Post-Cursor to Greatness

Tommy Boyce established himself as a hero to three-year-old caithiseach as soon as his single entered my collection. Apart from “Sweet Little Baby I Care,” I owned only the flip, a self-penned tune called “Have You Had a Change of Heart” (RCA 8126), but Tommy’s songs earned my complete attention. I didn’t play today’s side quite as much, but I consider this single to be one of the strongest two-sided 45s I owned. Since the material hasn’t been released on CD yet (to my knowledge), I am very glad this 45 is a Survivor of the Great Vinyl Meltdown.

I was fortunate enough to have the Quintessential Valuable Commenter, Yah Shure, offer me some data from his Goldmine 45 price guide, which I need to acquire so he doesn’t have to rescue me. According to this impeccable source, Tommy released these singles through 1963:

1960
R-Dell 111.............Betty Jean / I'm Not Sure
Dot 16117.............The Gypsy Song / Give Me The Clue

1961
Wow 345..............Is It True / Little One
RCA Victor 7975....Along Came Linda / You Look So Lonely

1962
RCA Victor 8025....Come Here Joanne / The Way I Used To Do
RCA Victor 8074....I'll Remember Carol / Too Late For Tears

1963
RCA Victor 8126....Have You Had A Change Of Heart / Sweet Little Baby, I Care
RCA Victor 8208....Don't Be Afraid / A Million Things To Say

Only “I’ll Remember Carol” charted, but I would jump at the chance to buy a compilation of these sides. Tommy seems to have released a couple of albums on RCA as well, and I’ll be looking for them.

As was the case with most of Tommy’s other compositions, he had a co-writer on “Have You Had a Change of Heart.” B. Kelly had some hand in its creation, according to the 45 label. And guess who B. is? Betty Jean Kelly, the probable inspiration for Tommy’s first single, and who happened to be Tommy’s sister.

The production and arrangements appealed to three-year-old caithiseach, so I’ll take a moment to mention their source. The sessions were produced by Ray Ellis. He has a solid pedigree, having orchestrated the 1958 Billie Holiday album Lady in Satin, arranged “A Certain Smile” for Johnny Mathis, and written the theme song for the Spider-Man cartoons. He wrote background music for the Archie TV show, which solidifies the link between the Jeff and Tommy RCA singles. All that, and Tommy Boyce, too.

The arrangements on these sides were the work of Jimmie Haskell. Yes, the Jimmie Haskell who arranged Billy Joel’s Cold Spring Harbor LP, played on Tina Turner’s Acid Queen LP, and came up with his own space-age pop LP, Count Down! He arranged Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe,” and Chicago’s “If You Leave Me Now,” all of which earned him “Best Arranger” Grammys. His spectacular credentials are available at his website.

The top-notch help makes me think RCA was big on Tommy Boyce. While the RCA material didn’t pan out, the A&R people at RCA eventually got to pat themselves on the back for having good judgment, if not the best timing.

Not long after this single didn’t hit the charts, Tommy experienced a watershed moment in his career when he met up with Robert Harshman, a Phoenix native who was already a talented songwriter. One of their first assignments was to pen the theme song for Days of Our Lives, a U.S. daytime drama that has been on the air since 1965. Here is that theme.

The boys, with Robert taking the name Bobby Hart, began to write a string of hits for top artists, including “Come a Little Bit Closer” for Jay and the Americans and “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone” for Paul Revere and the Raiders.

It may have been a right place, right time thing, but Boyce and Hart, the songwriters, were tapped to create music for a TV pilot that was intended as an American answer to the Beatles: The Monkees. From the theme song to “Last Train to Clarksville,” Boyce and Hart were the creative forces behind the act at its inception. They recorded the tracks, vocals included, then either wiped their vocals or mixed them out when Mickey Dolenz and pals came to sing.

