Post by rayge on Mar 3, 2021 16:15:06 GMT
All my previous Hagiography threads have been rewrites of pieces I wrote for BCB in the Beyond the 130 series, but this one I'm starting from scratch. It's a harder sell than any of the others, too. Most of you will be aware of her only through her 1961 US top five hit "Hurt", and possibly her 'Northern Soul' smash, "It'll Never Be Over For Me", if at all (although the unexpected appearance of What's a Matter Baby in the cup final this year, and the reactoin to that, suggests I might have been wrong about this). She did have other, minor, US hits, and was pretty big in the Netherlands in the 1980s, after she moved there: she was also reportedly a favourite of such diverse figures as Elvis Presley, Morrissey, Willie Nelson and Ronnie Kray. I totally get that she's not to everyone's taste, and some of her tracks do tip over into histrionics, but I fell in love with her when I was 15 years old, and you never forget your first love. She can still move me today, nearly a couple of decades after her death, aged 63, from – ironically for someone with such a powerful, full-on vocal style – throat cancer.
Virtually the whole of her important (to me) recorded output was contained in the 1960s, which were her twenties. She quit the business in 1969 after her marriage and seventh album (although she released three more in the early ’80s in her Dutch renaissance), and it's those first seven I am going to concentrate on, along with - surprise! – her singles. Her Sixties' career falls into three phases, defined by labels. Her first five were released in just three years, 1961-63, on Liberty. She then switched to Mercury until 1967, releasing just one, near perfect, album and half a dozen or so singles before returning to Liberty for a last hurrah.
Around the same time, there was single that to the best of my recollection never appeared on an album, the nearest she got to standard pop: The Love of a Boy, written and arranged by Burt Bacharach, and a lovely thing (I first heard, and heard of, the song as a Dionne Warwick album track, and Dionne's phrasing on that was such a faithful copy that I remember thinking at the time, that sounds like something Timi would do).
Apologies for the shit video here and in other places - I went for sound rather than visuals/
For Mercury she recorded just one album, which attempted to pitch her at the young adult market. Produced by Quincy Jones, with arrangements and orchestration by Bobby Scott (who also wrote a fair few numbers, which were interspersed again with standards), The Amazing Timi Yuro was another example of a great album conceived as an album, with a sometimes yearning, sometimes wistful, occasionally passionate, romantic mood (it was ‘our album’, with my first GF, Marian) maintained throughout, lush arrangements with strings and a full orchestra on some, and 12 wonderful vocals, with the emphasis shifting from the more soulful aspects of her performing style to the warmth of her voice and gift for phrasing and expression of emotions ranging from infatuation to heartbreak. For many years afterwards it ranked as my favourite album by anyone ever, and if it’s slipped down my list of favourites a little in subsequent decades, it's because I got old, not the album. Reissues on CD tend to partner it with her other releases on the label, all singles with different arrangers and producers, which dilutes it, but, if you are going to listen to it all, it’s worth listening to the twelve tracks from the vinyl, properly sequenced (https://www.discogs.com/Timi-Yuro-The-Talented-Timi-Yuro/master/224048), for the full effect. Here’s couple of samples if you can’t be bothered, both of them Bobby Scott compositions.
Then there were some non-album singles. Some were merely good to interesting, but two of them stand out, both produced by Nick Venet (among zillions of other credits, he produced the Beach Boys’ "Surfing Safari" - Brian Wilson often credited him with teaching him the way around a studio). One, released in late 1964, coupled a belted-out version of a doo-wop classic, the Dubs’ "Could This Be Magic", with a version of Roy Hamilton’s "You Can Have Her" that totally transformed the song from a skippy kiss-off to a slow soul builder orchestrated by Magic Jack Nitzsche into a maelstrom of screaming anger with a Greek chorus of wailing Harpies, gonzo electric guitar, a pounding kick drum, chimes and the full kitchen sink. Needless to say, as a confirmed Spectorite, I loved it.
The other one was different again, a double-sider "Get Out of My Life"/"Can’t Stop Running Away", released in 1965. Both songs were written and arranged by Teddy Randazzo, and partook of the signature sound he had developed on a string of pop-soul hits (all firm favourites with me) by Little Anthony and the Imperials. The B-side was yet another hit with British norther soul dancers.
