Hello everyone. This is a “public service announcement” to try to get the latest information I have about the delays in the USA out to as many fans who might have ordered The Ultimate Listener’s Guide as possible.
The book was intended to be published in hardback only. They are printed on demand – one copy at a time. In the UK and Europe, that has happened as it should, and there are no problems. In the USA, however, Amazon have an issue with their printer of hardbacks, and the delay I was told was 3-4 weeks delivery. That four weeks is now nearly up, and most people who ordered in the US have no book. I was told by a refreshingly candid assistant at the weekend that Amazon had “not been completely truthful” with the extent of the delays. This has caused a mess. Luckily, no-one pays for their items on Amazon until the book is dispatched, but that doesn’t help in getting the book, and I know these kinds of issues are frustrating.
So, I have taken the decision to release the book in paperback as well. I was hoping to get this published by Christmas Day, but I’ve been ill all week, and it will now be the very beginning of the new year. So, if you are in the USA and have ordered the new edition of the book, you have three choices open to you:
1.) Wait until Amazon finally get the hardback out to you.
2.) Hold on until the paperback is released, and, at that point, cancel your hardback order if it hasn’t been dispatched, and then buy (or not buy!) the paperback.
3.) Cancel your hardback now, and buy the paperback when it comes out.
There will be no delays in getting the paperback. They are unaffected by the current issues. Obviously, the paperback will be a bit cheaper for you, too, and it should be available in Australia. I could have coped with all of this better if the problem was caused by something I’d done, but it’s completely out of my hands. Even so, I am really sorry if you have been affected by the delays. There are no delays on Amazon in the UK and Europe with regards to the hardbacks – but shipping to the US obviously adds a not insignificant amount to the price for you.
I will make a further announcement about the “relaunch” in due course.
In a December 1961 interview with Hedda Hopper, Bobby Darin said that “I believe there’s a field for folk songs now and will do some of them.” During the same set of sessions that produced the Oh! Look at Me Now! album in 1962, Bobby was able to do just that. However, rather than simply mimicking the Peter, Paul and Mary sound that was popular at the time, he instead did something completely different, creating an album of folk songs (and songs in the folk style) ranging from prison songs to Latin American material, gospel songs, protest songs and even a song from Haiti. If Oh! Look at Me Now! was one of Darin’s less ambitious albums because of its more traditional repertoire, then Earthy!is at the other end of the spectrum completely.
The remark to Hedda Hopper was not the first time that Darin had referred to his admiration of folk songs. He had also done so just before singing I’m Just a Country Boy with Duane Eddy during the 1960 UK TV special. On record, he had also recorded the faux work song Timber at his very first recording session back in 1956, the slow calypso-like love song Lost Love a couple of years later and, more recently, Jailer Bring Me Water, a Darin song that imitated the folk and prison song genres. He had also added a folk section (including Cottonfieldsand Boil That Cabbage Down, neither of which were tackled in the studio) into his live act by the time that this LP was recorded.
Earthy! opens with two “prison songs,” the first of which is Long Time Man. Long Time Man may have writer’s credits given to Ian Tyson and Sylvia Fricker, but it is based on a traditional African-American prison song that went back decades. Tyson and Fricker were a Canadian folk duo who performed under the name of Ian & Sylvia, and one listen to their rendition of Long Time Man shows just how much Darin’s version owes to theirs, with the arrangement being virtually the same. With Earthy! often being regarded as one of Darin’s most original works, the similarities here come as quite a shock, and yet he still manages to bring things to the table that are wholly his. While Oh! Look at Me Now! smoothed out Bobby’s swinging style, and was devoid of yelps, eeks and groans, here he shrieks, whistles and shouts his way through the song, and also provides his own harmony vocals. It’s a striking opening to what is a contender for Bobby’s best album, and he returns to this raw sound and feel of Long Time Man elsewhere in the album, including on La Bamba and Guantanamera. Long TimeMan was added to Bobby’s live act in early 1963 with the twenty-year-old Jim (soon to be Roger) McGuinn featured on guitar.
First in a series of short posts coming up over the next couple of weeks, highlighting some of the lesser-heard Bobby Darin “deep cuts” as we approach the fiftieth anniversary of his passing on December 20th. I don’t pretend that all of these songs are Bobby’s absolute best, but I think they are some of the most interesting.
Bobby Darin’s 1968 album Bobby Darin born Walden Robert Cassotto was an intensely personal project, and very few heard it at the time, but for anyone trying to understand the Bobby Darin story, this is essential listening.
In The Proper Gander, we have an allegorical tale about a group of mice encouraged by their leader to go to war to fight a Siamese Cat that doesn’t actually exist, with the leader being found out as the song comes to the end of its seven verses. Everything here is tied up in the lyrics. Out of each verse’s 28 bars, 22 of them are simply the chord of G.
The lyrics more than make up for the harmonic simplicity, however, with Darin writing them in such a way that they can not only relate to the Vietnam war but to any propaganda/spin produced by a government on any issue in order to win votes and confidence. In other words, he’s talking about “fake news” albeit fifty years before the term was first used, and from the opposite side of the political spectrum when compared to those we associate with the term today. Despite the musical simplicity, there is a remarkable confidence in the writing of the song, with Darin having complete trust in his work as a lyricist, and his use of wordplay is both intelligent and fun and shows a different side to his songwriting.
Today (November 25th, 2023) sees the publication of the The Ultimate Listener’s Guide to the career of Bobby Darin. I want to take this opportunity to tell you a little about the book, and how it came to be.
