Dionne Warwick - Dionne, Burt and Hal: The Definitive Songbook, Volume 1: 1962-1964 (A Mike Solof Guest Post)

In the last album I posted, I mentioned that I'm leaving for a two week vacation to Peru, starting tomorrow morning. But while I'm gone, I'm hoping to keep post albums from time to time. Most or all of the albums will be from two big musical projects, one by Fabio from Rio, and the other by Mike Solof. I've gotten them ready in a kind of assembly line fashion, and they take little extra work for me. That's the plan anyway.

So you already know the Fabio project: Covered albums for Neil Young. This Mike Solof project attempts to collect all the songs Dionne Warwick sang that were written by Hal David and/or Burt Bacharach. The vast majority were written by both, until the last couple of albums.

A couple of weeks ago, Mike came to me with the idea for this collection. I was delighted, because I already made a bunch of "Covered" albums for the Burt Bacharach and Hal David songwriting team. But when I did that, I deliberately avoided including any Warwick versions, because otherwise those albums would have probably been more than half her versions. So this collection perfectly complements that one. So a big thanks from me to Mike for making these albums. I did the cover art and some other minor things, but he was the one who collected all the songs.

Mike managed to find enough music for seven albums, plus a bonus album we'll explain later. If you want to know more, check out Mike's PDF included in the download zip. In fact, it's the same PDF for all the albums in this series.  

By the way, note that the song numbering begins with 001, 002, 003, etc... That's because Mike wanted the numbering from the end of one album to continue with the beginning of the next one. That way, you can put all the songs in one mega-album if you want. Since there's over a 100 songs, we have the extra zero at the same of each number. 

This album is 54 minutes long. 

001 Don't Make Me Over (Dionne Warwick)
002 I Smiled Yesterday (Dionne Warwick)
003 Wishin' and Hopin' (Dionne Warwick)
004 I Cry Alone (Dionne Warwick)
005 Make the Music Play (Dionne Warwick)
006 It's Love that Really Counts (Dionne Warwick)
007 The Love of a Boy (Dionne Warwick)
008 This Empty Place (Dionne Warwick)
009 A House Is Not a Home (Dionne Warwick)
010 Land of Make Believe (Dionne Warwick)
011 The Last One to Be Loved (Dionne Warwick)
012 Reach Out for Me (Dionne Warwick)
013 Anyone Who Had a Heart (Dionne Warwick)
014 Any Old Time of Day [Alternate Version] (Dionne Warwick)
015 I Could Make You Mine (Dionne Warwick)
016 Please Make Him Love Me (Dionne Warwick)
017 Walk On By (Dionne Warwick)
018 You'll Never Get to Heaven [If You Break My Heart] (Dionne Warwick)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/75y7xMfQ

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/5blQU4ahwkF5DEG/file

The cover image shows, from right to left: Hal David, Dionne Warwick, and Burt Bacharach. I don't know the details, but it's from some time in the 1960s. The original was in black and white, and very poor quality. I got it in somewhat decent shape colorizing it with the Kolorize program, then cleaning it up and adding detail with the Krea AI program.

Since some people didn't like the transformation I made of this image, here's the totally unchanged black and white version, in case you want to use that instead. As you can see, the AI program made some changes as I tried to improve the quality. I wasn't happy with those, but I preferred the end result over the rough original. If anyone can do better, please do, and post it here.

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.

Covered: Hoyt Axton: 1963-1977

Here's another edition of the "Covered" series, where I pay tribute to talented songwriters by collecting cover versions of their songs. This time, the focus is on Hoyt Axton.

Axton was born in a small town in Oklahoma in 1938. He came from a musical family. His mother, Mae Boren Axton, was a songwriter who co-wrote the Elvis Presley classic hit "Heartbreak Hotel" and many country songs, and one of his cousins was folk singer Arlo Guthrie. After going to college and serving a few years in the U.S. Navy, he began playing his songs in clubs. He released his first album in 1962, and released a couple dozen from that time until the end of the 1990s.

However, while Axton had some minor hits in the 1970s, especially on the U.S. country chart, he had much greater success by having others cover his songs. He also had a successful parallel career as an actor, especially playing colorful characters in supporting roles in dozens of TV shows and movies. 

