AM Gold 1962

Artists

Album Info

Release Date: 1995

Labels: Warner Special Products, Time Life Music

Time-Life released this disc as "" (SUD-06) in the Super Hits series in 1991, and as "AM Gold 1962" (AM1-18) in the AM Gold series in 1995.

℗ 1991 Warner Special Products
© 1991, 1995 Time Life Inc.

Track durations obtained from software.

Publishing:
Track 1, 4, 21- Screen Gems-EMI Music, Inc. BMI
Track 2- Paramount Music Corporation ASCAP
Track 3, 19- Jobete Music Company ASCAP
Track 5, 15- Chappell & Co. ASCAP
Track 6- Duchess Music Corp. BMI
Track 7- World Songs Pub. Inc. ASCAP
Track 8- Aldon Music, Inc. BMI
Track 9- Full Keel Music Co. ASCAP
Track 10- Regent Music Corp./Ridgeway Music BMI
Track 11- Famous Music Corp. ASCAP
Track 12- ABKCO Music Inc./Alley Music Corp./Ludix Publishing Corp./Trio Music Co., Inc. BMI
Track 13- ABKCO Music Inc./Ludix Publishing Co. BMI
Track 14- Trio Music Co., Inc./Unichappell Music Inc. BMI
Track 16- Ridgeway Music BMI
Track 17- Intersong USA ASCAP
Track 18- Boobette Music/Rainbow Music ASCAP
Track 20- Management Agency & Music Publishing BMI
Track 22- Emily Music Corp./Ivanhoe Music Inc. ASCAP

Complete liner notes:

The early 1960s was the era of the girl group, and the Shirelles were chief among the artists who defined those times. Beverly Lee, Micki Harris, Doris Kenner and lead Shirley Owens were originally a quartet from Passaic, New Jersey, called the Poquellos. They sang at high-school functions until a classmate, Mary Jane Greenberg, fixed them up with her mother, Florence, who ran the Tiara label. After auditioning in her living room, they signed with Greenberg and enjoyed immediate success with I Met Him on a Sunday. In 1959 Greenberg formed Scepter Records, which issued the group's cover of the "5" Royales song Dedicated to the One I Love. Then she paired the Shirelles with writer and producer Luther Dixon, formerly of the Four Buddies.

The young women, who still identified strongly with rhythm and blues, bridled against Dixon's strong pop bent, but in 1961 their Will You Love Me Tomorrow became the first girl-group single to reach No. 1 on the pop charts. A year later, with a little time left unexpectedly at the end of a session, Dixon dashed off Soldier Boy, a tribute to every working-class teenage girl whose sweetie would not be going to college (in those days, there was only one alternative to college, and that was the military). The Shirelles rushed through the tune in one take, and it became their biggest hit ever.

With groups like the Shirelles and the Angels (whose 'Til set them up for the first No. 1 single by a white girl group, My Boyfriend's Back) riding high, female artists seemed to be having all the luck in 1962, especially solo singers. None had more success than Connie Francis, who had been in show biz since her father finagled her a spot playing accordion on the children's talent show Startime when she was 11. Six years later, in 1955, she began recording for MGM.

After 10 failures, her father suggested an old favorite of his from 1923, Who's Sorry Now. When her recording of it hit in 1958, she never doubted his judgment again. He picked out Don't Break the Heart That Loves You (cowritten by Benny Davis, who also gave the world Baby Face), and in 1962 it became her third No. 1. Francis produced it herself, as she had been doing since her pivotal Where the Boys Are movie soundtrack smash the year before. Between 1958 and 1969, she put 55 singles on the Hot 100.

Shelley Fabares was born into a theatrical family (her aunt is the actress Nanette Fabray) and made her television debut as a dancer on a 1953 Frank Sinatra special. She went on to play Mary Stone, the daughter in The Donna Reed Show. After the second season, the show's producer, Tony Owen (Donna's real-life husband), decided that Shelley and Paul Petersen (who played her brother, Jeff) would start singing on the show a la Ricky Nelson.