And then, the flap occurred over the fact that the Monkees didn’t play their instruments, and the Monkees wanted to write their own songs, and Boyce and Hart exited in favor of Don Kirshner’s guru, Jeff Barry. Jeff was no slouch, as he brought in a little Neil Diamond composition, “I’m a Believer,” which topped the Hot 100 for seven weeks in 1967, despite Mike Nesmith’s assurances that the song was no hit.

When the Monkees (read: Nesmith) griped about Jeff as they had about Boyce and Hart, the source of the problem became evident. But the legacy of what Boyce and Hart accomplished musically with that foursome will not go away, and time has had a way of creating more respect for the Boyce/Hart productions.

Sometimes it works out that a pair of writers can create their own musical act. For Boyce and Hart, the results were pretty spectacular. They scored three Top 40 hits, including one of the best songs of the decade, “I Wonder What She’s Doing Tonite.” (The title spelling stems from an identically titled 1963 single by Barry & the Tamerlanes.) This song centers itself in its time frame, calling on all of the musical conventions of the moment: loud brass, chord progressions you could hear anywhere. And yet, the lyrics, especially the B part of the verses, about what friends never do, are some of the wisest and tightest to come to light in 1968, when the song peaked at #8. It’s a spectacular song; the duo sang as if they were brothers, and they obviously had a lot of fun making the record.

From there, they wound up paired with Dolenz and Jones in a Monkees reunion in the mid-1970s, and then things started to calm down. Tommy spent some time in the United Kingdom, then he took up residence in Nashville.

At some point, Tommy suffered a brain aneurysm, which exacerbated some depression issues he faced. Some of his best friends had died, including Elvis Presley and Del Shannon, who took his own life on February 8, 1990. Tommy had the courage to appear on talk shows to discuss his depression, a touchy subject even in the early 1990s. Finally unable to deal with the pain, Tommy shot himself in the head at his home on November 23, 1994.

Tommy’s sister, Betty Jean, dedicated a memorial bench to Tommy at Studio B in Nashville. Sidney Thomas Boyce was born on September 29, 1939. Monday will be the 69th anniversary of his birth.

For Wednesday, I will bring you what may be the first 45 I specifically requested as a gift. It was a big hit, too, for once. Until then, listen to Tommy’s other song, and watch him and Bobby get after “I Wonder What She’s Doing Tonite.”

Tommy Boyce, Have You Had a Change of Heart

Another Precursor to Greatness

Over the course of the blog year, I have talked about some singles in my 1960s cache that were poorly received followup singles (“Snow Train” by the Jamies, for example), or enticing tastes of what was to come (“Face from Outer Space” by Jeff Barry, who had just one Top 40 single as a singer but wrote your childhood soundtrack). Here is another look at someone who was going to be someone, and the tale is almost as compelling to me as Jeff’s is.

Apart from a few legacy singles by Elvis (Presley), the early caithiseach collection of 45s didn’t include a lot of RCA singles, because the label’s stable of artists generated a lot of hits and thus few cutouts. That’s my theory, anyway. In a manner similar to my experience with Mercury singles, the RCA 45s that did make their way to me had a special cachet, because they were a lot closer to being hits than many of the other flops I owned.

I’ve said before that three-year-old caithiseach tended to favor uptempo numbers over syrupy slow songs. I really avoided playing songs that included heavy strings and large choruses singing quavery “oohs.” Today’s song is gentle, has a string part, and has a couple of girls singing background vocals, but it is tender rather than sappy, clean rather than overdone with the production. That distinction, as well as the artist’s voice, made a strong caithiseach hit of “Sweet Little Baby I Care” by Tommy Boyce (RCA Victor 8116).

A large percentage of my readership knows who Tommy Boyce is. Don’t feel bad if you’re young enough that his name has escaped your notice; I’ll fill you in shortly. But even if you know his work well, there’s a decent chance you have not heard “Sweet Little Baby I Care.” That’s not because the track lacks merit; it’s because no one has seen fit to issue a Tommy Boyce solo anthology.

