BILLY PRESTON: EARLY HITS OF '65 (1965)
1) You've Lost That Lovin'
Feelin'; 2) Eight Days A Week; 3) Downtown; 4) Goldfinger; 5) My Girl; 6) Go Now;
7) Ferry Across The Mersey; 8) Shotgun; 9) Stop! In The Name Of Love; 10) King
Of The Road; 11) The Birds And The Bees; 12) Can't You Hear My Heartbeat.
Not much to say here: as far as I can tell,
most or all of these songs were recorded during the same session that yielded Exciting Organ, so this is a same-style
companion album that is often called a «compilation» — a strange definition,
considering that only a few of these titles seem to have been released as
singles. In any case, it was an
original Vee-Jay LP, re-released on CD thirty years later, and it functions as
part of Billy's legacy, so here you are.
The «hits», of course, are not Billy's, but
other people's — he runs a relatively short gamut here, mostly contemporary
Motown material (ʽMy Girlʼ; Junior Walker's ʽShotgunʼ, etc.), interspersed with
a few oddities, such as a Beatles cover and the latest Bond song. Since Billy's
own compositions are rather slack as far as thematic hooks are concerned, this
is not a big problem, and in terms of capturing the «spirits» of the originals,
he consistently does a very good job — that organ captures everything, be it
the warm romance of Smokey Robinson, the classy seductiveness of Diana Ross, or
the desperate praying of Denny Laine.
Even ʽEight Days A Weekʼ works a fine charm —
in subtle ways, finer than the original, since Billy, being careful to preserve
each vocal note, embellishes them with quirky little flourishes on the sides,
coming out with something more complex and less predictable than Lennon / McCartney's
original creation (which was great, but lacked development — once you had your
verse, chorus, and middle-eight, the rest of the song was exactly the same; for
Billy, a bare transposition to organ would have been too boring).
The biggest problem is with the choice of
material — about half of these songs weren't too great in the first place (I
mean, ʽThe Birds And The Bees?ʼ, really?), and I don't quite manage to see the
«fun» in producing all these arrangements. Maybe an entire record's worth of
Beatles covers (they did have enough popular hits by late 1964 to stuff a
12-song LP, didn't they?) could have been a better idea: in any case, ʽEight
Days A Weekʼ sitting next to ʽGoldfingerʼ does give a fairly accurate snapshot
of the era, which wasn't exactly overpopulated
with pop-rock masterpieces, but doesn't function so well by way of general
enjoyment. (Unless you really dig
Hammond organ encoding of Dame Shirley Bassey's acoustics).
Billy doesn't look right in a three piece suit and Beatles 'do. Bring on the Afro years when he looked like he'd just gone solo from the Muppet band!
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