David Green

David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I published booklets of my own poems. The original allocation of ISBN numbers is used up now, though. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become, often more about music than books and not so often about poems. It will be about whatever suggests itself.

Monday, 3 April 2023

The Mamas & the Papas, Do You Wanna Dance

 

It's not necessarily the song, it's the way it's done. The Shadows put in one of their finest performances as Cliff's support band in 1962 but that was an entirely different thing to the Mamas & the Papas relaxed harmonies on their first album in 1966 and different again was a version by the T. Rex Disco Party on the B side of Dreamy Lady. The Beach Boys also had a go but they were all paying tribute, and royalties, to Bobby Freeman who wrote and recorded it in 1958.
Anybody who does better than a Cliff classic and, admittedly, not one of T. rex, most memorable outings, is doing well but the Mamas & the Papas must always be in with a chance, re-imagining what I had thought was a Cliff record. Gentle and sensitive before rising to something quite impassioned, it was a revelation when I first found it and it is some measure of their achievement that it was only filling out the album and never a single for them.
They had plenty of options but this hidden-away treasure was once quite a find, hasn't lost anything in the decades since and is possibly really their masterpiece.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.