– Price & Walsh Songbook –
Discovering another pair of staff songwriters having a go of their own, and being quite good at it, isn’t much of a surprise these days. Even though Michael Price and Dan Walsh released only one single during the sixties, and also recorded an almost-released album, the bulk of their demo recordings sounds as if they might’ve garnered some serious chart action themselves, had they only been given a proper chance.
The chronology starts from the two previously unreleased (which most of the material is!) 1966 studio efforts, featuring a part of the Wrecking Crew, of the Turtles-reminiscent bubblegum-ish harmony pop sounding Try Your Best To Forget Her and one of the earliest attempts at the classic sunshine-pop genre of That’s When It Happens.
Following is the Britsike/West Coast mixture of Virginia Grey’s Ragtime Memories, good enough to impress one Gary Zekley, who not only recorded it with The Looking Glass, along with Small Town Commotion with The Visions (with the pair audibly moving even closer towards what’s now commonly being referred to as “popsike”) but also signing them to his own publishing.
As commanded by the environment at the time, together, they set out to create a conceptual psychedelic album, announced by the 1968 Dot single, pairing Love Is The Order Of The Day with The House Of Ilene Castle, both being genuinely British sounding quirky little pop tunes, complete with an occasional fake accent here and there.
Considering what’s left of the unfortunately soon-to-be-abandoned project, most of the album fits the same formula, with Greenville County Fair also adding a drop of the usual vaudevillian vibe, The Mad Genius Of Shelby Square being touched by the hand of another “mad genius”, that is Syd Barrett, and Where Is Sunday is a Left Banke-ish piece of baroque-pop, supposedly rejected by The Association.
Though not part of the initial concept, the pair of tracks that follows, along with their audible Beatle-references, sound as if they’d fitted it perfectly (The Publisher And The Poet and Billy, the latter being released by Mama Cass’ sister Leah Kunkel as Cotton Candy), and it’s from then on, that Price and Walsh started churning out (mostly) upbeat “acoustic strummers”, as they call them themselves, that were to invade the charts.
Such as the well known Temptation Eyes by The Grass Roots (included is the authors’ just as great demo), or should-have-been early power-pop classics like Sensation, and Saved, or the good-time-ish McCartney-reminiscent I Just Can’t Stay Away, and even some more delicate balladery, like the Emitt Rhodes-like A Minute Too Soon.
The string of hits continued with Cher, Lulu, Bobby “Blue” Bland etc, but it’s really this early period of Price and Walsh that makes them shine.
[Released by Rev-Ola 2006]
Be the first to comment