The Chantels: The Chantels On Tour

THE CHANTELS: THE CHANTELS ON TOUR (1962)

1) Look In My Eyes; 2) Summertime; 3) Glad To Be Back; 4) Still; 5) I Lost My Baby; 6) My Chick Is Fine; 7) Well I Told You; 8) You'll Never Know; 9) Here It Comes Again; 10) Vut Vut; 11) They Say; 12) You Can't Go It Alone.

Please remember that any time you see an early Sixties record titled «The So-And-Sos On Tour», it means that (a) with 99.99% probability, the so-and-sos are not on tour, and (b) with about 80% probability, you are dealing with a rip-off (I exclude The Animals On Tour from this category, because that album still had plenty of great tracks — but, of course, all of them were recorded in the studio). For The Chantels, both of these principles work like crazy, because not only is this album a mish-mash of studio recordings from various sessions, but it is not even completely a Chantels record: squint your eyes long enough and you will see the fine print stating "and other selections starring Chris Montez, The Imperials, Gus Backus" — meaning that Carlton Records, to which The Chantels had been signed in 1961, couldn't even scrape together enough tracks for a short 12-song LP, and had to support them with a five-song «sampler» of their other artists. In­cluding, sure enough, a very very young and still totally obscure Chris Montez (before he had his big breakthrough hit, ʽLet's Danceʼ), and a couple generic tunes from Del-Vikings member Gus Backus (one rockabilly and one doo-wop number).

That said, the remaining seven Chantels songs are not uninteresting. This is where you will find their last big hit, ʽLook In My Eyesʼ; but they also do a solid rendition of ʽSummertimeʼ (unfor­tunately, spoiled by excessive strings that overshadow both the lead vocals and the harmonies), a funny sequel to ʽHit The Road Jackʼ (ʽWell I Told Youʼ) where the girls take the liberty of taking it all back ("Well I told you to hit the road, Jack, I'm sorry now, won't you come on back?"), and then there's a couple of tracks with genuinely soaring harmonies (ʽHere It Comes Againʼ), a little roughly produced, perhaps, but showing that they were still willing to perfect their craft even when nobody was buying the records any more. And Annette Smith's high register is so consis­tently powerful that she is on the verge of inventing a new vocal style, «kick-ass sweetness» (ʽGlad To Be Backʼ) — typically, most of the singing girls back then either had it rough and tough or tender and fragile, which makes her somewhat special among the crowd.

Apparently, this was not quite the end of The Chantels: in some form or other, they persisted all through the 1960s, with their last official single released on RCA as late as 1970 (an upbeat mix of R&B and sunshine pop, called ʽLove Makes All The Difference In The Worldʼ and featuring a newly returned Arlene Smith); however, this was accompanied by constant line-up changes, and they never really got a properly solid recording contract. Which is too bad, because both Arlene and Annette had potential, and it would be possible to envisage a situation where a girl group, fronted by both of them at the same time (a pretty nice contrast), could survive and prosper, given the right publicity and the right material. These girls, alas, met with no such luck, but, heck, at least they got their three minutes of fame and a chance to be remembered by small communities of doo-wop and early Sixties' fans — how many from that epoch were even less lucky?

The Chantels: There's Our Song Again

THE CHANTELS: THERE'S OUR SONG AGAIN (1961)

1) I Can't Take It; 2) Never Let Go; 3) Believe Me My Angel; 4) C'Est Si Bon; 5) IFIC; 6) My Darling; 7) I'm The Girl; 8) I; 9) My Memories Of You; 10) I'll Walk Alone; 11) I'm Confessin'; 12) Goodbye To Love.

In between The Chantels' first and second album, a lot of things happened to the band: they re­leased a few more, commercially unsuccessful, singles; they lost Arlene Smith, who embarked upon an even more obscure solo career, and carried on as a harmony-singing trio for a short while; and, finally, re-emerged around 1961 with a new lead singer (Annette Smith) and a bit more com­mercial luck, scoring a decent hit with ʽLook In My Eyesʼ. Not all of these changes are reflected on their second LP, which, I assume, they only got awarded from End Records after having al­ready left the label — predictably, it consists of A- and B-sides and leftovers recorded in 1959-1960, both with Arlene still at the top and after she'd already gone, and also including a couple of tracks marking the arrival of Annette in Arlene's place. At least, this is what I can establish from a brief comparison of conflicting sources (I do so believe, for instance, that the current Wikipedia article on The Chantels confuses their second and third LP, and online discographies are an even bigger mess).

Anyway, what cannot be confused is the quality of the material, and if you liked the girls in their solid doo-wop era, you will almost certainly like them in the transitional period as well, since the songs are predictably more diverse. ʽI Can't Take It (There's Our Song Again)ʼ, with a mighty bomb of high-to-low-range desperation from Arlene, starts things off in very traditional doo-wop fashion; but already ʽNever Let Goʼ shows them coming to terms with the twist movement, and that Arlene could easily belt it out at faster tempos without diluting any of the passion. With ʽI'm Confessin'ʼ, on the other hand, they make a retro move, covering an old standard, but upgrading it to modern soul standards; not that it helps a lot or anything.

