Various Artists: She Did It! The Songs Of Jackie DeShannon Volume 2 (Songwriter Series). Ace Records.
Jackie DeShannon writes songs the way some people draw breath. It seems like it's just something she does out of a creative necessity.
"When You Walk in the Room," "Put a Little Love in Your Heart" and "Bette Davis Eyes" are just a few of the hundreds of compositions that she's written for herself and other musicians such as Al Green, Annie Lennox, Van Morrison, The Carpenters, The Temptations, Marianne Faithfull, The Searchers, Ella Fitzgerald and Bruce Springsteen. As a recording artist she's also topped the charts with tunes from other songwriters.
But it's not the quantity of the material DeShannon's best remembered for, it's the quality of the songs she's written and performed over the years.
When Paul McCartney was going over a mental list of some of the people The Beatles had met in their travels he came to her name and said simply, "a great songwriter."
"That's fantastic," says DeShannon, speaking to the North Shore News over the phone from her home in Los Angeles. "I'm in the hall of fame, right? That's all I need coming from Paul McCartney. What better validation? It's so nice. I'm really proud of that quote."
DeShannon was one of the performers chosen to open for The Beatles on their first tour of North America in 1964. Both "Needles and Pins" and "When You Walk in the Room" (originally the B side of another DeShannon track "Till You Say You'll Be Mine") had been released the year before on Liberty Records making her a valuable addition to the show.
The tour, which included a stop in Vancouver on Aug. 22 at the PNE, also featured the Memphis rockabilly of The Bill Black Combo, the Leiber and Stoller R&B of The Exciters and blue-eyed soul stylists The Righteous Brothers.
The night before they played in Vancouver, DeShannon celebrated her birthday in Seattle dancing the night away with the rest of the tour group in Ringo and George's suite at the Edgewater Inn (nsnews.com/entertainment/music/the-beatles-invented-the-rock-n-roll-tour-in-the-summer-of-64-1.1319148).
Showtime on the tour dates was 8 p.m. with The Beatles scheduled to hit the stage around 9:20 p.m. DeShannon, already a veteran hitmaker at the age of 23, was given the thankless task of going on just before the boys and even though the fans never let up screaming for the headliners she loved every minute of it.
"It was magnificent," she recalls. "The guys were great to all the opening acts. We weren't allowed to go where they were in the back (of the plane) but they would come up and visit with us. George came up and sat across from me and said 'How do you play that When You Walk in the Room riff?' And then of course I became totally paralyzed and couldn't play anything."
DeShannon's reputation preceded her. The Beatles were well aware of her work through demos she'd recorded for Metric Music, the publishing arm of her L.A. label Liberty Records. "Dick James was the representative of Metric Music in England so Paul said he had heard quite a lot of my demos in the early days because they would float over there and they would play them for different artists to record. When I first had an opportunity to meet them at the Cow Palace, which was our first date in San Francisco, I tried to introduce myself, I was very nervous. He said, 'I know who you are."
Back in the day most people knew who DeShannon was. Even though she was their contemporary in age, by the time DeShannon met The Beatles she had already been a professional musician for more than a decade as both a performer and songwriter. Born Sharon Lee Myers, DeShannon was immersed in gospel and country music from an early age. "I grew up in Kentucky until I was around nine," she says. "When the weather was nice people would come over and we would sit around and there'd be guitars, banjos, fiddles - I just grew up with that music all around me. When I was three I was singing at fairs and in church. I sang with a gospel group on radio when I was six. I've always been pretty much surrounded by that."
Trying to establish an identity in the music industry, she began performing under different pseudonyms such as Sherry Lee and Jackie Shannon. Early on she also began writing her own songs. "I was always kind of fooling around with poetry and writing some things but it really kicked into gear when I was a teenager because I was making records and doing lots of stuff all over the Chicago area. Everywhere I would go auditioning for this and that they would ask, 'Do you have any new material?' And of course I didn't because the well-known songwriters are not going to give it to an unknown, let alone a teenager. So I started pursuing songwriting and that became my first love."
As 16-year-old rockabilly artist Jackie Dee she released the single "I'll Be True"/"How Wrong I Was" on the Gone label in both 78 rpm and 45 rpm versions and performed the tunes on Alan Freed's Big Rock 'n' Roll Show in 1957.