His first success as a songwriter was "Greenback Dollar," which became kind of a folk music classic after it was covered by the Kingston Trio in 1963. He didn't have much more success with others covering his songs for the rest of the 1960s, although "The Pusher" became one of Steppenwolf's best known songs in 1968. However, everything changed for him in 1970, because Three Dog Night covered "Joy to the World." Not only was it a Number One hit in the U.S., it was the best selling song of the year! After that, he had quite a few more successes with other people covering his songs for the rest of the 1970s. For instance, Three Dog Night had a Top Five hit with "Never Been to Spain," and Ringo Starr had a Top Five hit with "No No Song."

I've tried to avoid including songs sung by Axton, since this is supposed to be a collection of other musical acts covering his songs. However, I've included two duets he was involved in. "When the Morning Comes," a duet with Linda Ronstadt, is particularly notable for being his biggest hit as a singer. It reached Number 10 in the U.S. country chart in 1974.

He kept putting out new music until the end of his life. He died in 1999 at the age of 61 due to a heart attack.

Axton's songs weren't often big hits, though occasionally they were. However, they usually were distinctive and interesting.   

This album is 46 minutes long. 

01 Greenback Dollar (Kingston Trio)
02 The Pusher (Steppenwolf)
03 Willie Jean (Sunshine Company)
04 Joy to the World (Three Dog Night)
05 Snowblind Friend (Steppenwolf)
06 Ease Your Pain (Jackie DeShannon)
07 Never Been to Spain (Three Dog Night)
08 Sweet Fantasy (Glen Campbell)
09 When the Morning Comes (Hoyt Axton & Linda Ronstadt)
10 No No Song (Ringo Starr)
11 Sweet Misery (Martha Reeves)
12 Southbound (Three Dog Night)
13 Boney Fingers (Hoyt Axton & Rene Armand)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/V6H6sG3w

alternate:

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

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

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.

Allan Sherman - Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles, CA, 7-19-1963

I'm thrilled to be posting this album by comedian singer Allan Sherman. When I was a child, my sister and I discovered that our parents had a bunch of Sherman records in their record collection. We used to sit in front of the family record player and have many good laughs listening to him, until our parents couldn't stand it anymore.

If you're not aware of Sherman, he was basically the Weird Al Yankovic of the 1960s (and one of Yankovic's biggest influences, by the way). That means he took well known songs and wrote his own funny lyrics to them, then sung them. He only had one big hit, "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah (A Letter from Camp)," which reached Number Two for three weeks in the US. in 1963. But his albums sold millions. In fact, he had three albums in a row that reached Number One in the U.S., which was unheard of, before or since, for a song parody specialist. I thought his songs were clever and well done back when I was a kid, and I still do now. But, admittedly, his style isn't for everybody.

Sherman spent most of the 1950s producing and writing for TV shows, especially the show "I've Got a Secret." Living near Hollywood, his work allowed him to meet many celebrities. He often became the entertainment at parties hosted by comedian Harpo Marx. After many years of this, comedian George Burns called the record company that he was signed to and convinced them to sign Sherman to a record contact as well. His debut album in 1962, "My Son, the Folk Singer," was a sensation, selling over a million copies.

His career peaked early, from 1962 to 1964. Once the Beatles and the British Invasion came along, his music was largely left behind. Plus, in my opinion, his first four albums were his best and their quality steadily declined after that. His music career basically ended by 1967, though he lived until 1973. He died of respiratory failure when only 48 years old. 

Here's his Wikipedia entry, if you want to know more:  

Allan Sherman - Wikipedia 

I never knew about this performance, until I discovered it last week (writing this in September 2025). It turns out it has been officially released (decades afterwards) under the title "Live at the Hollywood Bowl," but it's extremely obscure. I couldn't even find it on SoulseekQT, and that has absolutely everything. The timing of this concert was ideal, because it came near the end of his peak period, when he was a big star. Another live album was released, in 1966, called "Allan Sherman: Live! (Hoping You Are the Same)." While that's good, this is better, and twice as long.

