Liberty Records - Vikki Carr

Michael Hagerty

Well-Known Member
Contributor
In case anyone is looking for a mono FOOL ON THE HILL, I see one on eBay.


It'll cost you about $40 with shipping, but hey, if it's something you really want...
And it comes with a Liberty Records inner sleeve!
 
That is nice but I stopped doing ebay a long time ago. I still make the rounds of used bookstores and record stores and the thrift stores. Maybe I will get luck one day.
 
...promoting a Vikki Carr album with lots of Mendes-esque material! (Intimate Excitement)
VikkiIntimate1.jpg

Curious, I found a pretty cheap LP of Intimate Excitement by Vikki Carr and it's an OK bunch of tunes. I've had a number of Vikki Carr recordings that I count among my favorites and this is an interesting excursion into Brazilian territory (with a sometime Spanish flare).

She does:
Laia Ladaia
Goin' Out Of My Head
Meditacion (Meditacáo)
Carnival (Manha do Carnaval)
Mas Que Nada (Pow, Pow, Pow)
Call Me
Constant Rain (Chove Chuva)
Forgetting You (Esquendo Voce)

...often switching effortlessly between English, Portuguese, and Spanish. This album has never been released digitally that I can find, and probably one track on here has prevented that - it's called "Toys". It's all about how girls are just toys for boys.

Many of the other tracks HAVE found their way to some of her compilations.
 
Vikki's "Intimate Excitement" album from 1967 is one of my favorites. I love it's Latin feel with excellent arrangements from the renown Marty Paich. Another song from this album is the fantastic "Pretty Butterfly"--"No Balanco Do Jequibau" in Portuguese. For me, the late 1960s were the summit of MOR music thanks to all those great Brazilian songs heard on AM radio. How lucky I was to have been alive back then as a teenager. And super talented singers like VIkki and Eydie Gorme were at the top of list for MOR back then.

 
I was just revisiting this thread to check something else out and played that video of "Pretty Butterfly" above. Great tune, but I'm assuming that it was sourced from that compilation pictured. If so, the compilers used a mono version of the track, and I can tell it was sourced from vinyl.

I'm just now working on making a better copy of the album digitally and realized that my LP has that track in full stereo. The compilers must have used the mono version of the LP, as this was from 1967 and Liberty was still issuing mono versions of albums.
 
It would appear that the company "OldDays" has released a mini-LP-CD of Vikki Carr's INTIMATE EXCITEMENT. It's showing up on eBay a few times, but I'm not convinced that it's authentic. It may be a needledrop or a poorly mastered "out-of-copyright-in Japan" issue. It's not the most expensive disc from Japan, bit still pricey compared to a US release.

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I'm also noticing something I hadn't noted when I was searching for this album before, and that is the fact that there was a Pickwick reissue with three tracks missing! I'd steer clear of that one for sure.
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I used to hear Vikki Carr on the radio a lot while I was growing up.
I have never bought anything by her. Most of what I heard was from her days at Liberty.
I rarely heard anything from her Columbia days.
 
Ray Conniff Singers "It Must Be Him" (also from 1967). Can't decide on either that version or Carr's version.
 
Did anyone here actually listen to "Toys"?



This isn't offensive, it's a bitter lament about how men treated women. It's five years before Helen Reddy decided it was time to punch back ("hear me roar"), but this is a poignant, moving portrait of just how women, starting in the dating years and often lasting their entire lives even in marriage, were, in a lot of cases, put on a spectrum of at best being taken for granted and at worst, outright abuse.
 
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