Those of you who bought the 2nd edition, published back in 2018, will probably remember that I said quite clearly in that book that there wouldn’t be a 3rd edition. However, some things happened that meant it was sensible to go back on that promise. The first of these was covid. I spent the first lockdown making a video essay/documentary about early film. In the second lockdown, I started work on a sessionography for Bobby Darin. For those of you that don’t know, a sessionography compiles information about each recording session: time, place, musicians, songs recorded, their composers, the number assigned to the recording by the record label, how and when it was first released, and (in my case) where alternate takes etc can be found.
Many great musicians already have very detailed sessionographies completed. For example, Elvis Presley has one in a book called A Life in Music by Ernst Jorgensen, and there is also an indispensable website by Keith Flynn, with everything listed that you could possibly imagine. We know everything about Elvis’s recordings that we could possibly wish to know. Alas, the same isn’t true for Bobby. The new official website doesn’t even have a complete list of his albums.
There were previously two sessionographies of Bobby: one on the Praguefrank website, and the other by Jan-Jaap Been. I really want to take time out to thank them for their work. While those sessionographies are now somewhat out of date (in that they don’t include more recent releases), they were (and still are) huge achievements that have laid the groundwork for someone like me to come along and build on.
The problem with this endeavour for Bobby is that so much information is still not known – especially regarding musicians in some sessions, but also even dates of sessions are uncertain – but I have done everything I can to bring together everything we do know about Bobby’s recordings. There are still gaps, but I have been honest where we don’t know something, rather than make guesses. There’s a lot of misinformation online about Bobby, and I’d rather say we’re unsure of something rather than add to it. The session information in the new book looks something like the following – it is then followed by the kind of critiques and information that owners of a previous edition will already expect.
I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Kenneth Kelly Jr. and David Ortoleva for all the information they passed on to me regarding alternate takes that have been issued through the years, and for providing me with the audio of some of them.
So, when the session info was getting close to being finished, my plan was to issue it as a 100 page book that could sit on the shelf alongside the 2018 edition of the “Listener’s Guide.” And then something weird happened – unreleased Bobby recordings started appearing in the most unlikely of places, most notably various auction sites. There was an inexplicable flurry of them over a period of eighteen months or so. While they all remain unreleased for now, I was given access to them by the new owners for the purposes of this book, meaning I could add in analysis of music that not only have we not heard before, but also didn’t know existed! There are some significant (and historical) surprises among them, and I hope you will get to hear them in the not-to-distant future, but it was great to be able to include them in the book so that it is already up to date when they find their way out into the Bobby world. And so, bearing in mind the new musical material AND the sessionography AND it being the 50th anniversary of Bobby’s passing, the decision was made to re-release the book.
Another sample page:
The decision was made to include everything that Bobby recorded that has been included on audio-only releases (official and unofficial). So, for example, the duet with Judy Garland from The Judy Garland Show is included because it was released on the Judy Duets CD album. Some might be surprised to see the inclusion of the songs from the Seeing is Believing DVD, but just the audio did actually get its own release in a digital album back in 2006, and so those songs are included within the book (both in session information and critique/analysis). I have also included info on all of Bobby’s officially-unreleased audio recordings that we know of, such as the 1959 recording at the Hollywood Bowl, and radio recordings from 1960 and 1966. As stated earlier, I have gone into details about unreleased material when it was made available to me.
It is now a rather hefty tome – A4 size. 135 images. 540 pages. 225,000 words!! It’s been a long (and sometimes very trying) endeavour, particularly with technical proofing issues delaying the book’s release by about two months. All but two images from the previous edition have been retained, and some new ones added. The book is being published in hardback and paperback options. I recommend the hardback (although I get less royalties from it!), but Amazon have about a 4 week delay on dispatching that in the USA, hence why I have also done a paperback option. There are no hardback delays outside of the USA.
And so, at this point, I release this commemorative 50th anniversary edition of the book into the wild! Many thanks to everyone who helped me during the writing of this or the previous editions, especially Karin Grevelund, Matt Forbes (whose cover design is stunning), Alex Bird, and L. Vergara Herrero. I really hope you like it, and that you feel it does Bobby’s legacy justice.
A couple of months ago, it was announced that Bobby Darin’s Direction label was going to be relaunched, some fifty-three years after its demise. We were told that, “Direction Records will expand to include previously released albums as well as newly found recordings.” The first announcement was that five of Bobby’s Atlantic albums would be available to stream for the first time. This happened on July 14th, 2023. But what are we to make of what Direction might have to offer?
Forgive me for not applauding wildly about this first set of releases. While it is great, of course, to have these five albums available on streaming platforms for the first time, the real question is why hasn’t it happened before? Only a couple of songs from 1965 to 1967 have been (officially) available in the past. Was this to do with the label in question not putting them out there? Hardly, for the Estate owns those recordings – so why put them out a decade later than they should have been? Your guess is as good as mine.
The good news is that the five albums in question sound fine – The Shadow of Your Smile album is in mono, which is particularly good news as the stereo mix is appalling. The bad news is that these are bare-bone releases. There are no bonus tracks at all, despite the fact that there have been plenty on the CD releases of the same albums. This is a huge shame, as it means a significant amount of Bobby’s Atlantic output is still unavailable. The single sides Breaking Point and Silver Dollar were recorded during the Shadow of Your Smile sessions, and so would have found a good home here (and they’re actually much better than most of the album!). Likewise, Weeping Willow, recorded at the same session as the album’s Rainin’, remains unreleased. As a reminder, this has been out there amongst collectors in perfect sound for two decades.