"I was very fortunate to be around at a time when there were really no walls put up musically," she says. "You can take any song and have it recorded by a country artist and then you take it and give it to someone else who's pop and give it more of a rock feel. It's really the instrumentation behind the song, how you direct the music for the song. I didn't really have any barriers and I came up that way."
Rocker Eddie Cochran, not long for this world, met DeShannon while on tour in the Midwest and suggested that she should head out to the West Coast. He introduced her to his girlfriend Sharon Sheeley in L.A. Sheeley had co-written Cochran's 1959 hit "Somethin' Else" and was also with the rocker in England on April 16, 1960 when he died in a car crash. After returning to L.A. Sheeley began a songwriting partnership with DeShannon.
The two young women, just barely out of their teens, wrote a string of hits together in a very short period of time, including Brenda Lee's "Dum Dum" and "Heart in Hand," The Fleetwoods' "He's The Great Imposter" and Irma Thomas' "Breakaway."
"I think we really had a connection and I'm really proud of so many of the songs that we wrote together," says DeShannon of her time with Sheeley. DeShannon and Sheeley were part of an assembly line of musicians, writers and producers looking for the next hit record for their record label.
"Liberty had artists ready for your songs," says DeShannon. "Basically the publishing companies would be on notice as to who was going in the studio. They would call me and say, 'Hey, so and so's going in - would you like to submit a song for them?' Or we would say, 'Wow this artist is great I would love to have them record a song of mine.' It was a nine-to-five job but it was a love fest at the same time. "If there were people that we really loved I would just get in there and write specifically for them, a la Brenda Lee, who was so significant in my songwriting. She gave me the first hit song I ever had which was "Dum Dum" and then she went on to record "So Deep" and "Heart in Hand." Brenda was really my guardian angel, in a sense that she really put my songwriting on the map."
Liberty Records, one of the most successful independent labels of the post-World War II period, was comfortably ensconsced in L.A. with one foot in old school Hollywood and the other in the youth pop market.
Launched in 1955 at the dawn of rock'n'roll, the label's first release was an orchestral composition by film composer Lionel Newman. Liberty's owner Si Waronker was a violinist who had worked for many years with Lionel and his brother Alfred in the 20th Century Fox Orchestra.
Waronker's son Lenny, who would later on become president of Warner Bros. Records and produce some of L.A.'s most iconic artists (such as his childhood buddy Randy Newman, Ry Cooder, Van Dyke Parks and Little Feat) started out as a publicist working under Snuff Garrett at Liberty Records. Originally from Texas, Garrett was a disc jockey in Lubbock, Texas, when he met Buddy Holly. He was the man responsible for loading up Liberty Records with rock'n'roll talent such as Cochran and Johnny Burnette.
Garrett's recording sessions included the cream of the crop of young L.A. hotshots such as pianist Leon Russell and guitarist Glen Campbell. He also stole Phil Spector away from Atlantic Records and gave him a big desk and carte blanche to create walls of sound. With all of their success on the charts, thanks to Snuff Garrett's rock'n'roll roster and some novelty hits (such as "The Chipmunk Song - Christmas Don't Be Late" which sold 4.5 million copies at Christmas-time in 1958), Liberty Records set up Metric Music to tap into publishing profits and keep as much as possible in-house.
"Metric was in a building on LaBrea," says DeShannon. "They had offices there and above some of the offices there was a little studio and that was the studio where the songwriters made their demos. Many folks were in and out of there. We only had three or four hours. We had to produce it, arrange the background, arrange the vocal background, sing the song and mix it. In an hour. You had to move on. Considering the time we had to do the demos there were some really great things that came out of there."
DeShannon regularly worked with musicians such as Leon Russell and Glen Campbell on song demos and on her own recording sessions. Russell and Campbell were part of a group of young studio regulars, loosely called The Wrecking Crew, who worked on many of the pop hits that came out of L.A. in the '60s.
"I was very spoiled," DeShannon says. "I had the Wrecking Crew. I had all these great musicians to work with and I just basically took it for granted. They were amazing and I got to work with them for most of my early career as a recording artist.
