Del Shannon - Home and Away: The Complete Recordings 1960-1970 (CD)

All Music Guide

Of all the early rock rollers, Del Shannon is the hardest to classify. He came on the scene a little late his first hits, "Hats off to Larry" and "Runaway," arrived in 1961, five years after rock roll came crashing in, a long enough period of time where his music felt much, much different than the threechord ravers of the first wave of rock roll. He arrived during the peak of teen idol pop and was handsome enough to ride that wave, but he was older than Fabian and Ricky Nelson, scoring his first hits in his midtwenties. Shannon could be seen as a kindred spirit of Roy Orbison, favoring dramatic ballast to blues boogie, threading a sense of melancholy into his biggest hits, but he never verged on the operatic the way Orbison did. He was comfortable enough with country to cut an album of Hank Williams tunes in 1965 and hip enough to go psychedelic when the times shifted in the late '60s. He wrote his biggest hits but also had exceptional taste in other songwriters, being one of the f...irst American rockers to cover the Beatles, along with such '60s pop hits as Bobby Hebb's "Sunny," Brian Hyland's "The Joker Went Wild" and the Lovin' Spoonful's "Summer in the City." Read more Less