only by the all-time classic "Stayin' Alive" by the Bee Gees. It was wildly misunderstood, to say the least. A great many of his songs are sarcastic. For instance, his great song "Political Science" sarcastically advocates for blowing up the world with nuclear weapons. Many people who heard "Short People" didn't realize it was a sarcastic attack on prejudice by pointing out how silly it would be to hate short people for no reason, including ignoring the lyrics of the bridge, which explicitly run counter to the rest of the song. 

But in any case, the song made him a household name, even though his overall sales still didn't increase much. His only two really big hits on the singles charts remain "Short People" and "Mama Told Me (Not to Come)." Since Newman's version of "Short People" is so well known, it's the only song in this series I've included that's performed by him.

I also want to give a special mention to "Sail Away." I think it's an incredible song. But it also shows how unique his songwriting is, and how easy it can be for people to misunderstand his songs if they don't pay attention. It's basically an advertisement for a slave trader prior to the Civil War, attempting to coax Black Africans to come to the U.S. for a better life, when in fact the trader is tricking them into slavery. Yet somehow this sarcastic premise becomes a powerful song about the evils of slavery. It's been widely covered, including by the likes of Bobby Darin, Etta James, Linda Ronstadt, Ray Charles, Gladys Knight, Joe Cocker, and Kirsty MacColl. It was hard for me to pick just one cover, but I thought the version by Etta James is extra powerful.

From the start of Newman's songwriting career, he'd had a sideline writing instrumental music for T.V. shows, which then led to movie soundtrack work. That began way back in 1962, as I mentioned in the previous volume. His first movie soundtrack was in 1971. He did a few more movies here and there over the next couple decades. But his career took a turn in 1995, when he did the soundtrack for the hit movie "Toy Story." One song he did for that, "You've Got a Friend in Me," wasn't a hit per se, barely reaching the singles chart. But it became widely known, and widely beloved by children, and it's gone on to sell over three million copies! Surely that makes it one of the best selling non-hits ever. 

For that song, I've included a duet version between Newman and Lyle Lovett, since it's an interesting one that's also much less well known than the version just featuring Newman.

This album is 50 minutes long. 

01 Have You Seen My Baby [Hold On] (Ringo Starr)
02 Sail Away (Etta James)
03 Last Night I Had a Dream (Fanny)
04 Let's Burn Down the Cornfield (Etta James)
05 Naked Man (Grass Roots)
06 Lucinda (Joe Cocker)
07 Short People (Randy Newman)
08 Baltimore (Nina Simone)
09 Mr. President (Marshall Tucker Band)
10 You Can Leave Your Hat On (Joe Cocker)
11 Louisiana 1927 (Aaron Neville)
12 Political Science (Everything but the Girl)
13 You've Got a Friend in Me (Randy Newman & Lyle Lovett)
14 Feels like Home (Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt & Dolly Parton)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/6SB3U9ZA

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/f6YT8V3gAvHLIQ3/file 

The cover image is from 1978.

Covered: Randy Newman, Volume 1: 1963-1973

Whenever I think about the "Covered" series of albums I've made, I get frustrated, because I've got dozens that I've never gotten around to posting. I guess I enjoy the making of the albums more than the steps needed to post them. It feels like unfinished homework. But I'm going to make more of an effort to fix that, starting with a triple-header of Randy Newman.

Here's some highlights from his Wikipedia entry:  

"[Newman] is an American singer-songwriter, pianist, composer, and arranger. Born in Los Angeles to an extended family of Hollywood film composers, he is known for his Americana-inspired songs, non-rhotic Southern-accented singing style, and typically mordant or satirical lyrics. Since the 1990s, he has worked mainly in film scoring, most popularly for Disney and Pixar. ... Newman has received numerous accolades, including two Academy Awards (out of 22 nominations), three Emmys, seven Grammy Awards, as well as nominations for a BAFTA Award and seven Golden Globe Awards. His award-winning film work includes 'Ragtime' (1981), 'The Natural' (1984), 'Toy Story' (1995), 'A Bug's Life' (1998), 'Pleasantville' (1998), 'Monsters, Inc.' (2001), 'Cars' (2006), 'The Princess and the Frog' (2009), 'Toy Story 3' (2010), and 'Marriage Story' (2019). He was honored with the Recording Academy's Governors Award in 2003, a Disney Legend award in 2007, and inductions into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2002 and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013."

As mentioned above, he was born in Los Angeles. But he also spent many of his childhood summers in New Orleans. That would prove to be important, because his songwriting would be heavily influenced by New Orleans styles. And also as mentioned above, he was part of an extended family of Hollywood film composers. His mother and father had regular jobs (as secretary and internist, respectively), but three of his uncles were film composers, and so were three cousins. 