The Shadow of Your Smile isn’t the only album here bereft of bonus tracks that should have been included. The remarkable Manhattan in My Heart remains officially unreleased, despite the fact that it would have been perfect as a bonus track on In a Broadway Bag, as it is very much in the same vein as the ballads on that album. Its release was announced in a radio interview eight years ago, but the album never came out. Quelle surprise. Likewise, Walking in the Shadow of Your Love was the B-side to the single release of Mame, the album’s opening track. That’s not here either.
Criminally, the A-side of Bobby’s first single for Atlantic, We Didn’t Ask to Be Brought Here, is still not available on streaming services, despite being a Darin classic. In fact, there are still at least fifteen tracks from the Atlantic years (that have been previously issued or are known to exist) that still are unavailable for streaming. On top of that is an entire live album, Something Special, which hasn’t ever been reissued officially, and has therefore been out of print for more than fifty years. One also has to wonder where the two albums released on Direction in 1968 and 1969 are. They also have never been issued in complete for on streaming platforms. The situation is ludicrous.
The Only place to hear “We Didn’t Ask to Be Brought Here” online is on YouTube.
Is this just a case of me being a glass half-full kind of guy? Not really. While the Direction announcement a couple of months ago seemed promising, what’s happened since has been disappointing at best. Most notably, there seems to be no movement when it comes to Bobby’s online presence. If people hear these new-to-streaming albums, where can they go for more information about Bobby? Can they go to the new website, http://www.bobbydarin.com? Well, they can, but, despite going live two years ago, the discography on there is less than half complete when it comes to Bobby’s original lifetime albums. What’s more, the dates attached to most of the albums are the year of CD or streaming release dates and not the original year of release. Go figure.
And, get this: the albums released on July 14th aren’t mentioned in the discography at all!
Beyond that discography, there is precious little there, other than a brief biography. It’s an empty shell of a website that is not going to spur visitors on to find out more about Bobby. It feels like a holding space – but it’s been up for two years. It’s pathetic.
But that’s only half of it. The social media presence for Bobby remains utterly appalling. The twitter, instagram and facebook accounts are vapid, mostly consisting of nice pictures and bland captions to go with them. Oddly, they have barely talked about Direction being relaunched other than the initial announcement. Even worse is Bobby’s presence on YouTube. The “official archivist” has spent years uploading incomplete songs, horrible colourised videos of TV performances, and other TV performances in the ratio of a mobile phone or, conversely, squashed into widescreen. No, Bobby never was that shape.
A new official YouTube channel launched a couple of months ago with two videos and fans waited with bated breath.
And they waited.
And waited.
Finally, another video appeared yesterday – Bobby singing If I Were a Carpenter from a show most fans own on DVD, and with the picture again squashed into widescreen. You couldn’t make it up.
Squished Bobby. He wasn’t tall, but he sure as hell wasn’t this shape!
Forgive me for saying that Bobby’s online presence (outside of Facebook groups run by fans) is a joke.
It sucks.
And what seems to be missed is that these social media accounts are of vital importance if this relaunch of Direction is going to be a success. It is so important these days for people new to Bobby to have somewhere to go to find out information and to see interesting, imaginative posts on social media. In 2023, official social media accounts HAVE to be helmed by professionals – and I don’t say that to dig at whoever does run them and has kept them for the last ten or fifteen. But times have changed, and Darin’s online presence has to change with it. One has to only look at the official Sammy Davis Jr social media accounts to see just how it could be done.
What will happen if nothing changes? Someone will hear the If I Were a Carpenter album (for example), and then their interest will fizzle out quickly. That means there is no interest in future releases from Direction, and then the label folds again, with the Estate making out there is a lack of public interest in the venture. That isn’t true. Bobby and his music are as vital now as they were sixty years ago, but you can’t just release something and sit back, waiting for the views and listens to mount up. Believe me, as an author, I know that all too well. And if you want real proof of that, check out the YouTube video the official channel uploaded 6 weeks ago: it’s had just 47 views.
And what about the Direction relaunch? Well, we have yet to see if it will actually result in some physical product rather than just digital albums – and digital albums are pretty useless if you actually care about the music. There’s no booklet, and so no way of knowing what version of a song you are getting to hear, or on what date it was recorded etc. Check out the Rare Capitol Masters release for proof of that. It includes unissued material, but Bobby attempted some of those songs on three occasions, and we are none the wiser as to which version is on that digital album.
So, whereas the news of the relaunch was welcomed, it hasn’t been accompanied by a professional online presence, or, it seems, the dedication to get Bobby “out there” again following what has been a pretty barren fifteen years or so, with the exception of discs covering the Motown years and the Godawful The Milk Shows set, which sounds like a ten-year-old edited it together with Goldwave.
And let me make one thing clear: I moan because I care. As do others – but sadly, it appears, not the people in the right places.
The report card most definitely reads: “must do better.”
I’ve had a few people approach me on Twitter and Facebook recently, asking me a little more about my book on Bobby, and also about Bobby in general. Bearing that in mind, I thought that, rather than including an excerpt of my book here that centres on an album or a concert, instead I would reprint some of the introduction. It gives some basic information and discussion about Bobby’s career and musical legacy and then goes on to talk about the content of the book. Please be aware this is only a series of excerpts (and doesn’t include the opening of the introduction), and so jumps around a little bit! It’s also rather nice to be able to illustrate the text with some YouTube videos of the music I’m talking about! Anyway, enjoy!