In 19666 I went away to university, and, although I still played my old records to anyone who would listen, I lost touch with Timi’s new material: some of her later Mercury singles got very limited releases in the UK, and she was never mentioned in the music press. Then, in 1968, I went to the cinema in Canterbury with the first actual person I fell in love with, to see the sort of film I would normally have avoided, a drama about a romance between a conductor and a reporter called Interlude. And the title song just blew me away – yhat unmistakeable voice pouring out of a cinema sound system. The original soundtrack recording is on www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObLJeKv0ic8, but the one I tracked down on a single, rerecorded a few months later, is simply my favourite vocal performance by anyone ever. OK, I accept this may have more to with the emotional state I was in (that romance flowered, flamed and failed over the course of the first nine months of 1969), but there is some evidence that others thought so - a (probably apocryphal) story is that the whole orchestra stood and applauded the single, perfectly melismatic vocal take that nailed it, every single word beautifully phrased. It still brings tears to my eyes, the perfect example of the emotional power latent within what some would no doubt consider a rather run of the mill pop song
"Interlude" could be found tucked away on Timi's first album back on Liberty, Something Bad on My Mind, a decent collection of powerfully sung ballads and R&B/pop stompers that ranks with the similarly constructed (although very different-sounding) What’s a Matter Baby? album. The title track was one of the latter type, released on a single that has come to be seen as the Holy Grail of Timi's vinyl releases because the B-side, also from the album, was taken up by the Northern Soul crowd. I sold my copy, bought for 20p in a remainder bin in Faversham in the early 1970s, to one such Wiganite for around £300 in the Noughties. It now sells for well North of £1,000. It’s typical of the sound of the album as a whole. Here it is…
And that was that for me and Timi. As I said in the first paragraph way up there, her career carried on after a hiatus of married bliss (in the same way that Laura Nyro's did), and I caught up with all of that in the Noughties, once I had acquired a CD player. The later stuff is pwerfectly decent – she never lost her way with a song – but the real magic is all in the vinyl of the 1960s, which coincided, not coincidentally, with my teens and early twenties.
Aplogies for the length, but hey
My lack of vocabulary about musical sounds hampers my ability to analyse what I like about particular sounds and instruments, but, while I'll never know anything about keys and nuances of pitch, I do have an understanding of performance and language and emotional resonance, about phrasing and expression and nuance, that by-passes my musical theory blindspots (deafspots?) and goes straight from my ears to my heart. Timi was a past mistress of all of these, no matter how cheesy the material or the arrangements - and a lot of her material, especially in the early albums, had more than a whiff of the Fifties' supper-club/B-movie about them. When she was given decent material - R&B, Soul and Country as well as standards – and/or arrangers/producers (Jack Nitzsche, Quincy Jones, Teddy Randazzo, Burt Bacharach) she really soared, but every track she released had something remarkable about the vocal, even it was just a few moments - melisma, a twisted phrase, remarkably tuneful growls, groans, sobs and screams, husky speak-singing that dripped with emotion. I've never heard another singer that came close to inhabiting such a diverse range of songs and styles so convincingly.
Virtually the whole of her important (to me) recorded output was contained in the 1960s, which were her twenties. She quit the business in 1969 after her marriage and seventh album (although she released three more in the early ’80s in her Dutch renaissance), and it's those first seven I am going to concentrate on, along with - surprise! – her singles. Her Sixties' career falls into three phases, defined by labels. Her first five were released in just three years, 1961-63, on Liberty. She then switched to Mercury until 1967, releasing just one, near perfect, album and half a dozen or so singles before returning to Liberty for a last hurrah.
She was born Rosemary Timotea Yuro (or Aurro) in 1940 to an Italian father and Jewish mother in Chicago. The family moved to LA in the early ’50s, and Timi began singing publicly in her parents' Italian restaurant as a young teenager. She launched her recording career with "Hurt" in 1961, and followed it, somewhat incongruously, with singles of the Charlie Chaplin chestnut "Smile", and a duet with sob sister Johnnie Ray on "I Believe", the standard I knew only from the Bachelors UK hit cover as perhaps one of the most appallingly sentimental songs ever, but these were in my future.