The sound quality here is excellent. I did make one change to nearly all the songs, however. It so happens this had the stage well recorded, but there was very little of the audience. So I used the MVSEP program to separate the crowd noise from everything else. Then I carefully boosted just the laughing and cheering from the audience, to show more of the audience interaction.

At the time of this concert, Sherman's best selling album, "My Son, the Nut," was just about to released. As far as I can tell, would come out one month later, but the lead single from it, "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah," had been released and already was a big hit. He played that, and a few other songs from the upcoming album. Otherwise, he mostly played songs from previous albums. He had a problem in that most songwriters in that era wouldn't give permission for him to write parodies of their songs, so he generally wrote parodies of songs in the public domain. I was hoping some of his unreleased songs that he wasn't allowed to put on album would appear here, but that wasn't the case. 

This album is an hour and 13 minutes long.

01 talk by emcee (Allan Sherman)
02 Overture (Allan Sherman)
03 talk (Allan Sherman)
04 Harvey and Shelia (Allan Sherman)
05 A Number of Short Songs (Allan Sherman)
06 Green Stamps (Allan Sherman)
07 talk (Allan Sherman)
08 I See Bones (Allan Sherman)
09 Hail to Thee, Fat Person (Allan Sherman)
10 talk (Allan Sherman)
11 Overweight People (Allan Sherman)
12 talk (Allan Sherman)
13 Disraeli, Won't You Please Come Home (Allan Sherman)
14 When I Was a Lad (Allan Sherman)
15 talk (Allan Sherman)
16 Automation (Allan Sherman)
17 talk (Allan Sherman)
18 Sarah Jackman (Allan Sherman with Rosemary Clooney)
19 talk (Allan Sherman)
20 One Hippopotami (Allan Sherman)
21 talk (Allan Sherman)
22 You Went the Wrong Way, Old King Louie (Allan Sherman)
23 talk (Allan Sherman)
24 The Ballad of Harry Lewis (Allan Sherman)
25 talk (Allan Sherman)
26 Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah [A Letter from Camp] (Allan Sherman)
27 talk (Allan Sherman)
28 No One's Perfect (Allan Sherman with the New Christy Minstrels)
29 Shticks and Stones (Allan Sherman)
30 talk (Allan Sherman)
31 When You Walk through the Bronx (Allan Sherman)
32 Finale [Instrumental] (Allan Sherman)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/sDBwhR4f

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/YrxOD26iM7oKXzX/file

For the cover photo, I found a concert poster from around this time period (though not this exact show). I cleaned it up a bit, cropped it to make it square, and added the location text at the bottom. 

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: Lee Hazlewood, Volume 1: 1956-1967

It's time to highlight another talented songwriter in my Covered series. This time, it's Lee Hazlewood. He's best known for writing hit songs for Nancy Sinatra, especially the huge hit "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'." But he did a lot more than that. He had a quirky style with songwriting, production, and his own singing so unique that he practically created his own musical genre. The intro paragraph to his Wikipedia entry states: "His collaborations with Sinatra as well as his solo output in the late 1960s and early 1970s have been praised as an essential contribution to a sound often described as 'cowboy psychedelia' or 'saccharine underground.'" I found enough interesting cover versions of his songs for two volumes.

Hazlewood had an unusual career, just like how he had an unusual sound. It seems he marched to the beat of his own drummer. Sometimes that meant big hits, sometimes obscure records. 

He was born in 1929, and mostly grew up in Texas. After serving in the military during the Korean War in the early 1950s, he began working as a DJ. This gave him a foot in the door into the music business. He soon started producing and well as selling songs he'd written. His first big hit was "The Fool" by Sanford Clark in 1956. After that, he had the most success in the late 1950s and early 1960s writing songs for guitarist Duane Eddy. His biggest success was with "Rebel-'Rouser," a Top Ten hit in the U.S. in 1958 and a true classic. He wrote a whole series of hits for Eddy, most (but not all) of them guitar-based instrumentals. I only included a few of those here because, in my opinion, most of them are similar to each other and don't really stand out.

