Cher - Behind The Door: 1964-1974 The First Recordings (2000)

Review by Bruce Eder
This 25-song CD might properly have been called "The Best of the Rest" of Cher, comprised as it is of tracks from her first ten years in music that are usually left off of the "best-of" Cher compilations that are out there. The first 15 songs consist of material from her years on Liberty Records, including oddities such as her mid-'60s cover of Ray Davies' "I Go to Sleep," the ornate "Song Called Children," with its "Eleanor Rigby"-like arrangement, her ultra-cool, Phil Spector-ish version of Bob Dylan's "I Want You," and "Reason to Believe." Some of the material here, such as her recordings of Graham Gouldman's "Behind the Door" and Sonny Bono's "Magic in the Air" (which, one could suspect, was the model for Neil Young's "Broken Arrow"), has been compiled elsewhere, most notably on Bang Bang: The Early Years, although at the time this disc was devised that was not the case -- additionally, assembling all of these odder early Cher sides together makes for a much more interesting and diverting way of hearing them, and a keen appreciation of the sheer range of producer and sometime songwriter Sonny Bono's talents and sensibilities. The tracks 16 through 25 are of somewhat less interest, dating from Cher's 1970s period on Kapp Records, where she was doing what amounted to pop music with a beat -- good stuff, but not with the same urgency and sense of searching for a new sound. Peggy Clinger's "I Hate to Sleep Alone" is the best of those songs, and it has been compiled elsewhere. Nothing among them breaks new ground in pop or rock music, but they are good performances that show off a much bigger range musically and emotionally -- she really belts out "Rescue Me" and, even more so, "Never Been to Spain," with throat-tearing abandon, moving into Dusty Springfield territory on a somewhat lower level of sophistication.