The first I heard of her was on a couple of the under-the-counter demos I bought from the High Cross Record Centre in Tottenham, of her 1963 singles, "Moving On (Parts I & II)" and "Gotta Travel On/Down in the Valley". I had no template (maybe Ray Charles, on reflection) for the combination of soulful contralto vocals (she sounded more like a black man than many black male vocalists at times) and country material with string and vocal chorus backing, but I was soon hooked, and went on a search for more. Over the next year or so, I bought the album they came from, Make the World Go Away (which remains a top ten album for me today), and hunted down copies of the previous four - Hurt!!!!!!!, Soul!, Let Me Call You Sweetheart and What's a Matter Baby? - that were advertised on the back of the MtWGA sleeve. I ordered them from the Record Centre, including an import copy of Sweetheart, which was out of print in the UK, and picked up some singles that weren't on them (most of the tracks on Make the World Go Away were released on a run of singles, at a time when most albums were one or two hits and B-sides and filler).
Here's Hurt, in case you don't know it
Her first three albums were produced by Clyde Otis and arranged by Belford Hendricks, both of them with careers firmly rooted in the ’40s and ’50s and grown-up music in general. The albums tended to favour standards with orchestral arrangements that my teenage self usually found a bit too old-fashioned (although I can appreciate them now as period pieces), but fuck, she performed the hell out of them. "For You", "I'm Confessing That I Love You", Johnny Ray's "Cry", "Satan Never Sleeps", "A Lovely Way to Spend an Evening", "Stardust", "If I Didn't Care": in some ways - although I remained at heart a rock & roller/soul fan/Spectorite – it was my introduction to, and education in, the American songbook.
Her fourth album, based around her only other US top 20 hit, What's a Matter Baby?, was a change in direction, produced by Eddie Silvers and arranged by Bert Keyes, both of them with a solid background in ’50s R&B (and both black, as were Hendricks and Otis). The material was strongly R&B and early soul, too, with bands and arrangements to match: as well as the mid-tempo stomp of the title track (later another Northern Soul staple), there were versions of "Hallelujah I Love Him So", "That's Right Walk on By", "Ain't Gonna Cry No More", "It's Too Soon to Know" and "The Night Time is the Right Time", as well as a lovely lilting reading of "If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody" featuring a parping tuba that outdoes not only the mighty Freddie Garrity 
but also James Ray's original.
but also James Ray's original.Around the same time, there was single that to the best of my recollection never appeared on an album, the nearest she got to standard pop: The Love of a Boy, written and arranged by Burt Bacharach, and a lovely thing (I first heard, and heard of, the song as a Dionne Warwick album track, and Dionne's phrasing on that was such a faithful copy that I remember thinking at the time, that sounds like something Timi would do).
Apologies for the shit video here and in other places - I went for sound rather than visuals/
Then the emphasis switched again: Hendricks and his strings were back, but jazzman Marty Paich also came on board with some of the arrangements, and, probably influenced by the success of Ray Charles's Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music the year before, the album featured songs by top contemporary Nashville writers, such as Willie Nelson, Hank Snow, Hank Cochran, Johnny Cash and Don Gibson, with arrangements sometimes tinged by big band jazz, and Timi switching between confessional whispers and full-on testifying vocals to wring every possible drop of emotional heft from the lyrics. It was the first album I heard that worked as an entity, rather than a random collection of songs and, as I said before, it still sits in my top ten more than half a century later, but the general public did not agree: sales were respectable, but not huge. Virtually every track from the album was released on singles, but this was as much to do with the economics of the industry as their quality, as her contract with Liberty ran out, and she had switched to Mercury early in 1964.