That is a shame, because Tommy’s RCA output is, as far as my knowledge of it goes, pretty solid. He recorded at least two albums for RCA, and I don’t know how many singles he released for them; there is so much search-engine chatter for other configurations of his career that I can’t whittle things down to his solo RCA output. But he scored a three-week Hot 100 hit with “I’ll Remember Carol,” which peaked at #80. A few months later, RCA released today’s song, but it didn’t chart nationally. A copy came into my hands shortly after its release. I loved it.

I was mulling over the song’s charm, and I have figured out a couple of things. First, this recording does not sound like any other quiet song of its era. It should have piano triplets or electric guitar licks, and it sounds more like a folk romance song. The strings serve a purpose, rather than being filler, but they don’t overpower the vocals or the rest of the arrangement.

Unlike, for example, Johnny Tillotson’s “Poetry in Motion,” you could drop “Sweet Little Baby I Care” into a 1970 playlist, and no one would bat an eye. Or an ear.

Conclusion: The song was ahead of its time, not behind it. “Sweet Little Baby I Care” was written by Edwin and Alvin Johnson, co-members of a late-1950s vocal group, the Souvenirs. One of their songs, “Castin’ My Spell,” reached #52 in 1959 for the Johnny Otis Show.

By 1963, Tommy Boyce had paid his dues and earned an RCA recording contract, so I wonder if it was a lack of promotion or radio resistance to his work that kept him down. His unpublished book of industry anecdotes might tell the story, so I’m going to look into that. Here is the chain of career events that led to his RCA days:

Born in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1939, Tommy’s break came when a song he said he wrote by himself, “Be My Guest,” made its way to Fats Domino. The de rigeur deal for a new songwriter was to share with a big-name artist, so Fats has partial credit, as does the middleman, John Marascalco. But that 1959 #8 smash was just the beginning, as Tommy went on to co-write “Pretty Little Angel Eyes” with Curtis Lee, who recorded it for the Dunes label, owned by Ray Peterson, with production by Phil Spector.

With Steven Venet, Tommy wrote “Peaches N Cream,” a #36 hit for the Ikettes in 1965, and “Action,” Freddy Cannon’s #13 hit from the same year. The later tune served as the theme to Dick Clark’s Where the Action Is show.

Rather than talk about Phase Two of Tommy’s career with Robert Harshman today, I’ll save myself something pretty spectacular to write about for Saturday. I’ll discuss the producer and arranger of both sides then, as well.

The single is scratchy, because caithiseach played this one all the time. In addition to that bit of solo work, here’s a clip of Tommy singing some of his compositions that were covered by others. More to come on Saturday. See you on the flip side!

Tommy Boyce, Sweet Little Baby I Care

Holy Vinyl, Batman!

When I set up the song sequence for this blogging year last October, I had no idea there was another Batman movie in the works. Well, there’s always another Batman film on the way, but I had no specific understanding that one would be breaking box-office records at the time I scheduled my week of posts on the mid-1960s TV phenomenon. I could have changed the schedule, but I spent hours in October getting it just right, and I don’t want to mess it up. So . . .

When five-year-old caithiseach toddled off to Our Little Saints Kindergarten in September of 1965, there was a huge change in store for him, apart from the beginning of an education that has not really ever stopped:

Batman hit the small screen.

Before that time, I had received hand-me-down comic books, probably from my cousin Bob, and so I was well-versed in what Archie and Richie Rich looked like, even if I still had to ask for help in figuring out what was scrawled in the word balloons. But somehow I was prevented from leafing through comics featuring Batman, so he was a mystery to me. Then came the TV show.

Batman was the first, but unfortunately not the last, TV show to capture my complete attention. I never missed an episode. That perfect record was not hard to accomplish, because I didn’t go anywhere in the evenings, but there you have it—I never forgot to watch Batman. That show was the first, and unfortunately the last, family institution that centered around my TV tastes. On Sundays, my mom’s friend Kathryn came over to watch Gunsmoke and Lawrence Welk with my parents, which was a colossal downer, but on Batman night, whichever night that was, Uncle Tom came over, and I sat down about a foot in front of the Zenith console and soaked up the delights of everyone’s favorite TV crime-fighter.