Hazlewood's hits for Duane Eddy petered out by the end of 1963, probably due to a change in the public's musical tastes. That was right when the Beatles and the British Invasion hit it big. Hazlewood was so disappointed in the change that he took a break from the music business for most of 1964. 

But in 1965, his career resumed when he got a chance to work with Nancy Sinatra. She was both very beautiful and a talented singer. Plus she was the daughter of music legend Frank Sinatra. However, she'd had a series of nothing but failed singles from 1961 to 1965, and was in danger of being dropped from her record label. Then she began working with Hazlewood. He drastically changed her sound, including having her sing in a lower register, and with a more sultry style. Their first single in 1965 didn't do that well. But their second one was "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'," which went to Number One in the U.S. singles charts and instantly turned Sinatra into a big star. That led to a whole series of hit songs he for Sinatra through the end of the 1960s.

The Sinatra collaboration turned Hazlewood into a minor star as well. That's because not only did he write and produce all her hits, he sang on some hit duets with her as well. It was a very odd combination, since Hazlewood had a low, gruff voice that typically wasn't found on hit records. But the clash with Sinatra's conventionally pretty voice somehow worked, in large part due to Hazlewood's songwriting and production.

The account of his career will continue with the second volume. Note that, on this volume, I generally stuck with the hit versions, even though that means a big cluster of Nancy Sinatra songs in the second half. Those versions are so distinctive and definitive that it seemed wrong to use different ones.

This album is 48 minutes long. 

01 The Fool (Sanford Clark)
02 Snake Eyed Mama (Don Cole with Al Casey)
03 Don't Look Now, but I've Got the Blues (B.B. King)
04 Rebel-'Rouser (Duane Eddy)
05 The Girl on Death Row (Lee Hazlewood with Duane Eddy & His Orchestra)
06 Shazam (Duane Eddy)
07 Guitars, Guitars, Guitars (Al Casey with the K-C-Ettes)
08 [Dance With] The Guitar Man (Duane Eddy)
09 Baja (Astronauts)
10 These Boots Are Made for Walkin' (Nancy Sinatra)
11 Friday's Child (Nancy Sinatra)
12 Need All the Help I Can Get (Suzi Jane Hokom)
13 How Does That Grab You, Darlin' (Nancy Sinatra)
14 Sugar Town (Nancy Sinatra)
15 Guitar on My Mind (Duane & Miriam Eddy)
16 Sand (Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood)
17 Summer Wine (Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood)
18 The Last of the Secret Agents (Nancy Sinatra)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/HjpmSyrP

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/J50fzMok1feovMx/file

I had a hard time finding good color images of Hazlewood when he was young, so I had to resort using an album cover photo. The cover image was taken from a 1960 album called "Something Special."

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

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

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

This album is 41 minutes long.

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

https://pixeldrain.com/u/6785v1eV 

alternate: 

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

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

Covered: John D. Loudermilk: 1956-2002

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John D. Loudermilk - Wikipedia 

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

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

This album is 50 minutes long.

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

https://pixeldrain.com/u/h2wgDDB2

alternate:

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

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

Covered: Aaron Schroeder: 1956-1978

Until recently, I had never heard of Aaron Schroeder. I'll bet that's the same for you. But he was the songwriter behind a lot of classic hits, especially for Elvis Presley, so here's a "Covered" album about him.

Aaron Schroeder was born in New York City in 1926. Once he became an adult, he went straight into songwriting. It's said that he wrote more than 1,500 songs, with about 500 of them recorded by professional musicians. 

He got an early connection with Elvis Presley, writing songs for him in 1956, a year after Presley became a star. He went on to write 16 songs done by him. That's the second most of anybody, behind only the great songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. (Check out the Covered albums I made for them.) He wrote or co-wrote no less than five Number One songs for Presley, more than anybody: "I Got Stung," "A Big Hunk o' Love," "Stuck on You," "It's Now or Never," and "Good Luck Charm." (Although note that "I Got Stung" was only Number One in Britain, not the U.S.) Unfortunately, he broke with Presley in 1962 due to a dispute about royalty rates. Presley's manager, Tom Parker, was notoriously stingy about paying for good songs.

