🎵 AotW Classics Boyce & Hart TEST PATTERNS SP-4126

[Harry]

Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart
TEST PATTERNS
A&M SP-4126

Also released as mono LP-126, five tracks from the album released on RevOla's I WONDER WHAT SHE'S DOING TONIGHT compilation CD (CR REV 113)

Tracks:

Side One
1. Out & About 2:23
2. I Should Be Going Home 2:56
3. In The Night 2:40
4. My Little Chickadee 2:38
5. For Baby 3:48

Side Two:
1. Sometimes A Little Girl 2:42
2. Abe's Tune 2:26
3. Shadows 2:32
4. Girl, I'm Out To Get You 2:23
5. Life 4:50

• A. Sunday Night In Phoenix
  B. Life In Hollywood
  C. Sunrise Through The Meadow
  D. What's It All About

All songs written by Boyce & Hart

Credits:
Produced by: Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart
Strings & Horns Arranged by: Don McGinnis
Guitars: Louis Shelton, Gerry McGee, Wayne Irwin
Drums: Billy Lewis
Bass: Larry Taylor
Engineered by: Hank Cicallo
Bird Calls by: Frank Leper
Riveting by: George Swile
Album Designed by: Peter Whorf Graphics

 

[Mike Blakesley]

Alas, the only time I ever heard these guys was when they appeared on an episode of "Bewitched" back the the day. They performed at least one song but I don't remember if I liked it or not....it was probably "TV rock" and thus went in one ear and out the other.

 

[Harry]

The BEWITCHED song was "I'll Blow You A Kiss In The Wind", released on the duo's own Aquarian label. Quentin Tarentino is quoted as wanting to use it in PULP FICTION, but at the time they couldn't locate the master.

On BEWITCHED: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS7XRAlzNYs

"Out And About"
On I DREAM OF JEANNIE (w/Phil Spector!): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqOGmSXadIk

Harry

 

[Dave]

I picked "Girl, I'm Out To Get You" on the strength of it being a fairly definitive song of this champion songwriting act (though mainly known for writing most of the hit songs for The Monkees) and largely for its inclusion on the multi-artist Family Portrait, which fairly introduced me enough to this group that I rushed out and bought their albums and a few non-LP singles (subject to whichever I could find available) until the two Complete Works CD's in two separate volumes containing every note of their works came along...

I must ask "why, oh, why?" when giving this album, which I've long appreciated and given enough loyal listening to, that I should have chosen "In The Night", especially the riveting of a jack-hammer done on this song to illustrate the "hustlin' through the day" in the one line describing as a whole, what the song is all about, making "nightfall" a welcome and enjoyable, not to mention relaxing respite...

(Ah, but the night workers need a song called "In The Day", no?)

A lot of fascination with the bass guitar is emphasized on the overly romantic "For Baby", on which the offerings of sentimentality border on ad nauseum (can one really come through with all those things to win her love? And does she want alll those things from/done by HIM???!!!)... This track is also augmented by a wavering flute which even more really sounds sooooooo gooey and sickly sweet...!

Also bass guitar-driven are "Abe's Tune" and "I Really Should Be Going Home" and "Out And About", which would later resurface on their follow-up LP, I Wonder What She's Doing Tonight?'s title track, as well as "Love Everyday", as though Boyce & Hart were so forever overly won-over with The Monkees' "(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone", of whom they wrote for, while also expanding the legacy of...

(Think of these two playing Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band to the more down-to-earth, innocent, radio-friendly Pop the rest of their personal messengers continued with until their break-up, also spinning off into solo careers...)

"My Little Chickadee" introduces a more focused proposition than what "For Baby" offers, being a love song, and although a heap more lightened up, it's honest and sincere, though also sappy...

"Out And About" is the real snappy hit single, though also a bit interrupted by the rather dodgy and orchestrated glissandos, not necessarily robbing the song's quality but setting the pattern after the "first track kick-off" for something more outreaching in a good sense, before becoming a little too ambitious... Then there's also the staccato of ad-libbed vocals, on which by, and by there will be many examples of this newfound approach demonstrated by even more of their "own background vocal gymnastics"...

"I Really Should Be Going Home" is a romping repeat (Yeah, there's more o' that bass guitar!) of what's more of the same...

This new take off on their own concept becomes further dramatized on Side 2's opener, a forerunner take-off on Bobby Vee's "Come Back When You Grow Up" (yes, it would come out afterwards) "of its time" is also portrayed on "Sometimes She's A Little Girl", but don't expect to hear much about a "paper doll world" as these two belt out something more critical, going as far as to portray "Her" as "living in a great, big world" which Vee's "loving ain't easy, loving is twice as rough" line is an answer to...

"Shadows" is then a most simplest tune, and more of what an MOR artist would be capable of, along the lines of "I Wanna Be Free", also from I Wonder What...?, for example, which had been covered by Jimmie Rodgers, Andy Williams, Ed Ames, and quite a many others... Perhaps a "rough draft" to such???

The incessant "Bah, bah, bah...!" of sloppy doo-wop, (yes, also powered by "the low frequency of the four-string guitar with the extra long neck") of "Abe's Tune" (Who's "Abe"?) introduces sound effects, such as bird calls and I think even more riveting, while a special effect as a harp (not a harmonica, mind you, but actually the upright thousand-string thing the angels play) and a deluge of a wailing choir of background vocals (just those two's) consequently inserted at appropriate times, thoough mostly at the end of each line in the song... It just revolves around an observation of a number of vignettes the two seem to be passing by... Sample lyric: "...Hello, Misses Gray..., How are you today?..." And every stanza also seems to be punctuated with "I hear muuuusssic..."

"Girl I'm Out To Get You" is appropriately chosen for Family Portrait in that this is the one song definitive of Tommy & Bobby's epinomous debut defining its ambitions without slighting the principals' musical worth, and gently pumped up with a lot'a bass, but also an accordion, gypsy violin, a clarinet solo and bouzouki-like guitar... (Maybe that's why I chose it)...

The album finishes with a bit of doggerel, but a friendly and animate exercises in creating moody concepts, "Life" done as a suite... Surely up until now these guys could extend themselves and their art without a lot of force or diminishing the more pop-friendly proceedings, but for something that's supposed to be divided into "four parts" is harmless and tame, compared to what the more tenacious offerings heretofore would give you... (And perhaps one, after much wincing over what would make Phil Spector blush may have taken the needle off by now?)

Rather uncanny that A&M would be the first to cash in on this off-the-wall sort of act, while introducing the medium of songwriters making their own album, unto themselves being an obscurity, while as a consequence, whom they write for being a more popular and recognizable breed...

At its best, this is the cheery, breezy crop of Sunshine Pop which would emerge and to confirm that Alpert & Moss' label is not as an unlikely or unusual place more is sure to come... The Merry•Go•Round and Roger Nicholls & The Small Circle Of Friends (as well as the long-unreleased Parade) are on their way to offering proof, and that's before Rock even went psychedelic...!

(Guess sometimes, "A Clown IS Good"...!!!)



Dave