Various Artists - The Hitmakers Sing Neil Diamond (1972) **UPDATED**

I know 'The Long Way Home' had a dodgy beginning, and I tried pitch correcting and got nowhere, but then I had a brainwave and patched it with sections from the middle of the track, so download again for a better copy of the song.  

Neil Diamond started his musical career writing and singing his own songs for demos, and his first recording contract was billed as "Neil and Jack", an Everly Brothers-type duet with high school friend Jack Packer. They recorded the singles 'You Are My Love At Last'/'What Will I Do', and 'I'm Afraid'/'Till You've Tried Love', both released in 1962, and despite positive reviews from Cashbox and Billboard magazines they were not successful. Diamond signed with Columbia Records as a solo performer later in 1962, and in July 1963 they released the single 'Clown Town'/'At Night', which once again received complimentary reviews, but it still failed to make the charts. Columbia dropped him from their label and he went back to writing songs in and out of publishing houses for the next seven years. He wrote wherever he could, including on buses, and used an upright piano above the Birdland Club in New York City, but he was only able to sell about one song a week during those years, barely enough to survive. The privacy that he had above the Birdland Club allowed him to focus on writing without distractions, and this freedom resulted in more interesting songs beginning to appear, including 'Cherry, Cherry' and 'Solitary Man', and the latter was the first record that Diamond recorded under his own name which made the charts. He spent his early career in the Brill Building, and his first success as a songwriter came in November 1965 with 'Sunday And Me', a Top 20 hit for Jay and the Americans, but that was just the beginning, as this was followed by 'I'm A Believer', 'A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You', 'Look Out (Here Comes Tomorrow)', and 'Love To Love', all performed by the Monkees. 'I'm A Believer' became a gold record within two days of its release and stayed at the top of the charts for seven weeks, and other notable artists who recorded his early songs were Lulu, Cliff Richard and Deep Purple. In 1966, he signed a deal with Bert Berns's Bang Records, then a subsidiary of Atlantic, and his first release on that label was 'Solitary Man', which was his first true hit as a solo artist, and he followed that with 'Cherry, Cherry' and 'Kentucky Woman'. He began to feel restricted by Bang Records because he wanted to record more ambitious, introspective music, such as 'Brooklyn Roads', but Berns wanted to release 'Kentucky Woman' as a single, while Diamond proposed 'Shilo', which was about an imaginary childhood friend. Berns believed that the song was not commercial enough, so it was relegated to being an LP track on 'Just for You', his second album for Bang. Diamond wrote every song on 'Just For You', and it included his own versions of the hit singles 'I'm A Believer' by The Monkees and 'The Boat That I Row' by Lulu, but it wasn't long before all of the songs on the record had been noticed and covered by other artists, and so this post is Neil Diamond's second album as interpreted by some well-known and some not so well-known artists of the late 60's. To flesh out the post to a reasonable length I've also included the b-sides to a couple of his 1967 singles, taken from his previous album on Bang. 

Track listing

01 Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon (Cliff Richard 1968)
02 The Long Way Home (Quentin E. Klopjaeger With The Gonks 1968)
03 Red Red Wine (Jimmy James And The Vagabonds 1968)
04 You'll Forget (The Wanderer's Rest 1967)
05 The Boat That I Row (Lulu 1967)
06 Cherry Cherry (Wishful Thinking 1967)
07 I'm A Believer (The Monkees 1966)
08 Shilo (Springbok 1971)
09 You Got To Me (Gene Pierson 1968)
10 Solitary Man (The Kitchen Cinq 1967)
11 C'est Pour Vous Que Je Chante (Thank The Lord For The Night Time) (Les Hou-Lops 1967)
12 Oh, No No (I Got The Feeling) (Wool 1972)
13 Do It (Keith Allison 1967)

Various Artists - The Hitmakers Sing Tony Hazzard (1969)

Anthony Hazzard was born on 31 October 1943 in Liverpool, and is best known as a successful songwriter of the late 60's. He learned the guitar and ukulele when young, but didn't start his music career until he finished his education at Durham University, and with the encouragement of Tony Garnett of the BBC, he moved to London where he signed a contract with publisher Gerry Bron. Bron could see potential in Hazzard's songs, and wanted him as a solo artist, releasing his first single 'You'll Never Put Shackles On Me' in 1966. Although it didn't chart, another of his songs was submitted to Herman's Hermits, who had a Top 20 hit with 'You Won't Be Leaving' in 1966. Following a dry spell where he struggled to write anything that he considered worthy, he gave 'Ha! Ha! Said The Clown' to Manfred Mann, who took it to the upper reaches of the UK charts. In 1968 his psyche-tinged 'The Sound Of The Candyman's Trumpet' was recorded by Cliff Richard and entered into the 1968 'Songs For Europe' preamble for the Eurovision Song Contest, although it lost out to 'Congratulations' in the final vote. Simon Dupree and the Big Sound, The Casuals, The Family Dogg, and The Swinging Blue Jeans all turned to Hazzard's pop tunes in the late 1960's, and many of them scored hit singles with their recordings. In the midst of all this success as a writer, Hazzard released his first solo album 'Tony Hazzard Sings Tony Hazzard' in 1969, and despite the fact that every single track had been successfully released as a single by another artist, it was commercially unsuccessful, although his second album, 'Loudwater House', fared much better. It could have been the fact that he was a relatively unknown singer which caused that first album to flop, as it certainly wasn't the quality of the songs, and so to make it appeal to a wider audience I've replaced Hazzard's own versions of his songs with the hit single versions from a wide variety of 60's artists, and we end up with a great tribute album by some of the biggest names of the era, and a fitting celebration of Hazzard's songwriting. 