Undoubtedly, Schroeder's biggest success was "It's Now or Never." That single sold about 20 million copies, making it the seventh best selling single of all time by anybody, as of 2025. The music was based on an Italian song written in the 1800s, "O Sole Mio." Presley heard the Italian version while stationed in Europe as a U.S. soldier. He liked it and wanted to sing an English version. Schroeder co-wrote the English lyrics (which were not a translation of the Italian) with another professional songwriter, Wally Gold, in less than half an hour. 

Schroeder generally co-wrote songs, and Gold was his most frequent collaborator. The two of them also co-wrote "It's My Party," "Good Luck Charm," "It's Now or Never," "Because They're Young," and others. And speaking of "It's My Party" (another Number One hit), Schroeder is not officially credited as a songwriter for that song, but it's well known that he was involved. The story is that both Schroeder and Gold took part, finishing a song started by a freelance songwriter named Seymour Gottlieb. But they were only given one songwriting portion between the two of them, so they flipped a coin for it, and Schroeder lost!

Schroeder's songwriting career declined after the early 1960s. But that's probably because he devoted most of his time to other music business. He started his own record label, Musicor Records. It was only moderately successful, but it did release a series of hits by Gene Pitney. He got even more involved with music publishing. Together with his wife Abby, he helped the music careers of many other performers and composers through their publishing agency, including Barry White, Randy Newman, Al Kooper, Blood, Sweat & Tears, and Jimi Hendrix. 

He did occasionally keep a hand in songwriting well into the 1970s. The three last songs on this album are examples of that. Note by the way that "Love's Theme" was a Number One hit as an instrumental for Love Unlimited in 1974. Schroeder wasn't involved with that, but he wrote the lyrics for a version that group put out on their next album, so that's the version I included here.

It seems Schroeder could be pretty ruthless as a music publisher. Another songwriter I've profiled in this "Covered" series, Tony Macaulay, had a protracted legal battle with Schroeder's publishing company in the early 1970s, claiming the terms of his contract weren't being fully honored. Macaulay won the battle in 1974, in a landmark decision which encouraged other artists to challenge the terms of their contracts. 

Schroeder died in 2009 at the age of 89. 

Here's the Wikipedia entry about Schroeder, which mentions the coin flip story:

Aaron Schroeder - Wikipedia    

This album is 45 minutes long.

01 Cincinnati Fireball (Johnny Burnette)
02 Got a Lot o' Livin' to Do (Elvis Presley)
03 My Boy Elvis (Janis Martin)
04 I Got Stung (Elvis Presley)
05 Glad All Over (Carl Perkins)
06 A Big Hunk o' Love (Elvis Presley)
07 Rubber Ball (Bobby Vee)
08 Because They're Young (Duane Eddy)
09 Time and the River (Nat King Cole)
10 Stuck on You (Elvis Presley)
11 It's Now or Never (Elvis Presley)
12 Half Heaven, Half Heartache (Gene Pitney)
13 Good Luck Charm (Elvis Presley)
14 It's My Party (Lesley Gore)
15 Love's Theme (Love Unlimited)
16 Move Me No Mountain (Dionne Warwick)
17 She Can Put Her Shoes Under My Bed [Anytime] (Johnny Duncan)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/64nmrvaP

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/GRsIF8DWiDTBOT8/file

Aaron Schroeder is such an obscure and forgotten figure that it's lucky I was able to find any photo of him at all. The one I could find (which you can see in his Wikipedia article) was black and white and generally low-res. I colorized it via the Kolorize program. Then I had to do a lot of work with Photoshop and Krea AI to get the half decent result you see here.  

Covered: Tony Hatch: 1960-2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tony Hatch - Wikipedia 

This album is an hour and seven minutes long.

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

https://pixeldrain.com/u/S3iEsBeT

alternate:

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

The cover photo is from 1974. 

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

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

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

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

Here's a Wikipedia link:

The Swinging Blue Jeans - Wikipedia 

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

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

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

This album is 58 minutes long.