During the fight scenes, which didn’t strike my parents as too violent for me to watch, each physical blow came with a cartoon representation of that punch: Biff! Pow! Crash! At first, I didn’t know those words, so Uncle Tom came to my aid and read the screen to me. Soon enough, I learned to read the words, but I didn’t let on, because it was fun to have Uncle Tom read them.
I think there was Batman merchandise available, and I’m sure I wanted any that existed. If I got any of it, I didn’t get much. What I did get, of course, was the vinyl. Twice.

Today I’ll talk about my second copy of the song, because it was the Neal Hefti original theme to the TV series (RCA Victor 8755). More specifics on the song in a moment, but I want to relate this record to my kindergarten experience.

Our school seems to have been a private enterprise. There was no public kindergarten in Merrillville, Indiana when I turned five, but if there had been, my mom would have sent me to Our Little Saints anyway. The people who ran it leased the basement of the Turkey Creek Pharmacy, so it looked as if we had school in an oversized family basement, with exposed rafters, cinderblock walls and a cement floor for décor.

I learned a lot there. I learned that nuthatches walk upside-down on the trunks of trees in search of food. I learned a lot about the Native Americans of Indiana. I ate my first pomegranate in that class. And one day, I tuned out Mrs. Ballinger completely, because I was reliving the Batman episode of the previous evening. It had been an amazing one, with this guy named the Joker as the villain of the week, concocting a diabolical scheme to mess up things in Gotham City, only to be foiled by Batman and Robin.

Suddenly, I realized that Mrs. Ballinger probably had not seen the episode, so she would know nothing at all about the Joker. There she was, going wah-wah-wah like Charlie Brown’s teacher, talking about something that was not nearly as interesting as Batman, and so I cut to the chase.

I raised my hand, she stopped talking and called on me, and I said, “The Joker has green hair.”

I appreciate the stunned look on her face more now that I have spent some years teaching. At the time, I found it a bit confusing, then it dawned on me, ever so slowly, that I had committed a faux pas. She didn’t really want the Joker to become part of that particular lesson. Oh, well.

She and my mom had a far-too-boisterous chuckle over that one.

Despite that event, once I got the 45 of the Batman theme, she let me bring it in for nap time. As had been the case when I brought in the bouncy “Why Wait” by Pérez Prado and His Orchestra, the kids sat up and clapped along instead of sleeping. I didn’t get asked to bring in a third song that year. With twenty kids and 40 weeks of school, I don’t think there was a conspiracy to silence me.

The original theme to the TV show, “Batman Theme” by Neal Hefti, was only a minor hit, reaching #35 in a 4-week Top 40 run that began on 3/5/1966. It was a big caithiseach hit, though, in the two incarnations that wound up in my collection. More on the second version Saturday.

Uncle Tom didn’t get this 45 for me. His specialty was bulk cutouts, and this song was my third specific purchase of a 45. My parents took me to downtown Gary, and I bought it at a record store there. It took me two tries to get the Neal Hefti version, but I worked it all out eventually.

I will discuss the song and its composer more on Saturday. For now, put a couple of cookies on a napkin, get a glass of milk, darken the room, and listen to Neal Hefti’s “Batman Theme.” If you get an urge to sit up and clap your hands instead of taking your fifteen-minute nap, go for it. See you Saturday!

Neal Hefti, Batman Theme

Lonely Lips Lead to Lyrical Longevity

On Wednesday, I began to chronicle the achievements of songwriter and producer Jeff Barry. Today, we’re still pinned to his recording career, via the B side of “Face from Outer Space,” “Lonely Lips” (RCA 47-7797). As with the A side, the song was co-written by Ben Raleigh and produced by Hugo & Luigi.

If you didn’t read the first part of this mini-bio on Wednesday, we’ll wait for you while you scroll down . . . ah, got it?