Track listing

01 Listen To Me (The Hollies)
02 Brown Eyed Girl (The Family Dogg)
03 Me, The Peaceful Heart (Lulu)
04 The Sound Of The Candyman's Trumpet (Cliff Richard)
05 Hello It's Me (The Casuals)
06 Fox On The Run (Manfred Mann)
07 Hello World (The Tremeloes)
08 Goodnight Sweet Josephine (The Yardbirds)
09 Ha! Ha! Said The Clown (Manfred Mann)
10 Hey Mrs. Housewife (The Swinging Bluejeans)
11 You Won't Be Leaving (Herman's Hermits)
12 Fade Away Maureen (Cherry Smash)

Duane Allman - ...and on guitar (1971)

Before Duane Allman became a guitar hero in the Allman Brothers Band, he was a hotshot session guitarist who was logging tons of studio time with some of the best R&B singers in the world. After the Allman Brothers started to be appreciated for their albums, Duane continued to record with other artists, most notably with Eric Clapton in Derek And The Dominos, until his death in 1971. Some of his best recordings were with artists like John Hammond, who was the son of the record-company exec who helped launch the careers of everyone from Billie Holiday to Bob Dylan, and from Aretha Franklin to Bruce Springsteen. Like his father, he loved rural acoustic blues music and built a cult career paying tribute to his heroes, attracting some famous fans, including Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Allman, who played on a couple of Hammond's albums. Clarence Carter was a blind R&B singer who hit the Top 10 with 'Patches' and 'Slip Away,' which Gregg Allman later covered, but on 'The Road Of Love' from 1969 he takes on soulful blues with some help from an eager horn section and Duane Allman's jagged guitar. Delaney & Bonnie had lots of famous friends and fans, including Clapton, Leon Russell and George Harrison, and their 'Livin' On The Open Road' is a bluesy R&B rocker with a positively piercing guitar solo provided by Allman. Boz Scaggs spent two years with the Steve Miller Band when he booked some time at the famous Muscle Shoals recording studio, working with its terrific in-house session group, and his eponymous 1969 album is filled with great music, including the superb 'Waiting For A Train'. Aretha Franklin's 'This Girl's In Love With You' includes some great covers, such as The Band's standard 'The Weight', as well as the soulful 'It Ain't Fair', and fellow soul-maestro Wilson Pickett also benefited from Allman's guitar prowess on his 'Hey Jude' album, most noticeably on the title track. Alongside these legendary US performers, he also played with a number of lesser-known artists, such as Johnny Jenkins, Eric Quincy Tate, Judy Mayhan, and Sam Samudio, as well as renowned bluesman Otis Rush, and Canadian rocker Ronnie Hawkins. Most of the songs on here were included on the extensive 2013 'Skydog' album, but they were scattered throughout the seven discs, and included multiple tracks from some artists, and so I've extracted what I consider to be the best of them from the years 1969 to 1971. So that this is not just a rip-off of that record, I've managed to track down one additional song that wasn't on 'Skydog', from Judy Mayhan, and I've only selected the recordings where you can really hear the contribution that Allman is making to the music, thereby condensing the 7CD set into one concise 55-minute album.  

Track Listing

01 Twice A Man (from '2 Jews Blues' by Barry Goldberg  1969)
02 You Reap What You Sow (from 'Mourning In The Morning' by Otis Rush 1969)
03 Dirty Old Man (from 'New Routes' by Lulu 1969)
04 Cryin' For My Baby (from 'Southern Fried' by John Hammond 1969) 
05 Hey Jude (from 'Hey Jude' by Wilson Pickett 1969)
06 The Road Of Love (from 'The Dynamic Clarence Carter' by Clarence Carter 1969)
07 Waiting For A Train (from 'Boz Scaggs' by Boz Scaggs 1969) 
08 Ghost Of Myself (from 'I'm A Loser' by Doris Duke 1969)
09 Everlovin' Ways (from 'Moments' by Judy Mayhan 1970)
10 Comin' Down (first album demo by Eric Quincy Tate 1970)
11 Down In The Alley (from 'Ronnie Hawkins' by Ronnie Hawkins 1970)
12 It Ain't Fair (from 'This Girl's In Love With You' by Aretha Franklin 1970) 
13 Down Along The Cove (from 'Ton-Ton Macoute!' by Johnny Jenkins 1970) 
14 Beads Of Sweat  (from 'Christmas And The Beads Of Sweat' by Laura Nyro 1970) 
15 Living On The Open Road (from 'To Bonnie From Delaney' by Delaney & Bonnie 1970) 
16 Relativity (from 'Sam, Hard And Heavy' by Sam Samudio 1971)