The way this series is eating up the hits it almost seems like there’ll be none left soon, and here we go again with a sizeable chunk of the 60s treasure trove in one fell swoop.
Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil were another of those early 60s partnerships that spawned great songs seemingly at the drop of a hat. Both New Yorkers, they formed a writing partnership, fell in love and got married.
They started at the tail end of the 50s, when rock’n’roll had lost its way and the square world thought it had ridden out the storm. It would take The Beatles to drive the stake right through the heart of sensible-sweatered adulthood, but American pop writers were doing their bit to decorate the present and point to the future.
One of the “squares”, if you like, was Eydie Gorme, a croony sort of conventional type your mother would have liked as much as you did and who worked with her husband, Steve Lawrence.
With Brazilian music jamming its foot in the post-Elvis door, Eydie had a solo hit with Mann and Weil’s Blame it on the Bossa Nova, issued around the same time as the team’s Don’t Be Afraid Little Darlin’ with Lawrence.
This was Drifters time, too, and they loved a nice Mann/Weil song, with a list including On Broadway (with help from fellow songwriting legends Leiber & Stoller) and Saturday Night At The Movies.
The Ronettes were the lucky recipients of Walking In The Rain, and then M&W came up with one of the real titans of the era, You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling, with the Righteous Brothers giving it some serious lung and Phil Spector pumping it full of steroids.
Cilla Black and Dionne Warwicke covered it in the same era, and it’s one of those songs that people keep fancying as the years go by, with notable versions by Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway and Hall & Oates. Elvis had a go in 1970 during a period when he was hard-up for good material, and as recently as 2003 it was tackled by British synth-pop duo Erasure.
And of course it’s a karaoke favourite for any guy who thinks he’s got a Bill Medley-style boom in his chest and can find a higher-singing sidekick.
Back on planet Earth in 1964, Mann and Weil provided Looking Through the Eyes Of Love for Gene Pitney and, in a slightly odd collaboration, We Gotta Get Out Of This Place for the Animals. It is easy to think of Eric Burdon and co. singing about wanting to leave the grim (at the time) industrial north-east of England, but the song was about Mann and Weil’s neck of the woods. It was originally intended for the Righteous Brothers, before Mann began his own singing career and his record company wanted it for him. In the meantime, Animals producer Mickie Most was on the case, somehow snapped it up and released it before he could be gazumped.
Monkees fans will be grateful to Mann and Weil for Shades of Grey, and Cass Elliott brought her own touch of class to Make Your Own Kind Of Music in 1968.
Mann and Weil have never stopped writing and although their time in the spotlight ended with the passing of the writer-hungry 60s, they did resurface in 1977 with Here You Come Again, a hit for both B. J. Thomas and Dolly Parton.
Mann and Weil, ladies and gentlemen: man and wife. And not only are they still working – by gum, they’re still married.
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