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…And so what are we to make of the legacy that Bobby Darin left behind? It is one that includes rock ‘n’ roll, country, swing, jazz, show tunes, folk, easy listening, spirituals, ballads, protest songs, blues, and even film scores. During his lifetime he was accused of switching styles because he wanted to jump on bandwagons, whereas in recent years he has been viewed as more of a musical chameleon.
The bandwagon-jumping accusation isn’t altogether untrue. After all, it is difficult to imagine Bobby writing and recording the song You’re the Reason I’m Living in the way he did had Ray Charles not recently had huge success with his Modern Sounds in Country and Western LP. But bandwagon-jumping suggests the recording was made simply for financial gain, whereas, considering Bobby’s love of Charles, it was just as likely to have been done to emulate, and pay tribute to, his idol. In reality, it appears that if Bobby heard something and liked it, he wanted to try it for himself. But it was always done Darin’s way, and was never a straight copy of a style or a sound, and that sets him apart.
I have never been happy with people calling Bobby Darin a “musical chameleon.” For me, this has a negative connotation – albeit perhaps an unintended one. I’m no expert on chameleons but, while they can change their colour for any number of reasons, we generally associate it with a kind of camouflage, an attempt to fit in to its surroundings so as not to be noticed or found out. When we transfer this idea on to Darin, it then makes him out to be someone who was just changing his style and genre in order to fit in to (or cash in on) the current music scene – which brings us back to the whole idea of jumping on a bandwagon.
We first come across this idea when he recorded the That’s All album back in late 1958, with the suggestion made that he was somehow trying to be Frank Sinatra. And yet, anyone who knows the music of both men will know that there are actually huge stylistic differences between their arrangements and vocal styles within the big band genre. I don’t know of a single Sinatra arrangement that has the same sound and feel as Mack the Knife or Clementine. Sinatra’s orchestrations swing in a very different way entirely. In fact, perhaps the nearest Sinatra got to that sound was his version of Old MacDonald – recorded after the aforementioned tracks were released, not before – and even then it’s not the exactly the same, despite the slow build-up in sound and the modulations in key with each verse. And it wasn’t often that Sinatra was as downright brash as the arrangements used for Softly as in a Morning Sunrise or Some of these Days. Maybe on I’m Gonna Live Till I Die – but this was the exception, not the rule. Darin’s vocal approach was far different, too – he didn’t sing from a jazz background as Sinatra did, but he brought rock ‘n’ roll vocal stylings to the big band sound. I’m not saying this to knock Sinatra in any way – I adore his music – but my point is just that Darin wasn’t somehow imitating Sinatra, he was doing it his way.
If anything, Darin’s swing sound was more like Sammy Davis Jr’s than Sinatra’s. Check out Davis’s version of There Is a Tavern in a Town, for example, and you will see what I mean. He got much of his material from the same place as Davis too: the current Broadway scene. Whereas Sinatra was normally reaching back to shows of the 1930s and 1940s, Darin and Davis were often culling material from Broadway in the 1960s and, with Darin, the current Hollywood scene too. Hence the albums From Hello Dolly to Goodbye Charlie, In a Broadway Bag, Bobby Darin sings the Shadow of your Smile and individual tracks such as What Kind of Fool am I and If I Ruled the World. Despite these connections with Davis, Darin wasn’t imitating him either, although both crossed over into rock ‘n’ roll material and rhythm ‘n’ blues.
Darin’s last album to be recorded for ATCO was his tribute to Ray Charles, and it is true to say it retains much of the Ray Charles sound. However, even this wasn’t a straightforward album. Bobby was taking risks here. What other pop singer of the time would spend over six minutes on I Got a Woman (and, in a late-60s TV appearance, over seven minutes on Drown in My Own Tears)? Most pop singers of the early 1960s were rarely recording songs over two and a half minutes. Darin’s I Got a Woman doesn’t actually work – it goes on for far too long – but at least he was willing to take risks or, to be less kind in this instance, be self-indulgent. Darin was always his own man and recorded what he wanted. Elvis Presley’s manager, Colonel Parker, would have run a mile from such an artist. What this ultimately meant was that Bobby was often the only one responsible for the success or failure of an album.
Bobby is again accused of jumping onto bandwagons when he released his folk album, Earthy!. And yet, once more, an actual examination of the LP finds that this wasn’t any normal folk album but an ambitious, daring (from a commercial point of view) collection of folk songs from around the world. What’s more, it is also one of his best albums. In this case, the risk, ambition, and vision paid off artistically. While Peter, Paul and Mary (who he is often accused of copying) were recording songs by Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, Darin was adapting folk music from across the globe along with a handful of new(ish) compositions in the same style. The musicianship here is incredible and yet the album did very little business commercially.
Darin’s next folk album, Golden Folk Hits, was a simple attempt to hone in on the Peter, Paul and Mary sound, but he had gone down the artistic route before turning to the commercial one. Then there have been the comparisons with Bob Dylan when we come to the late 1960s and Bobby’s creation of his own label to record his own songs of social commentary. And yet, once again, there is no foundation in these comparisons, as what Bobby was writing and recording often had very little to do with what other protest singers were doing at the time.