So, three-year-old caithiseach received this 45 for a nickel that he didn’t even have to spend, and the result was hours of sonic bliss. Let’s see, at five minutes per two-sided play, times 5000 plays, that would be 25,000 minutes of music, divided by 60, equals 416 hours I spent enjoying these two songs alone. And now that I have a CD of mp3s of about 200 recordings that Jeff Barry either wrote, sang or produced, I could pretty much stop listening to anyone else and still have a decent music collection.

But I won’t do that. Right now, I’m digging around to get as many songs from the 1890s and 2007 as I can. So the collection keeps growing.

“Lonely Lips” has a great piano part, nice guitar work, three key changes in the choruses, and everything else three-year-old caithiseach enjoyed. It would not be until 1970 that I noticed that Jeff Barry was writing many of the other songs I liked, but in the meantime, I was digging a lot of his work without knowing it.

After he produced Neil Diamond’s Bang recordings (you can hear Jeff and Ellie singing on “Solitary Man,” among others), Jeff was asked to take over production for the Monkees. This story will be told in more detail elsewhere, but the basics are that Jeff went to meet the Monkees, and he took a Neil Diamond demo with him. Three Monkees liked it, and one balked at it. They recorded it anyway, and “I’m a Believer,” with Jeff’s signature organ riff, topped the Billboard Hot 100 for seven weeks in early 1967. So much for that Monkee’s judgment.

A bit later, a kid named Andy Kim wandered into Jeff’s office after taking the train down from Montreal. We’ll look at Andy’s singles in May, as well as some of his writing/production collaborations with Jeff.

Jeff then created his own label, Steed, on which he released several Top 40 hits we’ll also see, in August. After that, he was hired to produce a talented pianist named Peter Allen for A&M, and Jeff told Peter about a lyric he had in his head: “Maybe I hang around here a little more than I should.” Peter started doodling on the piano, they wrote the lyrics and recorded a demo. Artie Wayne says he took it to Olivia, who wanted to record it despite some label execs’ misgivings. The Allen piano part was so perfect they didn’t re-record it. And that’s how we got “I Honestly Love You.” The result was the Grammy for Song of the Year for 1974. Add to that the 1969 RIAA Record of the Year for “Sugar, Sugar,” and you would have to say Jeff has created a superb writing legacy, even if you don’t consider that his overall sales put him in third place all-time.

A mutual friend knew how much I admired Jeff’s work, and when I mentioned wanting an address where I could write to thank him for his art, I got something better: a phone call from Jeff. The next time I was in California, Jeff and I met in May, 2006. I have learned a lot about his career, and from the people with whom he has collaborated, I’ve learned that he is also an exceptionally kind, generous human being. It can be a huge disappointment if you learn that your idol is not so nice behind the scenes, but I have the good fortune to know this talented man and the comfort of knowing he is loved within the music world.

And that’s that for now. Check out “Lonely Lips,” and prepare for a sonic spectacle you have NEVER heard before on Wednesday!

Jeff Barry, Lonely Lips

Sci-Fi Invades caithiseach’s Life!

I might have saved this song for the last post of 2008, the way Casey Kasem used to count ’em down to Number One, but tomorrow is the singer’s 70th birthday, so today is the proper time to write about my lifelong relationship with the music of Jeff Barry.

Early on in my Uncle Tom’s provision of 45s, he gave me a couple of RCA singles that I enjoyed. All four sides got a lot of play from the beginning. I’ll talk about one of the records in September, but today I’m bringing you “The Face from Outer Space” by Jeff Barry (RCA 47-7797).

A surprising number of my 45s were not recent cutouts when Uncle Tom bought them for me. My Danny Kellarney 45 came from 1957, for example. I don’t know what path these records took from their label’s warehouse to the Big Top department store, where my uncle bought them, but some of them sat somewhere for up to six years, unbought and unplayed.

My copy of “Face from Outer Space,” which survived the Great Meltdown and somehow avoided being Ground to Dust despite thousands of plays, came at the same time as the other RCA single. That makes me think an RCA warehouse got a spring cleaning in 1963, and a couple of 45s from 1960 or so went into a truck for distribution at a very low price. Even with gas prices hovering around thirty cents a gallon, how could anyone make money off the sale of a 45 for a nickel? I’m glad RCA didn’t just recycle the vinyl, of course.

