..:: audio-music dot info ::..


Main Page      The Desert Island      Copyright Notice
 Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz


Neil Diamond: The Bang Years 1966-1968

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Legacy Records
Released: 2011.03.08
Time:
 61:41
Category: Country
Producer(s): Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich
Rating: ******.... (6/10)
Media type: CD
Web address: www.neildiamond.com
Appears with:
Purchase date: 2013
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] Solitary Man (N.Diamond) - 2:35
[2] Cherry, Cherry (N.Diamond) - 2:45
[3] Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon (N.Diamond) - 3:02
[4] Kentucky Woman (N.Diamond) - 2:27
[5] Thank the Lord For the Night Time (N.Diamond) - 3:03
[6] You Got to Me (N.Diamond) - 2:51
[7] I’m a Believer (N.Diamond) - 2:45
[8] Red Red Wine (N.Diamond) - 2:42
[9] Boat That I Row (N.Diamond) - 2:40
[10] Do It (N.Diamond) - 1:55
[11] New Orleans (F.Guida/J.Roster) - 2:26
[12] Monday, Monday (J.Philips) - 3:03
[13] Red Rubber Ball (P.Simon) - 2:23
[14] I’ll Come Running (N.Diamond) - 3:03
[15] La Bamba (R.Valens) - 2:11
[16] The Long Way Home  (N.Diamond)- 2:34
[17] I’ve Got the Feeling [Oh No No] (N.Diamond) - 2:20
[18] You’ll Forget (N.Diamond) - 2:50
[19] Love to Love (N.Diamond) - 2:23
[20] Someday Baby (N.Diamond) - 2:20
[21] Hanky Panky (J.Barry/E.Greenwich) - 2:50
[22] The Time Is Now (N.Diamond) - 3:05
[23] Shilo (N.Diamond) - 3:27

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Neil Diamond - Acoustic Guitar, Liner Notes

Jeff Barry - Handclapping, Producer, Tambourine, Background Vocals
Ellie Greenwich - Handclapping, Producer, Tambourine, Background Vocals
Eddie Bert - Trombone
Artie Butler - Arranger, Organ, Piano
George Devens - Percussion
Sal DiTroia - Guitar
Eric Gayle -Electric Guitar
Al Gorgoni - Guitar
Nicky Gravine - Trombone
Benny Powell - Trombone
Artie Kaplan - Saxophone
Herb Lavelle - Drums
Charlie Macy - Guitar
Hugh McCrackin - Guitar, Harmonica
Dick Romoff - Bass
Buddy Saltzman - Drums
Russ Savakis - Bass
Bill Suyker - Guitar
Gary Chester - Drums

Tom Dowd - Engineer
Brooks Arthur - Engineer
Phil Ramone - Engineer
Bernie Becker - Mastering
Dale Becker - Mastering Assistant
Sam Cole - Production Coordination
Leonard Rapoport - Cover Photo, Photography
Ryan Corey - Design
Steve Baltin - Liner Notes
Susan McNeil - Text Editor
Glen Nakasako - Art Direction, Design

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


2011 CD Legacy ‎88697853312

Recorded 1966 (tracks 1, 2, 6, 8, 9, 11-15, 17, 19-21) and 1967 (tracks 3-5, 7, 10, 16, 18, 22, 23).
Recorded at A & R Studios except tracks 6, 8-10, 13 and 15 recorded at Century Sound Studios.
Track 1 recorded at Atlantic Records Studios.
Track 2 recorded at Dick Charles Studio/A & R Studios.



Highlighting Neil Diamond's origins as a singer/songwriter in the legendary Brill Building in New York, Columbia/Legacy will release Neil Diamond: The Bang Years on March 1, 2011. Covering the earliest years of his career in New York, Neil Diamond's recordings for Bert Bern's Bang Records produced some of the most loved songs of his career including "Cherry, Cherry," "Solitary Man," "Kentucky Woman," "Shilo," and "Red, Red Wine." Over the years these songs have been covered by a diverse group of artists from The Monkees, whose version of "I'm A Believer" was the best selling record of 1967, reggae artist UB40 who took "Red Red Wine" to #1 in the US in 1984, to alternative rock band Urge Overkill, who famously covered Diamond's "Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon" for Quentin Tarantino's film Pulp Fiction in 1994, to Johnny Cash who recorded his version of "Solitary Man" for his third American Recordings album with Rick Rubin in 2000.



Neil Diamond transitioned from professional songwriter to performer when he signed with Bang Records in 1966. There, he cut two albums -- his 1966 debut The Feel of Neil Diamond and its 1967 sequel Just for You -- that contained his greatest songs: “Solitary Man,” “Cherry, Cherry,” “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon,” “Kentucky Woman,” “Thank the Lord for the Night Time,” “I’m a Believer,” “Red, Red Wine,” “The Boat That I Row,” “You Got to Me,” and “Shilo.” All these, along with the rest of the two Bang albums all presented out of LP order, are on Columbia/Legacy’s 2011 The Bang Years: 1966-1968, by far the best overview ever assembled of this crucial era for Diamond. It’s not just that these are Diamond’s best songs but these are his best records: crisp, lively, colorful pop tunes balanced by luxurious moody brooding ballads. Once he turned into a superstar Diamond tended to rely on his innate showmanship, but here at the beginning of his career he sounded hungry and knew how to have fun, giving these records a snap that still stings decades later. And Diamond knows just how good these recordings are, as indicated by the terrific autobiographical liner notes he’s penned for this collection, notes that give this music context, but they’re not necessary to appreciate The Bang Years: this is pop music that’s so pure it needs no explanation.

Stephen Thomas Erlewine - AllMusic.com



He got the western movement!