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

https://pixeldrain.com/u/UBh2ic3L

alternate:

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

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

Covered: Bob Crewe & Bob Gaudio, Volume 1: 1957-1974

The songwriting team of Bob Crewe and Bob Gaudio is another one that doesn't get as much respect as it deserves. So they're a good subject for this next installment in my "Covered" series. They were responsible for writing most of the big hits by Franki Valli and the Four Seasons. But they had many songwriting successes for other musical acts as well.

Note that since many of the songs here were first hits by Franki Valli and the Four Seasons, I wanted to avoid turning this into mostly a "best of" by the band. So I tried hard to select versions of those songs by other musical acts. I've made two volumes, and many of the hit songs in this time period (1957 to 1974) aren't included until cover versions that happened in the time of the second volume. Examples that were 1960s hits but don't show up until later covers include "Sherry," "Rag Doll," "Walk like a Man," "Bye Bye Baby," and "Barbarella." Also keep in mind that these two wrote most Franki Valli and the Four Seasons hits, but not all of them.

Bob Crewe was thirteen years older than Bob Gaudio, so his music career started first. In 1953, he partnered with another songwriter, Frank Slay, Jr. Four years later, in 1957, they had their first hit with "Silhouettes" by the Rays. I haven't included that, because I chose another version of the song by Herman's Hermits, which was a big hit in 1965. The B-side was another song they wrote together, "Daddy Cool." The Diamonds had a hit with it in 1957, so I included that version here. They also had a big hit in 1957 with "Tallahassee Lassie" for Freddy Cannon in 1959.

Meanwhile, Bob Gaudio was starting his music career. In 1958, at only the age of 15 years old, he wrote the hit "Short Shorts" for the band he was in at the time, the Royal Teens. Not long after that, he came across a band led by Franki Valli, and joined them as a piano player and songwriter. They soon were renamed "Franki Valli and the Four Seasons." From the very start, they were produced by Bob Crewe, which is how Crewe and Gaudio met each other. It probably helped that both of them were from New Jersey.

The very first hit by the Four Seasons in 1962, "Sherry," was written by Gaudio alone. But soon, Crewe and Gaudio were generally writing the hits together. From 1962 to about 1968, they wrote dozens of hits together, just for the Four Seasons. 

Meanwhile, with Gaudio busy a lot of the time as a member of the Four Seasons, Crewe had a whole other career going on as a producer, which often also included more songwriting with others. He even formed his own record label, Dyno Voice Records, and had over 20 hits with artists on that label other than the Four Seasons. One hit was actually in his own name - the "Bob Crewe Generation" - an instrumental called "Music to Watch Girls By," in 1967. However, that's not here because although he produced it and performed it, he didn't write it. In 1968, his group the Bob Crewe Generation wrote and performed all the songs for the soundtrack to the hit movie "Barbarella." I put a cover of the theme song on Volume 2.

So the 1960s were an extremely successful time for both Bobs. Generally speaking, songs Gaudio helped write ended up first being performed by the Four Seasons, though sometimes other groups ultimately had the big hit. For instance, the Four Seasons version of "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine (Anymore)" didn't even make the Top 100 singles chart in 1965. But the Walker Brothers did a version in 1966 using the same arrangement and hit Number One in the singles chart in Britain with it. Meanwhile, Crewe had his fingers in other pies, and sometimes wrote songs with other songwriters.

However, in the late 1960s, the style of music favored by the Four Seasons fell out of favor, with musical trends changing rapidly and drastically. Gaudio teamed up with another songwriter, Jake Holmes (best known for writing "Dazed and Confused"), and made the 1969 Four Seasons album "The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette." It was their attempt to stay relevant with a quasi-psychedelic album. (Crewe wasn't involved with the songwriting, but he produced the album.) It was too strange to sell well, but it's reputation has grown over time, and it's actually a pretty good, interesting album, in my opinion. John Lennon reportedly considered it one of his favorite albums.

Overall though, the time from 1968 to 1973 was rough for both Crewe and Gaudio. It looked like both of their music careers were petering out. However, both would have great successes starting in 1974. But that will be saved for Volume 2. (The one song here from 1974, "You're Ready Now," is actually a cover of a song they first wrote and released in 1966.)

