Various Artists - Hard to Find 45's on CD, Vol. 7: 60's Classics (CD)

All Music Guide

Here's a real grab bag of Top 40 hits from 1960 to 1966, some of them indeed very hard to find on CD or even hear on the radio. Some of them are not really not that hard to find on CD, though this disc (like every one in this series) takes pains to present original 45 RPM single versions, often in stereo. It leans toward the innocuous pop side of pop/rock, though within that framework there's a lot of variety and a good amount of quality: slightly soul-influenced pop (Gene McDaniels' "A Hundred Pounds of Clay"), poppy, late doo wop (the Velvets' "Tonight [Could Be the Night]," the Chimes' "Once in a While"), British Invasion pop (Billy J. Kramer the Dakotas' "Bad to Me," the Honeycombs' "Have I the Right," the Seekers' "I'll Never Find Another You," Cilla Black's "You're My World"), celebrity teen idols (Patty Duke's "Don't Just Stand There"), weird foreign one-shots (Kyu Sakamoto's "Sukiyaki"), jazz soul-pop (Nancy Wilson's "[You Don't Know] How Glad I Am"), and more. The dedicated c...ollector might be interested in the items that are really the hardest to find or even heard on oldies radio, despite having been hit records. Those would include Nathaniel Mayer's relatively gutsy 1962 RB-pop hit "Village of Love"; Mike Clifford's almost unbearably white-bread 1962 ballad "Close to Cathy"; Danny Williams' anodyne "White on White," which somehow made the Top Ten in early 1964 in the midst of the early British Invasion; and Joey Powers' 1963 Top Ten hit "Midnight Mary," a super-light, acoustic-flavored pop/rocker. The best of the obscurities is Verdelle Smith's 1966 number 38 hit "Tar and Cement," which sounds a little like an American pop-country spin on Dusty Springfield and was done (as "La Maison Ou J'ai Grandi") in the mid-'60s by French star Françoise Hardy. - Richie Unterberger, All Music Guide Read more Less