If Neil Diamond is the Jewish Elvis, then Bang was his Sun Records. Bang was a small New York City label, distributed by Atlantic and operated by “Twist and Shout” songwriter Bert Berns. When Berns signed Diamond in 1966, Bang Records was best known for the McCoys’ “Hang on Sloopy”, another Berns composition. Like his boss, Diamond had graduated from New York’s Brill Building, a sort of Harvard for staff songwriters; unlike Berns, Diamond didn’t graduate with honors. As he puts it kindly in the liner notes of his new compilation The Bang Years 1966-1968, Diamond’s early non-hits were “silly songs about made up people”. By 1966, Diamond was frustrated and out of work, with a baby on the way. Bang was where he pulled it together and found a voice that was completely new.

As with most completely new voices, Diamond pillaged what other people had already done. Specifically, Diamond’s music combined the introspection of Greenwich Village singer-songwriter folk, the tightly wound beats and arrangements of Brill Building pop, and the brooding, leather-clad urban cowboy sensibility of a thousand solitary men toiling away in garage bands. This music was post-Beatles and post-Dylan (another compelling candidate for Jewish Elvis), but it was an utterly contemporary urban pop sound, with a scraggy rock edge in Diamond’s voice. Had Diamond undergone electroshock therapy and become friends with John Cale, he might have started the Velvet Underground.

That’s a big “if”, but listen to “Someday Baby” and see if you don’t hear more than a little Velvets in its droning, cavernous groove. “Someday” is a deep cut from Diamond’s debut album, The Feel of Neil Diamond, heretofore unavailable on CD except as part of sketchy bootlegs or a short-lived stereo compilation. Feel only reached #137 on Billboard’s album chart, but it’s terrific from top to bottom. It showcases Diamond the rhythm fiend, the backbeat scientist, the Dr. John of NYC guitar-slingers.

Feel’s songs are practically a taxonomy of different backbeats. Besides the druggy Factory vibe of “Someday”, there are the boogaloo touches of “Cherry, Cherry”, the horn stabs of “Solitary Man”, the slowed-down bubblegum of “Do It”, and the morose tambourine folk of “I’ve Got the Feeling (Oh No No)”. Diamond’s covers catalog his influences: “Red Rubber Ball”, “La Bamba”, “New Orleans”, “Monday Monday”, and “Hanky Panky”. Each is seemingly chosen for its locomotive energy, each manifests that energy with a distinct rhythm.

These rhythms are played straight, rarely swung, and they subsume all other musical elements. The trombone chorus, honking one-note bari sax, and omnipresent bottom half of the piano don’t play melodies so much as extensions of the grooves. Even Diamond’s melodies are rhythmic marvels. Go ahead, sing the stunning line that opens this album (you know you want to): “Melinda was miiiine ‘til the tiiiime that I found her.” Notice how it starts and ends with syncopated figures, and how they contrast and highlight the longer notes in the middle. Diamond’s biographer Laura Jackson describes those early recording sessions:

“He didn’t merely sing the song. To the surprise of those in the control room, he performed it, and in such a way that the strong sense of rhythm running through him was channeled visibly in the way his body and his acoustic guitar would sway in perfect harmony with each other. [Engineer] Brooks Arthur called it ‘a kinetic thing happening’...”

—from Neil Diamond: His Life, His Music, His Passion

If Diamond wrote and performed with innate beat savvy, his arranger Artie Butler and producers Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich made those beats explicit. Barry and Greenwich had discovered Diamond, and the authors of “Hanky Panky” knew how to bring songs to life. That’s them singing backup and clapping throughout these songs; their vocal arrangement on “Cherry, Cherry” is one of humanity’s proudest achievements.

The Bang Years also includes Diamond’s second album Just For You—as poorly represented on CD as Feel—and the single “Kentucky Woman” b/w “The Time Is Now”. All this stuff is uniformly great. Just For You boasts the hits “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon”, “Thank the Lord for the Night Time”, and the eternal classic “You Got to Me”. It features songs that were bigger hits for other artists: “I’m a Believer”, “Red, Red Wine”, and the eternal classic “The Boat That I Row”. It’s got “The Long Way Home”, a majestic song that barrels like a subway train. And the whole comp ends with “Shilo”, the first big Neil Diamond power ballad—it trades Ellie Greenwich and her handclaps for strings and actual drum fills. A harbinger of adult contemporary schlock to come, but a great bittersweet song nonetheless.

Two caveats: this package omits two of Diamond’s unofficial Bang songs, “Shot Down” and “Crooked Street”, and the mono remastering sounds a little loud through headphones. No matter. Overall, it’s a steering-wheel-pounding treat. For decades it’s been hard to find all these songs in the same place, especially in the sonic glory of their hard-hitting mono recordings. Because half these songs are already widely available elsewhere, this collection has slightly less archival impact than the Gentile Elvis’s Sun Sessions or last year’s widely-circulated Never Mind the Bullets, Here’s Early Bob Seger. Musically, though, it’s in their league.

Josh Langhoff - 11 March 2011



If Neil Diamond is the Jewish Elvis, these are his Sun Sessions. Timed to celebrate the man's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, The Bang Years is the anthology his fans have always craved — the first definitive collection of his Sixties nuggets, when he was just another Brooklyn punk hustling his way into the business with a guitar, groovy sideburns and a solitary-man glare. These 23 tracks include hits ("Cherry, Cherry"), surprisingly tough rockers ("You Got to Me"), songs made famous by others ("I'm a Believer," "Red Red Wine") — all delivered in that lung-busting Neil Diamond baritone.

Rob Sheffield - March 28, 2011
RollingStone.com
 

 L y r i c s


Currently no Lyrics available!

 M P 3   S a m p l e s


Currently no Samples available!