He began writing songs professionally by the age of 17. He put out a single under his own name in 1962, but it flopped. So he decided to try writing songs for others for a while. He began having successes almost immediately. The first song here, "Hold Your Head High" by Jackie DeShannon, is from 1963. 

Also very early on, he began writing instrumental music for TV shows, starting with an episode of "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis" in 1962. That talent would continue to grow, leading to him to eventually doing full movie soundtracks starting in 1971. More on that in a later volume though.

Alan Price helped boost Newman's songwriting career in 1967. For one thing, he had a hit with Newman's "Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear." But also, he was so taken by Newman's songwriting that his 1967 album "A Price on His Head" had no less than seven songs by Newman. Harry Nilsson paid him an even bigger compliment by covering an entire album of his songs in 1970, "Nilsson Sings Newman."

Newman finally released his first album under his own name in 1968, "Randy Newman (Creates Something New Under the Sun)." It was a critical success, and it led to even more musical acts covering his songs, but it didn't sell well. It didn't even reach the top 200 U.S. albums chart. For the next ten years or so, he would continue to be a cult artist, meaning he was critically praised and beloved by a small group of fans, but didn't have much wider commercial success. 

Meanwhile, his songwriting continued to get better and better. It arguably peaked with his 1972 album "Sail Away," though he has maintained remarkably high consistency for his entire career. Rolling Stone Magazine has put that album on their list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. His 1974 album "Good Old Boys" would also make that list, though lower down it.

Newman's songwriting is extraordinary, but it's also idiosyncratic, with frequent heavy sarcasm. Some songs have general romantic themes that lend themselves to being covered a lot, for instance "I Think It's Going to Rain Today." There are over a 100 different cover versions of that one. But then consider a song like "God's Song (That's Why I Love Mankind)." It's a sarcastic song about how God seemingly could care less about the human race, and even laughs at the calamities it throws at humanity. I think it's a great song, with deep meaning, but it's not exactly typical Top Forty subject material! So there are a lot of songs I would have wanted to include but didn't, because either there's no cover versions at all, or at least no worthy covers. And I've followed my usual rule for the "Covered" series of generally not including versions by Newman himself (although he'll show up with one song in a later volume, and in a duet in the other volume).

Note that some of the best songs written by Newman during this time period only show up in one of the later two volumes. So if you don't see a favorite, wait to see what's on those first. 

This album is 52 minutes long. 

01 Hold Your Head High (Jackie DeShannon)
02 Baby, Don't Look Down (Billy Storm)
03 I've Been Wrong Before (Cilla Black)
04 Nobody Needs Your Love (Gene Pitney)
05 Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear (Alan Price Set)
06 Snow (Claudine Longet)
07 Illinois (Everly Brothers)
08 I Think It's Going to Rain Today (Dusty Springfield)
09 Just One Smile (Blood Sweat & Tears)
10 Bet No One Ever Hurt This Bad (Linda Ronstadt)
11 Love Story (Peggy Lee)
12 Dayton, Ohio, 1903 (Wayne Fontana)
13 Mama Told Me [Not to Come] (Three Dog Night)
14 Cowboy (Nilsson)
15 The Beehive State (Doobie Brothers)
16 Living without You (Manfred Mann's Earth Band)
17 God's Song [That's Why I Love Mankind] (Etta James)
18 Guilty (Bonnie Raitt)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/i6jjx6vk

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/JKPIcpuJQBtagaN/file

The cover photo is from 1968.

Various Artists - Playboy After Dark (CBS Television City, Los Angeles, CA), Volume 8: December 1969 to February 1970

Here's the seventh volume of the episodes I compiled of the "Playboy After Dark" TV show. It's the third volume of the show's second season.

I'll only mention some things about a couple of the performances. The rest should be evident just by listening. 

This episode features a previously unknown chapter of Lesley Gore's music career. She'd had a string of hits from 1963 to 1967, but her music went out of style. She continued to release some singles, but they all flopped. In 1972, she put out an album for the first time since 1967, "Someplace Else Now," that recast her in a singer-songwriter mode, similar to Carole King and her seminal 1971 album "Tapestry." In her Playboy TV appearance, she sang two songs that were moving into that mode. Neither of them were officially released by her anywhere, as far as I could tell. One of them, "Didn't We," is a Jimmy Webb song that was covered by many musical artists in this time period. 

Another bit of lost history are the two songs by Joanne Vent and Muscatel. Vent was an attractive White woman with a soulful, bluesy voice, who seemed to have potential for a big music career, a la Janis Joplin. She put out a solo album in 1969, called, "The Black and White of It Is Blues." Unfortunately, as one review I read put it, "Great voice, but not such a great album." At the time of this show, she was getting ready to release a second album with a new backing band, called Muscatel. I found a web link of someone selling a test pressing of it on eBay. But somehow that album never came out. The two songs she sang here suggest what her second album could have sounded like. She also was part of a duet in Volume 5, and shows up again in Volumes 10 and 11.

