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 Posted By: Jim Liddane on: 09/08/2008 18:12:37 EDTSubject: RE: 2nd Largest Hit - Lesley Gore - Goodbye Tony |
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I have always been interested in Lesley because, as you know, she wrote "Out Here On My Own" for Irene Cara, which was in Lesley's brother Michael Gore's musical "Fame". I really liked her records, particularly "She's A Fool", "That's The Way Boys Are" and "Maybe I Know." and considering that she went back to college just as her career was starting, she did remarkably well for herself. A lot of it is due to Quincy Jones would you agree? I remember when she broke, we were told all sorts of stories about how she had sung at a friend's birthday paerty, and her rich family, on hearing how popular she had been, gace her a recording session as her own birthday present. It sounded just perfect. Later, it turned out that in reality, she had stood in at short notice as a replacement in her cousin's band, when they were doing an audition gig in a New York hotel for Mercury President Irving Green. He passed on the band, but picked her, and introduced her to Quincy Jones. Why Mercury invented the first lame story when the true story was pure showbiz - I'll never know. The real weird thing about "Party" was that the songwriter's demo of the song was in offices all over the place, and Phil Spector had also picked it out for The Crystals. The writer, afraid of offending Mercury (I'd be more afraid of offending Phil!), told Quincy, who persuaded Mercury to stop pressing everything else, so they could rush release Lesley's version. You suggest that Bob Crewe is to blame for "California Nights", but I did not know he produced it - I had thought it was produced by Marvin Hamlisch, but she did join Crew Records in 1972 and did an album for them produced by Bob Crewe called "Someplace Else" which was quite ineresting in a Carole King kind of way. |
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