Excerpt from
We had joy, we had fun: the "lost" recording artists of the seventies
Written by Barry Scott
Published in the U.S. & Great Britain in 1994 by Faber & Faber, Inc.
Sherman's first single release came during the summer of 1969. Now signed to Metromedia records,
"Little Woman" sold a million copies, just missing the top spot. He soon became the label's most
successful recording artist. By the end of 1970, Sherman had three more million-selling records,
including "La La La (If I Had You)," "Easy Come, Easy Go" (first recorded by Mama Cass) and "Julie,
Do You Love Me". "Julie" broke many sales records, reportedly selling over 150,000 copies in just
one day, marking the peak of Bobby's chart career...
Bobby's first three albums "Little Woman", "Here Comes Bobby", and "With Love, Bobby" all went gold.
Newspapers, magazines, and television programs began to take note of Bobby's concert performances.
Not since the Beatles had such hysteria reigned in concert halls.
"Basically, our concerts were really kind of 'love-ins,'" Bobby describes. "Ninety-nine percent of
the time I could lip-synch to the Supremes records and no one would know the difference, because
the noise level was so high. Everybody just came to have a good old time. Parents would bring their
kids and everyone felt good. It was one of those things that they felt they got their money's worth.
Even if they couldn't hear anything very well, or hear after the show because the threshold of noise
was so high. It gave you a headache after a while. Everyone still had a good time."
In 1970, Bobby also appeared as a documentary filmmaker in an ABC-TV movie of the week called "Zoom".
During the making of the movie Bobby bought camera equipment and learned how to produce and direct
his own footage. In addition to his ability to control parts of the movie by directing, Bobby also
had some control over what he wanted to record.
"I certainly had a say in some of the things I really wanted to do," Bobby says. "I didn't have much
of a say on when it would be released. For instance, one of the songs that certainly was one of my
favorites was 'Easy Come, Easy Go'--that was done in a session where it included 'La La La.' I loved
'Easy Come' but they decided to release 'La La La' first. They probably were thinking correctly
because both of them went gold. I had a choice in the songs, but not the release date."
Bobby says of his least and most favorite tunes:
"If I was gonna try to pick one of them out, I would probably think 'La La La,' only because I think
the lyrical content was fairly lame. I didn't feel real good about doing things that just didn't have
any redeeming quality to them lyrically. They pretty much had the stuff written in a way that was
geared at a particular age bracket for my audience. So I really had not that much to say about what
the lyric content was. As far as a song that I think has staying power, I think it is 'Easy Come,
Easy Go.' In Fact, every now and then I hear that in an elevator, so I finally qualify for elevator
music [he laughs]."
After "Julie, Do You Love Me" hit the Top 5 in the summer of 1970, things began to slow down for
Bobby. He hit the Top 40 two more times, with "Cried Like a Baby" and "The Drum" in 1971. Shortly
after "Here Come the Brides" went off the air, Bobby returned with a new TV show, "Getting Together".
The half-hour sit-com premiered as part of "The Partridge Family" TV series, receiving its own time
slot in September 1971 which lasted until January of 1972. Bobby is pragmatic about the decline of his
early seventies successes:
"I think quite honestly there was a tremendous over-saturation. Everything that was happening was
winding up in the teen magazines. I was doing an awful lot of episodic television as far as guest shots
and things like that. The fans were growing up, their tastes were changing and they were moving on to
other things. I think that happens in everybody's career. I can't think that there's any one particular
person that constantly stays hot. You have periods where you get hot, then you're gonna get cold and
get hot again, or you move on to other things. That certainly has been true in my career."
© 1994 by Barry Scott
|
T H E W O R L D O F S I N G I N G T E E N I D O L S