It's great that Fleetwood Mac is included here. But unfortunately, their performance was badly edited down. Their one song, "Rattlesnake Shake," is only two and a half minutes long. It's clear the performance was longer, since the song both fades in and fades out. They also did a second song, "Coming Your Way," but it only showed up for half a minute at the very end of that particular episode, under an overdubbed advertisement for T.W.A. Airlines. So I didn't bother to include that.

I've mentioned that each episode ended with talking over the music. But, by chance, that only impacted one song in this volume,  "The Category Stomp by John Hartford. That's why that one has "[Edit]" in its title.

This album is an hour and eight minutes long. 

01 Something (Dolores Hall)
02 Just Because of You (Dolores Hall)
03 A Simple Thing as Love (John Hartford)
04 Natural to Be Gone (John Hartford)
05 The Category Stomp [Edit] (John Hartford)
06 Let's Get Together (Jack Jones)
07 If You Want Me To (Chambers Brothers)
08 Love, Love, Love (Chambers Brothers)
09 Georgia on My Mind (James Brown)
10 Yesterday (Vicki Anderson)
11 By the Time I Get to Phoenix (James Brown)
12 God Bless the Child (Jack Jones)
13 The More I See You (Jack Jones)
14 Rattlesnake Shake (Fleetwood Mac)
15 Hello Young Lovers (Lesley Gore)
16 Didn't We (Lesley Gore)
17 High Sheriff of Calhoun Parrish (Tony Joe White)
18 Groupy Girl (Tony Joe White)
19 Slow Train (Joanne Vent & Muscatel)
20 Long Walk to D.C. (Joanne Vent & Muscatel)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/JdGHbzj8

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/HAcJNqwRYyI9p09/file

The cover image shows Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac. It's a screenshot I took from one of these episodes.

Various Artists - Playboy After Dark (CBS Television City, Los Angeles, CA), Volume 7: November to December 1969

Here's the seventh volume of the episodes I compiled of the "Playboy After Dark" TV show. It's the second volume of the show's second season.

In this volume, one again we see the split between Hugh Hefner including acts from the easy listening pop style of music he preferred, such as Tony Bennett and Mitch Miller, and rock and soul music he allowed on the show "for the kids." (As I mentioned in a previous write-up in this series, he usually would explicitly say some acts were "for the kids" when introducing them, as if adults weren't going to like them.) 

This volume has an unusual number of collaborations, none of which have been officially released in any form: Tony Bennett with Mitch Miller, Tony Bennett and Joe Williams (twice),  Tony Bennett with Moe Kaufman, Lou Rawls and the Cannonball Adderly Quintet, and Ike & Tina Turner with Doug Kershaw. Plus, there was a version of "Flip, Flop and Fly" featuring everyone in that episode. I mentioned a few of the participants in the song title, including Steve Allen, the comedian, who sang one of the verses. But there were others too that I didn't mention, or the title would have been too long. Even Hugh Hefner, the head of Playboy, sang a verse!

This episode also continued the second season trend of having unwanted talking over the music sometimes, especially voice-over advertisements for T.W.A. Airlines on the last song of each episode. So that's why you'll see "[Edit]" on some songs. 

This album is an hour and 15 minutes long. 

01 It Don't Mean a Thing [If It Ain't Got That Swing] (Tony Bennett)
02 Blue Velvet (Tony Bennett with Mitch Miller)
03 Watch What Happens (Tony Bennett)
04 Swinging Shepherd Blues [Instrumental] (Moe Koffman)
05 I've Gotta Be Me (Tony Bennett & Joe Williams)
06 The Song Is You (Joe Williams)
07 What the World Needs Now Is Love (Tony Bennett & Joe Williams)
08 I Can't Cry Anymore (Joe Williams)
09 The Shadow of Your Smile (George Kirby)
10 I Left My Heart in San Francisco - I Wanna Be Around (Tony Bennett with Moe Kaufman)
11 Hamba Nami [Instrumental] [Edit] (Cannonball Adderly Quintet)
12 Dead End Street (Lou Rawls)
13 Make the World Go Away (Lou Rawls)
14 The Country Preacher [Edit] (Cannonball Adderly Quintet)
15 My Baby Loves Me (Lou Rawls & the Cannonball Adderly Quintet)
16 I Want to Take You Higher (Ike & Tina Turner)
17 Come Together (Ike & Tina Turner)
18 Proud Mary (Ike & Tina Turner)
19 Honky Tonk Women [Edit] (Ike & Tina Turner with Doug Kershaw)
20 You've Lost that Lovin' Feelin' (Blossoms)
21 Me and You (O. C. Smith)
22 The Learning Tree (O. C. Smith)
23 Flip, Flop and Fly (Blossoms, Steve Allen, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band & Everyone)
24 Goodnight My Love (Nitty Gritty Dirt Band)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/BaELQz7n

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/aOyyOnC6ukjmxkl/file

The cover photo shows Ike and Tina Turner, and some of their backing band. That's Tina in the middle of the front, and Ike right behind her. This is a screenshot I took from the video of one of the episodes here.