Here's links to their Wikipedia pages:

Bob Crewe - Wikipedia

Bob Gaudio - Wikipedia

This album is 49 minutes long.

01 Daddy Cool (Diamonds)
02 Short Shorts (Royal Teens)
03 Tallahassee Lassie (Freddy Cannon)
04 Big Girls Don't Cry (Orlons)
05 Navy Blue (Diane Renay)
06 Big Man in Town (Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons)
07 Silhouettes (Herman's Hermits)
08 The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine [Anymore] (Walker Brothers)
09 Dawn [Go Away] (Rockin' Berries)
10 I'm Going Out [The Same Way I Came In] (Kiki Dee)
11 Sock It to Me Baby (Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels)
12 Silence Is Golden (Tremeloes)
13 [You're Gonna] Hurt Yourself (Bystanders)
14 Beggin' (Timebox)
15 Can't Take My Eyes Off You (Nancy Wilson)
16 Mrs. Stately's Garden (Four Seasons)
17 Stone Liberty (Diana Ross)
18 You're Ready Now (Guy Darrell)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/do5dtFze

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/6uSrZKGp9dqYhGe/file

There are very, very few photos of Crewe and Gaudio together, and those didn't show their faces well. So I found individual photos and put them together for the cover. The one of Gaudio (with black hair) is from 1966 while the one of Crewe (with reddish hair) is from 1959.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are the Wikipedia pages of both:

Neil Sedaka - Wikipedia 

Howard Greenfield - Wikipedia

This album is 42 minutes long.

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

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

alternate: 

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

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

Covered: Henry Crosby: 1963-1978

The vast majority of the classic Motown songs from the 1960s and 70s were written by a relatively small group of songwriters. So with all the Motown-related "Covered" series albums I've posted, I should have nearly all those classic songs on at least one of those albums. Nearly all, but not all. There are some key ones I realized I'm missing, such as "Fingertips, Part 2." So here's yet another behind-the-scenes Motown songwriter, Henry Crosby. He doesn't have that many songs here, but he fills some important gaps.

Crosby was born in Detroit in 1928. That made him older than most of the other Motown songwriters and singers he worked with. He served in the U.S. army in the Korean war, then began playing saxophone in jazz clubs in Detroit. He joined Motown when the company was founded in 1959, and became part of the backing band later known as the Funk Brothers, playing on hundreds of hit songs. But he didn't stop there. He became a jack-of-all-trades for the company, branching out as an arranger, producer, and songwriter as well. 

His first big success as a songwriter was "Fingertips, Part 2," which he co-wrote with another Motown songwriter, Clarence Paul. Stevie Wonder took it to the top of the U.S. singles chart in 1963. That led to Crosby developing particularly close musical ties with Wonder. If you look at the song list below, a majority of them were first hits by Wonder, even if I used versions by others.

The reason why I'm using versions other than that by Wonder is because Crosby usually co-wrote song with other key members of the Motown songwriting team. The other songwriters have their own Covered albums, and I have often already posted albums with versions of those co-written songs on them. So for instance, "The Tears of a Clown" was co-written by Crosby, Wonder, and Smokey Robinson. I put the Robinson version on a Wonder Covered album, and the hit English Beat version on a Robinson Covered album. So I chose a more obscure version by Petula Clark for this album.

Crosby was involved in co-writing many great Motown hits until about 1971. That's when Motown head Berry Gordy stupidly decided to move the company from Detroit to Los Angeles to in order to get more involved with movies and TV. In the process, many very talented people like Crosby were fired or chose to stay behind, and Crosby was one of them. 

Crosby continued to be involved in the music industry. For instance, he produced albums by Blood, Sweat and Tears, Martha Reeves, and the Originals. However, he wasn't involved in writing any more hit songs. The songs here are in chronological order, but all the ones from after 1970 are covers of earlier hits. He died in 2002 at the age of 72.

I've come across conflicting information if Crosby helped write the Supremes hits "Love Child" and "I'm Living in Shame" or not. For instance, the Wikipedia entry on "Love Child" only lists him as a producer, not a songwriter. But the Wikipedia entry for Crosby lists him as a songwriter for that song too. And there were other conflicting sources like that. I ultimately left those two out, since both songs already had at least four other co-writers anyway, and they're included on other Covered albums I made. But if anyone knows if he really helped co-write those songs or not, I'd be curious to hear the answer.