They may have been largely ignored on release but, like Earthy!, the Direction albums have now gained cult status, particularly in the UK and Europe. The first, Bobby Darin born Walden Robert Cassotto, contained songs that were musically simplistic, but the lyrics were what mattered. There is some wonderful wordplay in The Proper Gander, while Sunday lures the listener in before issuing a damning indictment on organised religion. Commitment, the second album, is more interesting musically, and is clearly a more varied selection of songs, and Bobby manages to tie together a beautiful melody with a powerful political comment as in Sausalito. Elsewhere he isn’t protesting at all, but there is great wordplay and musicality in Water Color Canvas, and a dry self-deprecating humour in Distractions (Part 1).
His Motown years were largely disappointing, and yet the 1971 album recorded in Las Vegas (released in 1987) is probably the best live album of his career. Yes, he is relying largely on contemporary covers, but look at what he does with them! People say that Las Vegas saps a singer’s artistic vision – but not Darin’s. While Elvis’s idea of a Beatles medley was a bland re-tread of Yesterday with the refrain of Hey Jude tagged on the end, Darin came up with a multi-song, almost rhapsodic, masterpiece. And, once again, ambition shone through, as in the extended version of James Taylor’s Fire and Rain.
There wasn’t much musical ambition in the Motown studio recordings, with Bobby trying to adhere to the Motown sound to start with before ultimately turning into a bland balladeer with orchestrations that often should have been torn up and thrown out long before they reached the studio. And there wasn’t much ambition on his disappointing TV series either – and yet Darin was still doing what he wanted when he could. What other variety show gave over a few minutes each week to a chess game? Again, this was Darin being self-indulgent and ambitious and this time it didn’t work – but he hadn’t given up despite seemingly losing his way musically in his final years (although appearances on The David Frost Show and Midnight Special showed exactly what he was capable of when he put his mind to it – as did the concert-style final show of his TV series).
No artist leaves a perfect musical legacy. Bobby Darin took risks, and sometimes they didn’t work or he over-estimated his audience. And yet the quality of his recordings is far more consistent than Elvis, Sammy Davis Jr, or even (arguably) Sinatra, who went through several periods of artistic doldrums within his studio work in the late 1960s through to the late 1970s. But one thing I am sure of is that Bobby Darin had no interest in being a chameleon, and changing his genre and style just to fit in or, worse, cash-in. If he changed his style, it was always because he thought he could bring something different to it, that he could add something, that he could move it forward, that he could push the boundaries.
It is not an exaggeration to say that he never made the same album twice. For example, Bobby made numerous albums of standards, or songs in that style, and yet no two of them have exactly the same feel or draw their repertoire from the same place. This is Darin has less rock ‘n’ roll phrasing and edge than That’s All. Love Swings tells the story of a love affair, whereas Two of a Kind is a duets album using mostly novelty songs as the basis for its repertoire. Winners is a wonderful album using just a jazz combo, but Oh! Look at Me Now sees Bobby singing a dozen of the most popular and often-sung standards for the first time in a big band setting. And so it goes on.
…
Bobby Darin: Directions, named after the Direction label Bobby founded in 1968, is not a straightforward biography, and is largely not interested in retelling Bobby Darin’s life story. For any reader wanting that, there are fine biographies by David Evanier, Al DiOrio, and Bobby’s son, Dodd Darin (among others). These all tell their stories in different ways and with a different emphasis, and all are recommended. There is also the book That’s All: Bobby Darin on Record, Stage and Screen by Jeff Bleiel, which is a highly informative and remarkably readable biography of Darin as told through his career rather than his personal life.
Alongside my own commentary on the music runs the parallel story of how Bobby’s music, personality and career were discussed, reviewed and reported in the newspapers, magazines and trade journals of the day. In this new edition, there are excerpts and comments from over 550 different reviews and articles, ranging from trade publications such as Variety to major newspapers such as the New York Times to movie and music fan magazines – even Woman’s Weekly! They give us a fascinating picture of Bobby’s career as it happened, from how his music was received to how his comments were skewed and misquoted and dogged him in the media for months and years afterwards.
The ultimate aim here, of course, is to bring the focus back to Bobby Darin’s huge musical legacy. By offering a new commentary on the recordings themselves, andby telling the story of Darin’s reception in the media, I hope that I have created a book that is of interest and use both to the long-time fan and those who are only just beginning to investigate the wonderful work that Bobby Darin left behind. If reading the following pages makes you want to go and listen again (or for the first time) to the albums or songs being discussed (if only to make sure you do disagree with me as much as you think you do), then this book has achieved its aim. Now, make yourself comfortable and let’s travel back to 1956 where a teenaged Bobby Darin is waiting to tell us the story of the Rock Island Line…
Quite a lot of time has been spent on this blog celebrating the best of Bobby Darin – his great achievements, his best performances, his most enduring recordings. But, today, I’m in a rather flippant (not to mention outspoken) mood, and so I thought it would be good to take a trip through the not-so-wonderful aspects of Bobby’s legacy. I shall brace myself for the furious comments as I am sure to upset someone! Who, me? Never!
In no particular order…
What’s New Pussycat (1966)
In 1966, Bobby thought it would be a great idea to record all the songs on the shortlist for the Best Original Song Oscar that year. In any other year, this might have been fun – but Bobby managed to do it when, to paraphrase Frank Sinatra, it was not a very good year. This means that we were treated to the delights of The Ballad of Cat Ballou and What’s New Pussycat. If any song was not suitable for Bobby it was What’s New Pussycat. Woe, woe, woe, woe indeed!!!