For Mercury she recorded just one album, which attempted to pitch her at the young adult market. Produced by Quincy Jones, with arrangements and orchestration by Bobby Scott (who also wrote a fair few numbers, which were interspersed again with standards), The Amazing Timi Yuro was another example of a great album conceived as an album, with a sometimes yearning, sometimes wistful, occasionally passionate, romantic mood (it was ‘our album’, with my first GF, Marian) maintained throughout, lush arrangements with strings and a full orchestra on some, and 12 wonderful vocals, with the emphasis shifting from the more soulful aspects of her performing style to the warmth of her voice and gift for phrasing and expression of emotions ranging from infatuation to heartbreak. For many years afterwards it ranked as my favourite album by anyone ever, and if it’s slipped down my list of favourites a little in subsequent decades, it's because I got old, not the album. Reissues on CD tend to partner it with her other releases on the label, all singles with different arrangers and producers, which dilutes it, but, if you are going to listen to it all, it’s worth listening to the twelve tracks from the vinyl, properly sequenced (https://www.discogs.com/Timi-Yuro-The-Talented-Timi-Yuro/master/224048), for the full effect. Here’s couple of samples if you can’t be bothered, both of them Bobby Scott compositions.
Then there were some non-album singles. Some were merely good to interesting, but two of them stand out, both produced by Nick Venet (among zillions of other credits, he produced the Beach Boys’ "Surfing Safari" - Brian Wilson often credited him with teaching him the way around a studio). One, released in late 1964, coupled a belted-out version of a doo-wop classic, the Dubs’ "Could This Be Magic", with a version of Roy Hamilton’s "You Can Have Her" that totally transformed the song from a skippy kiss-off to a slow soul builder orchestrated by Magic Jack Nitzsche into a maelstrom of screaming anger with a Greek chorus of wailing Harpies, gonzo electric guitar, a pounding kick drum, chimes and the full kitchen sink. Needless to say, as a confirmed Spectorite, I loved it.
The other one was different again, a double-sider "Get Out of My Life"/"Can’t Stop Running Away", released in 1965. Both songs were written and arranged by Teddy Randazzo, and partook of the signature sound he had developed on a string of pop-soul hits (all firm favourites with me) by Little Anthony and the Imperials. The B-side was yet another hit with British norther soul dancers.
In 19666 I went away to university, and, although I still played my old records to anyone who would listen, I lost touch with Timi’s new material: some of her later Mercury singles got very limited releases in the UK, and she was never mentioned in the music press. Then, in 1968, I went to the cinema in Canterbury with the first actual person I fell in love with, to see the sort of film I would normally have avoided, a drama about a romance between a conductor and a reporter called Interlude. And the title song just blew me away – yhat unmistakeable voice pouring out of a cinema sound system. The original soundtrack recording is on www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObLJeKv0ic8, but the one I tracked down on a single, rerecorded a few months later, is simply my favourite vocal performance by anyone ever. OK, I accept this may have more to with the emotional state I was in (that romance flowered, flamed and failed over the course of the first nine months of 1969), but there is some evidence that others thought so - a (probably apocryphal) story is that the whole orchestra stood and applauded the single, perfectly melismatic vocal take that nailed it, every single word beautifully phrased. It still brings tears to my eyes, the perfect example of the emotional power latent within what some would no doubt consider a rather run of the mill pop song
"Interlude" could be found tucked away on Timi's first album back on Liberty, Something Bad on My Mind, a decent collection of powerfully sung ballads and R&B/pop stompers that ranks with the similarly constructed (although very different-sounding) What’s a Matter Baby? album. The title track was one of the latter type, released on a single that has come to be seen as the Holy Grail of Timi's vinyl releases because the B-side, also from the album, was taken up by the Northern Soul crowd. I sold my copy, bought for 20p in a remainder bin in Faversham in the early 1970s, to one such Wiganite for around £300 in the Noughties. It now sells for well North of £1,000. It’s typical of the sound of the album as a whole. Here it is…
And that was that for me and Timi. As I said in the first paragraph way up there, her career carried on after a hiatus of married bliss (in the same way that Laura Nyro's did), and I caught up with all of that in the Noughties, once I had acquired a CD player. The later stuff is pwerfectly decent – she never lost her way with a song – but the real magic is all in the vinyl of the 1960s, which coincided, not coincidentally, with my teens and early twenties.
Aplogies for the length, but hey