Various Artists - Playboy After Dark (CBS Television City, Los Angeles, CA), Volume 6: October to November 1969

Here's the sixth volume of the episodes I compiled of the "Playboy After Dark" TV show. This also is the first album from the show's second (and final) season. Note the big time jump, between Volume 5 ending in January 1969 and this one starting in October 1969 - that's most of a year.

This show tended to have a lot of repeat guests. Consider the soul group Checkmates, Ltd. This already was their third episode. Many of the other guests on volume made or would make appearances on other volumes as well. I think it was especially common for a musical act to appear on an episode in the show's first season, and then another one in the second season.

There are more incidents of "[Edit]" - four - in this volume than in any previous ones. That's because there was more talking over the music in the second season. One particularly annoying aspect was that each episode of this season ended had a brief spoken advertisement for T.W.A. Airlines over the final song. In most cases, I was able to successfully wipe such talking while keeping the underlying music, thanks to the UVR5 audio editing program.

There's a surprising number of songs performed on this T.V. that were never officially released in any form. Consider the duet between Linda Ronstadt and Billy Eckstine. If you listen to the banter before the song started, it seems Ronstadt was very reluctant to sing it, and had to be coaxed into it. That could be prepared dialogue, but in the case, it seemed like a genuinely spontaneous performance to me. As far as I can tell, this was the one and only time Ronstadt performed that song in public.

The duet between Checkmates, Ltd. and Carla Thomas on "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" is similarly unique to this TV show. I also couldn't find any release of "Soul Man" by Bill Medley (who was one half of the Righteous Brothers). Similarly, "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" was never released by Sonny & Cher (or by solo Cher, for that matter). It also seems Carla Thomas never released any version of "Abraham, Martin and John." And it's a similar case with the other volumes.

If anyone knows the name of the instrumental performed by Canned Heat, please let me know so I can give it a proper name. 

This album is an hour and eight minutes long.

01 Walkin' Down the Line (Linda Ronstadt)
02 Living like a Fool (Linda Ronstadt)
03 Hitchcock Railway [Edit] (Joe Cocker)
04 Something (Joe Cocker)
05 God Bless the Child [Edit] (Linda Ronstadt & Billy Eckstine)
06 Soul Man (Bill Medley)
07 What's Wrong (Sweetwater)
08 For Once in My Life (Bill Medley)
09 Why Oh Why - Hey Jude (Sweetwater)
10 Sweet Caroline (Checkmates, Ltd.)
11 Where Do I Go (Carla Thomas)
12 The Japanese Transistor (Biff Rose)
13 Molly (Biff Rose)
14 Abraham, Martin and John (Carla Thomas)
15 Proud Mary (Checkmates, Ltd.)
16 [Sittin' On] The Dock of the Bay [Edit] (Checkmates, Ltd. & Carla Thomas)
17 For Once in My Life [Edit] (Sonny & Cher)
18 Can't Take My Eyes Off You (Sonny & Cher)
19 Future Blues (Canned Heat)
20 My Time Ain't Long (Canned Heat)
21 Instrumental (Canned Heat)
22 Take Me for a Little While (Sonny & Cher)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/aKqnxAQ1

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/6VNID5vPpmlP32t/file

For this series, it was hard for me to pick the cover art, because I could take screenshots of any of the musical acts, and there are always a few good ones to choose from. I didn't choose Linda Ronstadt because she gets a cover later in this series. A key reason I decided on a picture of Cher is because the screenshot I took shows comedian Bill Cosby playing bass in the background. (One can see some of his faced, with sunglasses and cigar, and a little bit of his hands on an upright bass.) 

At the time, Cosby was a widely beloved star. But nowadays, he has been revealed to be a serial rapist. So his appearance on this show can be seen in a whole new light. And he didn't appear just on this episode, he appeared on a LOT of them. I'd guess about a dozen, probably more than any other famous guest. A lot of the time, as in the episode shown on the cover here, he wasn't doing a stand-up routine, but instead was just kind of lurking around. In hindsight, it's super creepy to imagine what Crosby might have been doing behind the scenes with all the beautiful women there. It's symbolic of how the whole carefully constructed image of Playboy has also been torn down, now that we know more. Anyway, I just thought I'd mention that.