I always liked the concept of space travel, of aliens, of science fiction. My first concrete sci-fi experience was “The Face from Outer Space.” Though Jeff now says he doesn’t know what he was thinking when he wrote that song, three-year-old caithiseach loved it. No 45 I owned topped these two sides for plays or long-term appeal, up to the very end of the 45 era.

When Jeff was signed to his songwriting and recording contract, he was paired with a songwriting legend, Ben Raleigh. Raleigh (1913-1997) wrote such disparate works as “Midnight Mary” with Artie Wayne for Joey Powers, “She’s a Fool” with Mark Barkan for Lesley Gore, and “Scooby Doo, Where Are You?” with David Mook for . . . Scooby Doo. Raleigh died in a terrible accident in his kitchen at the age of 83; he was cooking, and his robe caught fire.

While Jeff’s first chart hit was “Teenage Sonata,” which Sam Cooke took to #50 in 1960, Jeff and Ben Raleigh both got credit for Jeff’s first Top 40 hit, “Tell Laura I Love Her.” Jeff originally had the song’s protagonist die after being gored by a bull, and it was Ben Raleigh who said a car wreck would be more universal. The idea worked, as Ray Peterson’s version of the song reached #7 in 1960 in the United States, and Ricky Valance’s version spent three weeks at #1 in the United Kingdom.

“The Face from Outer Space” exists in a demo version that tells a longer story, and I’m sure the released version was cut down for radio. The RCA production/songwriting team of cousins Hugo (Peretti) & Luigi (Creatore) were in charge of this recording. Hugo & Luigi produced Perry Como, Sam Cooke, some guy named Elvis, “I Will Follow Him” for Little Peggy March, and “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” for the Tokens.

Jeff’s writing career took off more than his singing career (and don’t let the vocals on this week’s songs fool you; he has a very versatile voice). He met up with a young songwriter named Ellie Greenwich, and they started writing with a guy named Phil Spector. The result was “Da Doo Ron Ron,” “Baby I Love You” and “Be My Baby,” among others.

Then Jeff and Ellie were off to work with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller at Red Bird Records. Jeff and Ellie took a tune they had given to Phil Spector, “Chapel of Love,” and helped Leiber and Stoller turn it into the classic Dixie Cups version. Jeff’s production of “Iko Iko” for the Dixie Cups was stunningly ahead of its time, yet it managed to reach #20 in 1965.

In 1964, the year of the British Invasion, guess whose compositions still managed to chart six weeks at #1 via three different artists? Jeff and Ellie’s. Apart from the Beatles and the Supremes, no one else topped the Hot 100 more than once that year. “Chapel of Love,” “Leader of the Pack” and “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” did it for them.

As part of their writing gig at 1650 Broadway (where many big names worked, near the Brill Building), Ellie brought to Jeff a young singer/songwriter named Neil Diamond. Jeff and Ellie produced the recordings Diamond made for Bang records. Jeff was also involved in the Van Morrison sessions for Bang, which were produced by the label’s owner, Bert Berns. When you listen to “Brown Eyed Girl,” at the end you hear another voice come in with the sha-la-la part. That’s because Bert Berns realized they needed one more “sha-la-la” after Van Morrison had already flown back to Ireland. So Jeff Barry put some grit in his voice and sang it.

There is a lot more to tell you about Jeff Barry’s accomplishments, as is fitting for the third most successful American pop songwriter of the pop era (behind Carole King and Lionel Richie). So I’ll give you more on Saturday, and in May, and in August. And there are tidbits I could give you here, but won’t, because they belong in a book rather than in a blog.

So, enjoy the two versions of “Face from Outer Space,” and be sure to wish Jeff Barry a happy birthday tomorrow. Look for the other tune on Saturday. See you on the flip side!

Jeff Barry, Face from Outer Space

Jeff Barry, Face from Outer Space demo