Chris Montez - Time After Time (1966)

Chris Montez Time After Time album was a quick follow-up to his The More I See You/Call Me LP in 1966, the singer's entry into the world of easy listening music. Here, Tommy LiPuma, Herb Alpert, and Marshall Leib all produce the 23-year-old singer, Alpert and LiPuma collaborating on the title track, a Top 40 remake of Frank Sinatra's 1947 Top 20 hit from the film It Happened in Brooklyn. With arranging by Nick DeCaro and engineering from The Doors' Bruce Botnick, the album is more intriguing and listenable than one might think after reading KSFO DJ Jack Carney's liner notes about singing in the shower. Beating Ferrante & Teicher to the punch by recording both Little Anthony's "Goin' out of My Head" and Bobby Hebb's "Sunny" on the same disc, the singer takes "Goin' out of My Head" and makes it even more gut wrenching than the 1964 classic. It has its own life and is one of the LP's highlights. When Montez is on, as he is when taking Dinah Washington's "What a Difference a Day Makes" (strangely retitled "What a Difference a Day Made"), he is exquisite. When he is off, on display with the pointless rendition of Blackwell's "Lil' Red Riding Hood," charting at the same time as this release by Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs, one can see how the formula Herb Alpert devised had its limitations. The Beatles' "Yesterday" works great in this setting and his "Sunny" is so much fun that it was included in the compilation Sunny Part 2: A Collection of Various Interpretations of Sunny. Everything, with the exception of "Lil' Red Riding Hood," makes the grade, but one wonders what would have happened had the producers struck a balance with the rocking 1962 Chris Montez of "Let's Dance" fame his biggest hit and the cocktail lounge boy singer who landed four hits four years after the world first heard him. These recordings don't fully display the singer who engineer Dinky Dawson in 2004 said is a great guitarist and absolutely incredible live.