Various Artists - Playboy After Dark (CBS Television City, Los Angeles, CA), Volume 5: December 1968 to January 1969

Here's the fifth volume of the episodes I compiled of the "Playboy After Dark" TV show. There are 11 in all. 

Just the first three songs were recorded in 1968. The rest date from 1969. As usual with the albums I post, check out the mp3 tags for more detail. I organized these by recording date. The broadcast dates usually took place a few months later.

Probably the most notable thing about the music here is the performance of the Grateful Dead. As I've mentioned previously, most of the music from this T.V. show has languished in obscurity (though I hope these posts are starting to change that). However, the Dead's performance has gotten around some, especially among Deadheads. As it should, because it's a rare treat to see them on T.V. all the way back in early 1969. Three of their songs are included here. "Mountains of the Moon" is special, because it was only performed 15 times by the band, and this was just the second time. The version of "St. Stephen" was very good too. The only disappointment is that the makers of the show faded the song out while the band was jamming on it. I also included what I could of a third song, "Turn On Your Lovelight." But this is less than half a minute. Basically, it was just a snippet that played as the credits rolled at the end of that episode.

An interesting fact is that the Dead's sound engineer, Owsley "Bear" Stanley, secretly put L.S.D. in the coffee that everyone on the set was drinking! So everyone from Hugh Hefner to the stagehands was tripping on acid during the taping of this episode. You can read more about this incident here:

https://www.openculture.com/2021/01/when-the-grateful-dead-performed-on-hugh-hefners-playboy-after-dark.html

That article also contains a link to the Dead's performance, if you want to see it and not just hear it. And there's another link to a later interview of drummer Bill Kreutzmann in which he talked about the spiking of the coffee. 

While that was probably the most interesting musical performance, there are many other good performances on this episode, with lots of rock and soul. Note, by the way, two songs with "[Edit]" in their titles. Sometimes, for this show, there were other people talking over parts of the music. In the second season this would get much worse, to the point that brief advertisements were even spoken over the end of the last song of each episode. So when you see "[Edit]" in this series, that's usually why.

I would also like to point out how odd it was that the Clara Ward Singers performed for this show. Consider that they exclusively sang gospel songs in churches. I wonder if they were appalled at all the "heathen" appearances and behavior all around them. But kudos to Hefner and Playboy for putting a wide variety of musical styles on this T.V. show. 

This album is 56 minutes long. 

01 River Deep, Mountain High (Bobby Doyle)
02 Blowin' in the Wind (Bobby Doyle)
03 Wear It on Our Face [Edit] (Checkmates, Ltd.)
04 Mountains of the Moon (Grateful Dead)
05 St. Stephen (Grateful Dead)
06 The Great Electric Experiment Is Over (Noel Harrison)
07 Hello Sun (Noel Harrison)
08 Turn On Your Lovelight [Edit] (Grateful Dead)
09 Turpentine Moan (Canned Heat)
10 On the Road Again (Canned Heat)
11 Mendocino (Sir Douglas Quintet)
12 She's about a Mover (Sir Douglas Quintet)
13 Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho (Clara Ward Singers)
14 Swing Low, Sweet Chariot (Clara Ward Singers)
15 Chicken Wolf (Steppenwolf)
16 Don't Cry (Steppenwolf)
17 Get Out My Life Woman (Joe Williams & Joanne Vent)
18 Hurry On Down (Joe Williams)
19 That Face (Joe Williams)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/1vPw9aH6

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/rd6je9jcQYVFtLU/file

The cover photo shows Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. This is a screenshot I took from the video of one of the episodes here.

Various Artists - Playboy After Dark (CBS Television City, Los Angeles, CA), Volume 4: November to December 1968

Here's the fourth volume of the episodes I compiled of the "Playboy After Dark" TV show. 

Imagine having James Brown in his musical prime perform for you and a small circle of friends in your living room! As you can see from the cover art for this volume, that's exactly what happened on this T.V. show. Except instead of it being your living room, it was a duplicate of the living room of Hugh Hefner's Playboy mansion in Chicago, redone to allow filming in ideal conditions in Los Angeles. But basically all the performances on all the volumes in this series are like that, with a couple dozen of people gathered around the musical act. And, also as you can see from the cover image, there was a suspiciously high number of very beautiful women there. Naturally, a lot of them were Playboy models.

It so happens there's a good number of soul music acts on this volume. If anyone knows the name of the instrumental performed by Buddy Miles, tell me so I can fix the song title.

By the way, Three Dog Night appeared on the show another time, but that performance was lip-synced. But luckily, this one was not. 

It seems Playboy head Hugh Hefner had a lot of say over which musical acts were included. He seems to have had a personal preference from pre-rock and roll crooners. So we got an unusually big spot here for Sammy Davis, Jr., who got to play six songs instead of the usual two or three. 