Here's his Wikipedia entry if you want to know more:

Henry Cosby - Wikipedia

This album is 42 minutes long.

01 Fingertips, Part 2 (Stevie Wonder)
02 Uptight [Everything's Alright] (Nancy Wilson)
03 Lucky Lucky Me (Marvin Gaye)
04 Nothing's Too Good for My Baby (Stevie Wonder)
05 I'm Wondering (Stevie Wonder)
06 Home Cookin' (Jr. Walker & the All Stars)
07 No Matter What Sign You Are (Supremes)
08 My Cherie Amour (Jon Lucian)
09 I Should Be Proud (Martha Reeves & the Vandellas)
10 Never Had a Dream Come True (Stevie Wonder)
11 The Tears of a Clown (Petula Clark)
12 With a Child's Heart (Michael Jackson)
13 Shoo-Be-Doo-Be-Doo-Dah-Day (Linda George)
14 I Was Made to Love Him [I Was Made to Love Her] (Chaka Khan)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/cp4JZ7Ws

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/Ei7qTGglXhJbnwG/file

I found a couple of decent photos of Crosby when he was much older, but I preferred one when he was young and writing these songs. The cover photo is taken from a group photo of the Motown backing band "the Funk Brothers" in the early 1960s. It was in black and white, but I colorized it with the Kolorize program. Then I improved it with the Krea AI program. Crosby was looking away, but I moved his eyes to look at the camera using Photoshop. 

The Beatles - The Beatles Uncovered, Volume 11: Mike's Mixes (1963-2023) (A MIKE SOLOF GUEST POST)

Here we go again. Like a dancing fool who just can't stop dancing, Mike Solof just can't stop editing Beatles songs. By now, you should know the drill. Mike takes songs by the Beatles, and well as a few from their solo careers, and remixes them in ways to bring out aspects you may not have appreciated before.

He really outdid himself with the first song here, "Run So Far." That song, written by George Harrison, first appeared on an Eric Clapton album in 1989. Then it appeared on a Harrison album in 2003. Discovering the two versions were in the same key, Mike combined the lead vocals to create a truly unique acappella mash-up, thanks to over 300 edits for just three minutes of music. Check it out! Then enjoy all the other interesting mixes.

Oh, and as usual, if you want to know more details, like what the edits are for each song, check out the PDF including in the download.

This album is 56 minutes long.

01 Run So Far [Mike's Mix 2025] (George Harrison and Eric Clapton)
02 Now and Then [Orchestra Version] [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
03 Piggies [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
04 Drive My Car [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
05 From Me to You [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
06 Good Day Sunshine [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
07 Rocky Raccoon [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
08 Rock and Roll Music [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
09 All My Loving [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
10 Norwegian Wood [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
11 Blackbird [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
12 You Know My Name [Look Up the Number] [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
13 Yer Blues [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
14 Got to Get You into My Life [Band Version] [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
15 Maybe I'm Amazed [Mike's Mix 2025] (Paul McCartney)
16 The Long and Winding Road [De-Spectorized Version] [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)
17 No. 9 Dream [Mike's Mix 2025] (John Lennon)
18 Maggie Mae [Mike's Mix 2025] (Beatles)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/dmbRp1er

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/a1g6298C9uDpe0J/file

Mike selected the cover photo. I'm sure it's from 1969, but I don't know any details.

COVERED: Luther Dixon: 1957-1972

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

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

 

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

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

Luther Dixon - Wikipedia

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

This album is 43 minutes long. 

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

https://pixeldrain.com/u/Hzg8N4eA

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/JUCGAftRRNsKQZT/file

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

Covered: Norman Gimbel: 1953-1986

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Killing Me Softly with His Song - Wikipedia

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

Norman Gimbel - Wikipedia

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

This album is an hour and seven minutes long.

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

https://pixeldrain.com/u/P2BYQLtv

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/MpTyosybz70Db69/file

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