Group harmony is king on ʽC'Est Si Bonʼ, an almost inescapable (for most pop outfits of the time) attempt to «frenchify» (or, more correctly, gallicize) the sound, because, you know, there's no­thing sexier than hearing a bunch of African-American girls from the Bronx fight their way through a couple of seductively mispronounced French phrases. (Actually, ʽC'Est Ci Bonʼ was even the title of an EP released by End Records in 1958, with the same cover of the girls in Southern Belle outfits that they used for We Are The Chantels — crass!). Much better is ʽIFICʼ, a jolly fast kiddie R&B romp in the style of ʽJim Dandyʼ or, more accurately, Elvis' ʽTeddy Bearʼ (the song title is actually an abbreviation for "terrific", but don't ask me why).

The new singer, Annette Smith, is introduced with the strictly doo-wop single ʽBelieve Me My Angel / Iʼ, both sides written by Barrett and featuring a sharp turn towards smoother-sappier from the original desperate-powerful: however, Annette does have a great voice for smooth-sappy, with a cooing, buttery falsetto that Arlene was incapable of, and she performs some impressive vocal gymnastics on both songs that should have raised some eyebrows back at the time — I have no idea why the single was not a hit. That said, neither the older material nor the new one are strong enough to call this period in the band's life underrated: most of the time, the songwriting is too formulaic and subpar to rank along with the contemporary masterpieces from the forges of Motown or Atlantic Records. Perfectly listenable and interesting in light of the presence of two widely different lead vocal styles, but not much to make it stand out other than just a few more cases of Arlene Smith's mighty voice.

The Chantels: We Are The Chantels

THE CHANTELS: WE ARE THE CHANTELS (1958)

1) Maybe; 2) The Plea; 3) Come My Little Baby; 4) Congratulations; 5) Prayee; 6) He's Gone; 7) I Love You So; 8) Every Night; 9) Whoever You Are; 10) How Could You Call It Off?; 11) Sure Of Love; 12) If You Try.

Allegedly, the first relatively successful African-American girl group were The Bobbettes, whose ʽMr. Leeʼ (available on various Atlantic compilations) is a fun, giggly romp and who lasted all the way up to 1974 — but with only a small handful of singles to their name. The Chantels, how­ever, came right on their heels, and with ʽMaybeʼ, pretty much invented the classic girl group sound. Technically, it is still in the doo-wop paradigm, but with Richard Barrett's loud, brash piano playing and lead singer Arlene Smith's go-all-the-way shrill, gospel-and-classical-influ­en­ced vocals, ʽMaybeʼ does to doo-wop pretty much the same thing that the Beatles did to pop music. It isn't much of a song, but it's a hell of a performance, and it must have sounded just as liberating for young girls in 1958 as Little Richard did for young boys.

The good news is that the single caught on so well that The Chantels got to release a whole LP on the End Records label — no mean feat in 1958 for five young girls from The Bronx, who probab­ly deserve to have their names listed: Arlene Smith, Sonia Goring, Renee Minus, Jackie Landry, and Lois Harris. The bad news is that, although Richard Barrett (lead singer for The Valentines who took the girls under his patronage and produced their records) wrote some songs for them and Arlene Smith herself also contributed to some of the numbers, most of the other tunes pale in comparison to ʽMaybeʼ, largely based on the same '50s progression but not adding much to the original impact — not surprising for a cautious pioneering act in the late Fifties, but twelve songs set to the exact same doo-wop melody can be as mind-rotting as twelve 12-bar blues tunes in a row. Correction: eleven songs — the twelfth one, ʽCome My Little Babyʼ, is the only one here to feature a more playful R&B sound, a massive sax solo, group vocals rather than lead vocal with harmonies... and is the most embarrassing and silly one of the lot.

Repeated listens still bring out some specific goodness in the Smith/Barrett collaboration on ʽThe Pleaʼ, with some of the most nicely chirped baby-baby-baby's ever, and in the bass-heavy ʽCon­gratulationsʼ, which describes the classic situation of betrayal with a nice mix of desperation, sarcasm, and arrogance. But overall, it is useless to dwell on the minor differences between the songs — as a single, somewhat monochrome package, they all get by largely on the strength of Arlene Smith's lead vocal, in the tenseness and shrill power of which you can see the seeds of everybody from The Ronettes to The Shangri-La's (particularly the Shangri-La's, with their em­phasis on total broken-heartedness). And after all, it is not that bad to have to listen to 11 cases of the doo-wop progression in a row when you have such a great voice to drive 'em.

The weirdest deal here might be with the original album cover where, for some reason, the Bronx ladies are dressed in «Southern Plantation» style despite not having anything whatsoever to do with the art of cotton picking. Maybe somebody found that embarrassing even in 1958, because the album cover was quickly withdrawn and replaced with an even weirder choice of two utterly white teenagers, a girl and a boy, picking out a Chantels song on the jukebox — then again, ʽMaybeʼ did hit #15 on the pop charts (in addition to #2 on the R&B charts), implying that white folks were probably just as enthralled by this new sound as black folks. But regardless of the silly (or offensive, if you prefer to look at it from a 21st century perspective) taste in album covers, and regardless even of the not-too-great variety of compositions, We Are The Chantels deserves a thumbs up for both historical importance and one fine wave of personal charisma.