The music here is unreleased. The sound quality is excellent. 

This album is an hour and four minutes long.

01 Who Can I Turn To (Marva Whitney)
02 Celebrate (Three Dog Night)
03 Your Love (Marva Whitney)
04 Love Me So Hard (Three Dog Night)
05 If I Ruled the World (James Brown)
06 Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud (James Brown)
07 [Sittin' On] The Dock of the Bay (Checkmates, Ltd.)
08 I Can't Turn You Loose (Checkmates, Ltd.)
09 I Got You Babe (Buddy Miles)
10 Instrumental (Buddy Miles)
11 Tell Me All the Things (Joanie Sommers)
12 I Feel Fine (Joanie Sommers)
13 Just Squeeze Me [But Don't Tease Me] (Lou Rawls)
14 That's You (Lou Rawls)
15 Washington at Valley Forge (Nitty Gritty Dirt Band)
16 talk (Nitty Gritty Dirt Band)
17 Alligator Man (Nitty Gritty Dirt Band)
18 Your Red Wagon (Lou Rawls)
19 I've Gotta Be Me (Sammy Davis, Jr.)
20 The Joker Is Me - I'm Feeling Good - In My Dreams (Sammy Davis, Jr.)
21 What Kind of Fool Am I (Sammy Davis, Jr.)
22 Who Can I Turn To (Sammy Davis, Jr.)
23 Once in My Lifetime (Sammy Davis, Jr. & Anthony Newley)
24 Rockabye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody (Sammy Davis, Jr. & Jerry Lewis)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/NDa7p1Cd

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/RayW1R6CnlrWuAa/file

The cover image is a screenshot I took of James Brown from one of the episodes in this volume. 

Various Artists - Playboy After Dark (CBS Television City, Los Angeles, CA), Volume 3: October to November 1968

Here's the third volume compiling episodes of the "Playboy After Dark" TV show. 

I said most of what I wanted to say about this weird TV show in general in my write-ups for the first and second volumes. So this time I'll concentrate more on the music.

I'm especially psyched that this has Jackie DeShannon performing two songs. I've been looking for a concert recording from her for ages. I found one she did in 1963, and I've posted that at this music blog, but that's about all I've found. (There are a few YouTube videos of her performing, but most of them are from decades later.) So this is a real find, in my opinion.

As I keep posting these volumes, you'll probably notice a mix of famous musical acts and total obscurities. MC Squared is an example of an obscurity. They were a band many compared to Jefferson Airplane. But they only ever managed to release four singles, none of which dented the charts. 

However, I noticed that many of the obscurities "just happened" to be very attractive women. Cathy Carlson and Lynn Kellogg are examples of that on this volume. Both of them only had one single released under their own names at the time of this show, and neither of them went on to release even a single album. (Although Kellogg did have some minor success later in movie and Broadway play roles.) I surmise that Playboy head Hugh Hefner figured many people would watch his show as much for the many beautiful women shown in the crowd scenes as for the music, comedy, and other performances, so he probably preferred musical acts featuring beautiful women as well. Even MC Squared fits this pattern, since that band had an attractive female lead singer.

Also, unfortunately, as I mentioned in more detail in the write-up for Volume 2, Hefner was an expert in sexual manipulation and grooming. It's highly likely that he often tried to tempt women to have sex with him by dangling the prospect of them performing on this show (or even just being an extra in the party crowds), though it's impossible to say if he was successful with that in any specific instance. In some later episodes, there are cases of female singers on the show who posed nude for Playboy Magazine as well. Though I'll mention again that I didn't include all the musical performances in these compilations. There were the occasional few who just weren't very good, in my opinion, or I had other issues with them, so they were left out.

Something else just came to my mind about Hefner. One reason he got away with his sexual exploitation for so long was because people assumed he was an enlightened person due to his progressive social and political views. For instance, he was ahead of the curve promoting minorities and women in his business empire, as well as giving them opportunities in his magazines and T.V. shows and such. We can see examples of that enlightened reputation in this volume. Not only does it include liberal folk singers Pete Seeger and Joan Baez, but he gave them ample time to talk about their progressive causes, in addition to just singing songs. For instance, before singing, Baez led a discussion that lasted several minutes, arguing there was a moral imperative to oppose the Vietnam War. I highly doubt there were other T.V. shows in that era with a national audience that allowed that sort of discussion. But we now know Hefner could have both been progressive in some of his attitudes in public while also sexually exploiting many women in private. 

This album is an hour and one minute long. 