Melodie (1970)
Here we have Melodie, ironically a song without a decent melody. This was the A-side of Bobby’s first single for Motown. It is an awful, awful record. To be fair, it wasn’t all Bobby’s fault. The song itself is pretty grim, and it’s in an arrangement that is in a too-high key. What perhaps is most jaw-dropping is that this fiasco took five visits to the studio to complete! The B-side, Someday We’ll Be Together is nearly as bad. The chorus wails “sing it, Bobby” in the background, and Bobby is heard to mutter “sorry” as the song fades out (no, I’m not joking!)
Be Mad, Little Girl (1963)
In the final episode of his 1973 TV series, Bobby jokes about how he had the chance to record Younger Girl some seven years earlier, but that they would have thrown his ass in jail had he sung about a younger girl (his words, not mine!). But that didn’t stop him recording Be Mad, Little Girl in 1963 – a song about an older man getting upset at the law because he couldn’t have an affair with someone underage. If you think that was a mistake, the record has a chorus singing “you chicken, you chicken” throughout.
There’s a Hole in My Bucket and other awful duets (1973)
Thankfully, There’s a Hole in My Bucket didn’t make it to record, but Bobby decided that it was a perfect duet for him and Carol Lawrence in The Bobby Darin Show in 1973. Bobby had child-star Charlene Wong as a semi-regular guest for a few weeks on the show, and it would have been fine as a cute song with her. But with Carol Lawrence, and going out at 10pm at night? Really?
Some of the other duets in the series aren’t much better – not least the nose-to-nose love duets with his female guests, in which they both sit on stools and move closer and closer as the song progresses until the lights fade when, presumably, we are meant to believe they are about to…get friendly. While Bobby clearly had a rapport with Nancy Sinatra, Bobbie Gentry, and Petula Clark, some of the others are utterly embarrassing. The worst, not to say the saddest of the “serious” duets on the show isn’t a nose-to-nose effort at all, but the medley of songs from Love Swings with Peggy Lee. It should have been magic, but both performers are less than inspired, and the wishy-washy, seemingly unrehearsed sound from the house band turns this into a nightmare before either Darin or Lee have opened their mouths.
Meanwhile, the Hole In My Bucket sequence starts at 6.53 in the following video…
The Milk Shows (1963/2014)
Am I really including an entire 2CD set, you ask? Damn right, I am. This was a radio series broadcast for five minutes a day in 1963 – which was plenty long enough considering that Bobby is hardly at his best. But that’s not the reason why it’s included here. The reason for the inclusion is the editing of the CD set itself. An attempt is made (I use the word “attempt” loosely) to link all of the songs together to make two eighty-minute discs. The problem is that it was seemingly done by a nine-year-old just learning to use Goldwave. It is done so badly that there are moments when Bobby is thanking the non-existing audience for applauding AND introducing the next song at the same time. Bobby had many talents, but nobody knew that speaking in tongues was one of them until this delight was released. A monumental cock-up.
The Bobby Darin Show DVD (1973/2014)
While we’re on the subject of monumental cock-ups, let’s discuss the DVD release of The Bobby Darin Show TV series from 1973. Now, the series wasn’t exactly the high point in Bobby’s career, but fans were still delighted when they were informed that the complete series was coming to DVD. Except it didn’t turn out to be the complete series, because the producers decided to cut multiple musical numbers due to copyright charges – and, of course, the numbers they cut were often the ones that we have no other performance of. In short, the DVD set is a complete travesty, with one episode running just 25 minutes (it should be nearer fifty) – but hey, why complain when they managed to leave in the sequences of Bobby playing chess?!
The Greatest Builder (1956)
When Bobby got his first recording contract at Decca in 1956, he spent his time trying to find out what kind of singer he was. He tried rock ‘n’ roll, faux folk, Guy Mitchell-style novelty records, and even this very hard to stomach, over-the-top semi-religious twaddle. The style of song was quite popular in the UK at this time, but it had nothing to do with the US charts of 1956. What’s more, it’s a song that requires a rather more beefy voice than Bobby had at this time, and he battles against the orchestra, trying to make us believe that he believes in the wonders of the “Greatest Builder.” Twelve years later, Bobby was back in the studio singing Sunday – not the jazz classic, but an attack on organised religion, accusing it of bloodshed. What a difference twelve years makes.
Release Me – and all the other Capitol songs with a choir (1962-1965)
There is nothing worse than having a great performance ruined by an element of the arrangement, and during Bobby’s Capitol years we come acvross this issue repeatedly due to the use of a chorus in many of the ballads on the albums. I highlight Release Me because the choir almost completely takes over here (and it’s not Bobby’s best moment, either), but the saccharine choir pops up all over the Oh Look at Me Now and You’re the Reason I’m Living LPs (and elsewhere). They are enough to drive anyone to distraction, and continually ruin some otherwise-wonderful performances.
It’s You Or No-one album (1960)
Oh yes, we’re getting towards controversy for this one. This was an album that Bobby planned, with a swinging side that virtually dispensed with the brass section – and a ballad side that dispensed with percussion. It was all very esoteric and left-field, and ATCO left it in the vault for three years, and who can blame them? The problem here is that when heard individually, the songs sound great, but in the order of the album they are very much sleep-inducing. This was one occasion when ambition got the better of Bobby and he tried something that really didn’t work.
And so we come to the final spot. But I think here that all Bobby fans will be united….
The state of Bobby’s legacy in 2020
If there is one thing worse than anything else Bobby-related, then it’s the state of his legacy as we enter a new decade.