Johnny Angel was written during a New York City blackout by Lyn Duddy (best known for the Bosco commercial jingle) and Lee Pockriss (who, with his usual partner, Paul Vance, wrote Brian Hyland's Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini). Working at the piano by candlelight, Pockriss helped Duddy rework a song about a girl who waits on the corner every night to watch a certain boy pass by. The two songwriters never worked together again, but once proved enough to create a chart topper. Fabares hated her voice and was sure her record would never make the TV show, but thanks in part to the crack sessions players who backed her-guitarist Glen Campbell, drummer Hal Blaine, vocalists the Blossoms with Darlene Love-she was wrong.

Ketty Lester, a veteran of both Cab Calloway's Orchestra and the Ziegfeld Follies, shared space on the charts with Francis and Fabares, thanks to a unique arrangement of Love Letters, the Edward Heyman-Victor Young theme from the 1945 movie of the same name. Brenda Lee, the little girl with the big voice, was as dramatic as ever with All Alone Am I and Break It to Me Gently; by the time she turned 21 in 1965, Little Miss Dynamite had cut an amazing 256 sides for Decca.

For soulfulness and success, Brenda's only match among female solo artists was Mary Wells, whose three top-10 hits in 1962 provided the fledgling Motown label its foothold in the record business. Two Lovers was given to her by her producer, Smokey Robinson. The multitalented Robinson had written it for Claudette, his high-school sweetheart and later wife, and he sang it in those early days in his own group, the Miracles. Claudette, who was a member of the Miracles, also moved him to write You've Really Got a Hold on Me, another brilliant lyric he put on paper after hearing Sam Cooke's Bring It On Home to Me on the radio in a New York hotel room.

Among male artists, Neil Sedaka has proved one of the most enduring of those who were popular in 1962. He and his neighbor and high-school buddy Howie Greenfield had been writing together since 1952, and they became Brill Building writers in 1958, the year Sedaka signed to RCA as a performer. He had 11 chart hits before scoring his first No. 1 with Breaking Up Is Hard to Do, which was inspired by the Showmen's hymn to rock 'n' roll, It Will Stand. The night before he went into the studio, Sedaka made up the nonsense-syllable intro because he was too excited to sleep; he called his arranger at 12:30 a.m. to give him the phrases so they could be worked into the song in time for the session.

In the same year as the better-remembered Town without Pity and (The Man Who Shot) Liberty Valance, Gene Pitney also enjoyed a haunting No. 2 hit, Only Love Can Break a Heart, written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. Ironically, Pitney's triumph was kept from going all the way to the No. 1 spot by the delightfully delinquent He's a Rebel, which he himself had written for the Crystals.

Frank Ifield was born in England, grew up in Australia and returned to his homeland in 1959. His clear Irish tenor made a hit out of I Remember You long after it was written by film director Victor Schertzinger for his 1942 musical The Fleet's In, which starred Dorothy Lamour, Bob Eberly, Helen O'Connell and the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra.

Other male stars included Bobby Darin, the first white rocker signed to Atlantic-Atco. He was on a Ray Charles kick when he wrote Things, his seventh top-10 hit. Dickey Lee had left Sun Records in Memphis and moved to Beaumont, Texas, when he cut Patches, a teen-death classic, with former Sun producer Jack Clement. Sealed with a Kiss was one of Queens boy Brian Hyland's bids for the Frankie-Fabian market after he abandoned the novelties (like Itsy Bitsy. . .) that made him famous. And Floridian Johnny Tillotson signed with Cadence, the label the Everly Brothers made famous, as a Ricky Nelson-influenced country-rocker, but returned to his roots with It Keeps Right On A-Hurtin', a country ballad. Having been drafted into the army in 1962, Tillotson toured in GI haircut to promote the song.

He wasn't the only enlisted performer to maintain a high profile. In November 1961, the Everlys themselves (now at Warner Bros.) went on six months' active duty with the Marine Corps Reserve in Camp Pendleton, California. They were crew-cut and in uniform when they sang Howie Greenfield and Carole King's Crying In the Rain on The Ed Sullivan Show a few months later.

The Drifters, meanwhile, immortalized a critical component of East Coast urban teen life with Up on the Roof, which King cowrote with her husband, Gerry Goffin. And You Belong to Me was revived in 1962 by the Duprees from Jersey City, New Jersey. Their recording of this 1952 Jo Stafford classic helped keep the street-corner-group sound alive.

-John Morthland

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