01 I Know You [Your Nature Is like Mine] (MC Squared)
02 Everybody's Talkin' (MC Squared)
03 The Pill (Pete Seeger)
04 I Got It Bad [And That Ain't Good] (Carmen McRae)
05 Come Live with Me (Carmen McRae)
06 I Got the Reason (Jackie DeShannon)
07 Holly Would (Jackie DeShannon)
08 Everybody's Got to Change Sometime (Taj Mahal)
09 E Z Rider (Taj Mahal)
10 You Could End the World (Cathy Carlson)
11 Hurt So Bad (Cathy Carlson)
12 And the Address [Instrumental] [Edit] (Deep Purple)
13 Hush (Deep Purple)
14 Ol' Man River (Lynn Kellogg)
15 It's Just a Game Love (Brenton Wood)
16 Gimme Little Sign (Brenton Wood)
17 California Earthquake (John Hartford)
18 Natural to Be Gone (John Hartford)
19 Hickory Wind (Joan Baez)
20 Tears of Rage (Joan Baez)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/n4say7Ry

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/rOgqrK3kEfKZ9SF/file

The cover image is a screenshot I took from one of the videos of these episodes of Jackie DeShannon. Do you see the mostly bald-headed man standing right behind her? That's Barry White, who would become a big soul music star in the 1970s. At this time, he was a relative unknown, working mostly as a producer and backing vocalist. He was heavily involved in DeShannon's career around 1968. In fact, the first song she sang here, "I Got the Reason," was written by White.

Various Artists - Playboy After Dark (CBS Television City, Los Angeles, CA), Volume 2: September 1968

Here is the second volume out of eleven, in which I collected songs from episodes of the "Playboy After Dark" T.V. show.

In the write-up to the first volume, I explained a lot about the music on this unusual show. Here, I want to discuss some more about the show in general, to give some context and understanding about the music that was performed on it.

First off, the show has not aged well. AT ALL! In the 1960s and 70s, "Playboy Magazine" was seen as cool by many. The owner, Hugh Hefner, promoted an entire hedonistic lifestyle, and made himself the central character, turning himself into a household name. He died in 2017 at the age of 91. He was lucky he died when he did, because he missed the cultural reckoning of the "Me Too" movement that began after he died, starting with the public exposure of Harvey Weinstein only about a month later. It turns out that Hefner was a pretty horrible person. He had sex with countless thousands of women. In most cases, it was a blatantly transactional thing: women slept with him hoping that would give them a leg up to fame and fortune. Many hundreds of women in his media empire have signed onto letters defending him. But it has gradually emerged that in some cases, at least, things got ugly. He used grooming techniques to manipulate women in all kinds of awful ways. If you want to know more, check out a documentary series called "The Secrets of Playboy," released in 2020.

The reason I mention all that is because knowing what we know now sheds new light on how the "Playboy After Dark" T.V. show is perceived. I tried to skip past all the non-musical parts. Even so, I couldn't help but catch many cringey moments as I went looking for the songs. Although there was no nudity on the show, since it was on a major T.V. channel, there were scantily-clad beautiful women as scenery almost non-stop in every episode. Luckily, if you just listen to the music, you can avoid nearly all of the cringe. I made sure to only include the songs, even though there often were brief interviews with the musical stars, because the talking was usually, well, cringey too.

The T.V. show had a concept, which was that it tried to present the show as a party held in Hefner's Playboy mansion. You, the viewer, were supposedly an invited guest who got to have a fly on the wall perspective of the good times. The very start of each episode showed a limousine pulling up to a building, the door opening for you, and you got taken to the party where Hefner personally greeted you, and so on, all through each episode. The show wasn't actually filmed at the Playboy mansion, which was located in Chicago at the time. (In the early 1970s, shortly after this show finished, a new mansion was bought in Los Angeles and the Chicago one was slowly phased out.) Instead, to make this believable, exact duplicates of many rooms of the mansion were recreated in a Los Angeles recording studio. Every episode stuck to the party format, with dozens of people mingling about. (I noticed that most of them were the same people from episode to episode.) 

A lot of this obviously was contrived, especially many corny lines scripted in advance spoken for the T.V. cameras. But it seems that, to some extent, there was a real party going on. If you're going to have dozens of people lingering around together for the hours and hours it takes to film each episode, it's only natural that they would socialize. Normally, for shows like this, each star would appear when it's time for their performance, do their performance, and immediately leave. But interestingly, as I watched, I noticed that the various musical guests that appeared for each episode, and other performing guests, like comedians or famous actors, were in background scenes of the crowd too, just hanging out and talking to other people all throughout the episode. So you can see strange situations like Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead watching comedian Sid Ceasar make jokes, or actress Patty Duke dancing to the music of Ike and Tina Turner. The number of famous people from different entertainment fields crossing paths on this show is truly strange to see.