I don’t know of a single major star who is represented worse on the internet. There is no Bobby Darin Vevo channel on YouTube, for example. Whereas we see the Sammy Davis estate (for example) posting videos of rare performances online very regularly, with Bobby we get nothing. Or, perhaps, worse than nothing – we get the occasional fuzzy-quality video in the aspect ratio of a mobile phone (I’m not joking). The official YouTube channel that does exist has ten videos and hasn’t been updated in three years. This is the age of the internet, folks! The official website hasn’t changed its design since I first looked at it in 1999, and is rarely updated – and I don’t blame the people that run the site for that – they should be given the resources to make it into what it should be. Meanwhile, the twitter account in Bobby’s name is hardly jaw-dropping.
Perhaps even worse is that there is so much unreleased material that is sitting there in the vaults or archives unheard, unseen, and, even worse, unloved. Five years ago, fans were promised a release of the studio recordings Manhattan in my Heart and Weeping Willow. We’re still waiting. There are demo discs known to exist. There are recordings made for radio that still exist. There is a live recording made at the Hollywood Bowl. There are studio and live recordings from the ATCO years that have never been released. And there is an entire concert from the Copa in 1966 that still exists in an archive. We also know that more recordings exist from The Troubadour in 1969, and also from the Desert Inn in 1971. The entire Bobby Darin Amusement Company TV series from 1972 has never been made available. The Burlesque is Alive and Living in Beautiful Downtown Burbank TV special, never shown anywhere except Australia, exists and has never been released – the rights owners are even offering to licence it on their YouTube channel. Will any of these ever be released? Never say never – we never thought we’d get an album of unreleased Motown songs, but along came one a couple of years ago. But the Darin legacy is currently in a mess and utterly uncared for. It drastically needs an overhaul, an injection of enthusiasm and, frankly, someone to come along who gives a damn. And that, dear friends, is something far worse than any of the performances I have gently poked fun at during the rest of this article…
You will find that the blog will go rather quiet over the summer months. I have decided that perhaps I will spend the next couple of months trying to update and expand Bobby’s presence on Wikipedia instead. Some of Bobby’s albums and work have entries on the site, but certainly not all, and many are rather thin on detail. I am unable to add new entries at presence, but can edit and expand others, and hopefully this will help to get the Darin message across to the general public at large if and when they search him out on the internet.
The blog will return and get updated sporadically, but in the meantime I shall be working on Bobby elsewhere!
Thank you as always for your support – and, of course, the book is still available! 😉
One of the great things for a researcher/writer in the last decade or two is the appearance online of newspaper and magazine archives. These were examined at length for my book on Bobby, Directions, which was released earlier this year. However, there are always new things appearing, and new items being added to the archives. This modest post brings together a handful of items that have appeared in online archives since the publication of the book.
We start on April 16, 1956 with a piece from the Windsor Star newspaper, which documents one of Bobby’s early live performances of which there really is very little information, so any extra item such as this is a big help for filling in the gaps.
We are off to the Detroit Free Press on 20th April, 1956 for another article referencing a live appearance.
Next up are a handful of advertisement for performances during the spring and summer of 1957.
Now we have what might be a “new” picture of Bobby, featured with a real-life Queen of the Hop in 1958:
Our penultimate piece is from December 1958, where we find more info on a live performance, but this time Bobby is the supporting act…for a belly dancer!
We end this little excursion through the 1950s with an advertisement for a 1959 concert performance and a couple of newspaper articles from the same year.
The following is an extract from the book Bobby Darin: Directions. A Listener’s Guide, available in paperback from all Amazon sites.
Bobby Darin’s final session of 1961, and of his ATCO contract, was for a more personal project, an album paying tribute to his idol Ray Charles. According to the liner notes by Leonard Feather, Darin described the album as “one of the biggest kicks of my life.”[1]
The album barely entered the charts, reaching just #96 in the US, and yet it was one of the most critically acclaimed LPs of Darin’s career. TV Radio Mirror said that “Bobby is certainly to be commended on his flexibility. […] I have no doubt it’ll sell like hot cakes – it’s an enjoyable tribute from one growing legend to another growing legend!”[2] The author of the review does finds it “strange,” however, that Darin uses virtually the same arrangements as Charles himself, and this is certainly a legitimate concern with the album. Billboard declared the album a “tour de force” and that Bobby was showing off “his remarkable versatility” on the album.[3]Life magazine said that the album was “surprisingly successful,”[4]and Variety declared:
The combination of Bobby Darin’s potent vocal style and Ray Charles’ moving songs add up to a powerhouse platter product. Instead of making an outright carbon of Charles’ vocal techniques, Darin has wisely developed his own interpretive impressions that add much to the Charles creations.[5]
Cash Boxagreed, saying that the “chanter does not attempt to imitate or emulate Charles’ potent folk-jazz style but offers a melodic musical tribute to Ray’s forceful approach.”[6] It is interesting how the Cash Boxand Variety reviews seem to be at odds with that from TV Radio Mirror, but the points they are making are somewhat different. Cash Box and Variety are praising Darin for not copying Charles’s vocal style, whereas TV Radio Mirror is criticising him for keeping the same arrangements.