As part of this party conceit, supposedly, every now and then, some famous musical act would break into song to entertain those other party-goers. Often, Hefner would have a brief conversation with the lead singer and then ask them to play a song. Then the audience would be the fifty or so party-goers, usually completely surrounding wherever the musicians were playing. So you get bizarre situations like soul singer James Brown singing in the middle of a living room, with people (mostly beautiful women) sitting all around him, so much so that he could hardly move around like he normally did on stage.

The reason I mention all this is because it is relevant to how these songs were performed and recorded. At first glance, it seems like everything must have been lip-synced, given chaotic conditions like that. But on closer inspection, I believe the vast majority of it was live. Perhaps there were hidden microphones when there were no obvious ones in sight, and the crowd members were told to stay totally quiet. I say that because time and time again, I watched the lips of singers and I was convinced the performances had to be live. I've seen tons of lip-synced performances putting albums together for this musical blog, and I believe I can notice the slight timing discrepancies of lip-syncing. Furthermore, I double checked with the album versions of songs whenever I could find them. Also, even for the talking scenes between the songs, one can hear discussions taking place quite clearly, despite there often being no microphones in sight. Maybe some of that was rerecorded for clarity later, but if so, the way the lips matched the mouth movements is very impressive.

As I mentioned in my write-up to Volume 1, sometimes there were live vocals sung to partial or compete instrumental backing tracks. But I've included those, since I consider the different vocal performances worthy enough. Often though, there were backing musicians, but they would be hidden elsewhere in the room, with only brief glimpses of them. Other times, perhaps the entire thing WAS lip-synced, but it was done for a song that was completely unreleased. That happened a surprising amount, especially for the lesser known musical acts. 

One example of that last case on this album is Marvin Gaye. He sang two songs for the show, "Chained" and "By the Time I Get to Phoenix." "Chained" was a recent hit for him. I double checked with the album version, and that one was lip-synced. But there is no released version of him ever doing "By the Time I Get to Phoenix." So even if it was lip-synced (which it probably was), I still included that. That actually is a major find, in my opinion, given how rarely any "new" songs are discovered to have been sung by him this many years after he passed away in 1984. 

One great thing about this T.V. series, in my opinion, is that it often had live performances by musical acts with virtually no live performances available anywhere else. For instance, consider some of the performers on this album. O. C. Smith was a soul music star who had a couple of big hits in the late 1960s. But the only live album he ever released occurred early in his career, his 1966 debut album, before he had those hits. And I haven't found any bootlegs of him either. It's exactly the same with Checkmates, Ltd. Their 1967 debut album was live, before they had any hits. There are no other live albums or bootlegs from them. Rod Piazza and Gloria Loring would both go on to have long music careers, with most of their success coming much later. There's no other live performances from them that I could find until many years after this one. As for Angeline Butler, she only ever released one album, in 1970, which is an obscurity. This probably was her one time in a nationwide spotlight. 

And so it goes for many other musical acts all through this series. Time and time again, their appearances on this T.V. show was the only time they have a live performance recorded well, or at all, at least this early in their career. (Keep in mind that the number of bootlegs, truly live recorded TV shows, and official live albums skyrocketed in the 1970s and beyond, but were very rare in the 1960s.)

I want to add one detail about the Byrds, for serious Byrds fans. Founding member Chris Hillman left the band only two weeks prior to the taping of their appearance on this show, leaving Roger McGuinn as the only remaining founding member. The others in the band at this time were Clarence White, John York, and Gene Parsons.

This album is an hour and one minute long.

01 She's the One (Rod Piazza)
02 My Babe (Rod Piazza)
03 Little Green Apples (O. C. Smith)
04 The Son of Hickory Holler's Tramp (O. C. Smith)
05 It's Too Late [To Say You're Sorry] (Gloria Loring)
06 Did I Ever Really Live (Gloria Loring)
07 One of the Nicer Things (Jimmy Webb)
08 She's Lookin' Good (Checkmates, Ltd.)
09 Sunny (Checkmates, Ltd.)
10 Baby I Need Your Loving (Checkmates, Ltd.)
11 You Ain't Goin' Nowhere (Byrds)
12 This Wheel's on Fire (Byrds)
13 By the Time I Get to Phoenix (Marvin Gaye)
14 Turn Around Look at Me (Angeline Butler)
15 Goodbye Charlie (Angeline Butler)
16 Train (Buddy Miles)
17 Wrap It Up (Buddy Miles)
18 Lincoln's Train (John Stewart & Buffy Ford)
19 Signals to Ludi (John Stewart & Buffy Ford)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/g6vL9ys4

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/c0ZRRf50OW3aw1o/file

The cover image is a screenshot I took from one of the episodes featured here. It shows Roger McGuinn, the lead singer of the Byrds. For some strange reason, he was wearing a military jacket.