The poor chart showing for the album is somewhat at odds with an article that appeared in Cash Boxconcerning advance sales:
[ATCO] last week reported advance sales at 100,000, a reception that shapes up as Darin’s strongest LP stint to date, according to Len Sachs, the label’s director of album sales and merchandising. Joe Beiderman of Universal Distributors, notified the label that the firm had already sold out of its entire allocation of the LP prior to receiving the merchandise. Dumont Distribution in Boston re-ordered an additional 5,000 copies of the packages based on orders solicited in its territory before getting its initial allocation.[7]
The album opens with a lengthy rendition of What’d I Say. It soon becomes clear that the critic who commented that the arrangements were very similar to the originals was correct. However, Darin brings something new and exciting to these songs. The whole album is one of Bobby’s most exciting, and What’d I Say starts it off in great fashion. The number was split into the two sides of a single and also received good reviews, with Billboard writing that “Darin is in sock, showmanly vocal form on this exciting Ray Charles tune.”[8]Cash Boxenthused that “it’s a fabulous 2-part revival of the Ray Charles classic that Bobby and the Jimmy Haskell ork-chorus belt out in ultra-commercial fashion.”[9] In the UK, the song was squeezed onto one side of the single, and was backed with Ain’t that Love. The song saw Bobby nominated for the Best Rhythm ‘n’ Blues Recording Grammy at the 5th annual ceremony – only for him to lose out on the award, which went to…yes, Ray Charles.
The second track of the album is the most ambitious. Darin had already recorded I Got a Woman at the jazz combo sessions nearly two years earlier and also for the Darin at the Copaalbum. Here he tackles it again – for a whole six and a half minutes. The song starts off in normal fashion, but then Bobby keeps the “alright” ending of the song going for in excess of three minutes despite it being basically the same line repeated over and over again. This is Darin at his most self-indulgent, and yet there is still a point to it, for he finds almost every possible variation of singing that line during this extended coda which listeners are going to love or tire of quickly and simply hit the “next” button on the remote control. This is miles away from the more polished vocals of, say, Love Swings. During the main section, he reaches for notes and misses them, but it doesn’t matter – Darin is showing us that this music is all about “feel” and not about technical perfection, and he hits that message home time and again during the course of the album.
I Got a Woman might have been an epic, but Tell all the World About You, which follows, clocks in at under two minutes. There is some great interplay between Darin and vocal group The Blossoms here which elevates this otherwise straightforward rendering of the song.
Tell Me How Do You Feel opens with a funky organ introduction before Darin and The Blossoms again trade phrases in this blues number. The change of instrumentation helps to add variety to the album, and the saxophone solo (by Nino Tempo or Pas Johnson) is stunning. Bobby finishes the song with a couple of choruses of the “alright” ending that was heard in the second half of I Got a Woman.
My Bonnie, which ends the first side of the LP, continues the same high quality of singing and arranging, but suffers a little in that it is also more of the same of what has come before. The second side of the album contains two slower numbers, and perhaps moving one of these to the first side would have provided more variety to the track listing. What is noticeable here, though, is that, just as with the Christmas album, Darin is more than willing to give some of the spotlight to the backing singers (in this case The Blossoms) and/or the musicians in the band.
The second half of the album opens with one of the highlights. The Right Time begins with a soulful saxophone solo, and is also one of the few Darin studio recordings to be a genuine duet, with the lead being sung by Darlene Love for two whole verses. Once again, the arrangement is very similar to Charles’s own, and yet Darin’s vocal line is actually rather different thanks to subtle changes to phrasing.
Hallelujah I Love Her So, one of the more familiar songs here to those who are not Charles fans, is given a straightforward rendition. It would be wrong to suggest that this means it was merely album filler, but there are no risks taken here with the arrangement or the vocal delivery.
Leave My Woman Alone has a jazzier feel than some of the other numbers, thanks to the tight harmonies in the brass section. There is also a gospel tinge to the track. However, Darin sings this at the lower end of his vocal range, meaning it doesn’t have as much of an intensity as some of the songs here. He also repeats the last line over and over for nearly a minute before launching into a final chorus. This device worked well with I Got a Woman, but this is the second time it had been repeated on the same album, and little is gained from it here.
Ain’t that Love carries on the same feel as the previous couple of numbers. It is easy to forget just how well the album is recorded and mixed. Darin is undoubtedly the star here, but The Blossoms are as far forward in the mix as he is, almost making each and every track a duet.
The penultimate track, Drown in My Own Tears, is probably the best on the album. A slow blues, it provides contrast with much of what has come before. The arrangement is again first class, and Darin’s vocal uses the “pleading” quality that sometimes was overdone, but is perfectly judged on this occasion. In the late 1960s, Darin performed the song on a television special, slowing the tempo still further and turning the number into an epic of around seven minutes.
In many ways, Drown in My Own Tears, is the climax of the album as there is a feeling that That’s Enough acts more like a kind of theme song, just as That’s All did for his sophomore album. Again, it is well sung, but seems more like a coda than the real finale of the record.
Also recorded at these sessions was the studio version of Multiplication, which cinema audiences had heard a number of months earlier in the film Come September. It seems bizarre that this catchy rock ‘n’ roll number wasn’t recorded in advance and released at the time of the film, as it had “hit” written all over it. The studio version is certainly much better than the one in the film, which seems hesitant, bland, and, frankly, unfinished in comparison. Ultimately, this number, one of Darin’s finest original rock ‘n’ roll songs, ended up as the flip-side to Irresistible Youin the USA, although it was a big hit in the UK (and made the top 40 again when covered by Showaddywaddy in 1981).
[1] Leonard Feather, liner notes to Bobby Darin sings Ray Charles, Bobby Darin, ATCO 33-140, LP, 1962.
[2] “Your Monthly On Record Guide,” TV Radio Mirror, July 1962, 20.
[3] “Spotlight Albums of the Week,” Billboard, March 31, 1962, 26.
This is Bobby Darin 