"They could play anything. When I would play them a little riff like 'When You Walk in the Room' I was full of pep and I would say just play it the way I did and don't play anything else. They would all laugh and play but when they played it, it sounded a heck of a lot better. It was just great."
While DeShannon recorded her share of songs under her own name she was also called upon to record material from other songwriters. One of her biggest hits, "What the World Needs Now Is Love" was actually written by Burt Bachrach and Hal David. Another "Needles and Pins" came to her from Jack Nitzsche and Sonny Bono. A minor hit in the States at the time it went to number one in Canada on Toronto's CHUM radio station in 1963.
"I met Jack through his first wife Gracia," says DeShannon. "She was one of the background singers I used on many of the demos, along with Darlene Love. I was really lucky. I had great people to work with because they were doing a lot of stuff themselves so I had really good people around me at all times. She said, 'My husband's a big fan. Could I bring Jack to one of the demo sessions?' He came and we started talking about music and we found that we were definitely on the same page. He was a very dear friend and I felt that he was one of the few people who really understood all the genres that were inside of me and knew how to bring the vision that I had forth and help me get the record that I wanted out of my song.
"It was difficult for women, for me, because you always had to be with a guy in the studio - not like today where everybody does what they want. I was one of the first women, especially on the West Coast, to produce and write, yet when I went in the recording studio I was basically under the umbrella of a producer. Although many of my songs were just copies of my demos with bigger arrangements."
DeShannon was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2010, a year after Ace Records began their series of albums focusing on her recorded legacy as both a performer and a songwriter.
The fifth album in the collection, She Did It! The Songs Of Jackie DeShannon Volume 2, came out in 2014 and compiles 26 tracks recorded in the 1960s, '70s and '80s. Everything is superb but aside from Kim Carnes' 1981 rendition of "Bette Davis Eyes" (which was one of the biggest hits of the decade and won Grammy Awards for Song of the Year and Record of the Year) most of the tracks are rarities or obscure versions of songs associated with other artists.
Some of the material on the album is even new to DeShannon. "I've kind of worn it out and I'm kind of embarrassed to say how much I love it," she says. "I didn't know that The Ronettes record was before they hooked up with Phil. And I've just been blown away by this Gerry Diamond recording of "I'm Breaking the Law." I had to pull over to the side of the road: 'What is that?' I had never heard it. The publishing company really didn't keep us informed of who was recording what. "So many of the things I love. I actually love everything on here. To have a lot of the older stuff and then to move in to these great recordings by Karen Carpenter and Rita Coolidge and Kim - they just tear your heart out. I have to say I love everything on there and that's a terrible thing for me to admit. I love everything. I'm just so knocked out by what was going on back in the day."
There's a lot of history in the music which connects just as strongly now as it did back when the songs were first recorded. DeShannon co-wrote the Marianne Faithfull track "With You in Mind" in England with Jimmy Page back in 1965. She wrote and produced Delaney Bramlett's "You Have No Choice" before he formed Delaney and Bonnie and Friends.
At one point DeShannon was partnered with Randy Newman, an iconoclast who has rarely worked with other songwriters. She Did It includes one of the songs they wrote together "You Don't Understand Him Like I Do" recorded by country singer Jeannie Seely. DeShannon also did her own version of the song, which is included on the Breakin' It Up on The Beatles Tour, an album Liberty released to capitalize on the live dates. That 1964 album also features another DeShannon/Newman song "Hold Your Head High."
"Randy Newman was around with a lot of other songwriters at that time," DeShannon says. "They would always try to hook us up with different people so they suggested we do a couple of things together and I was very fortunate to meet him very, very early on and I think we wrote a couple of great songs together."
Two of the tracks on She Did It! have not been previously released. Tammy Grimes recorded "The Greener Side" with Nitzsche for some project that never saw the light of day back in the '60s while "Love Forever Stay" was a demo DeShannon recorded on her own. The type of tune she would put down on tape to make the publishing rounds.
There's a story behind every song.
"I look back at my catalogue and I go 'Who is this mess? What happened there?' " DeShannon laughs. "It was very exciting because it was all brand new. Instead of watching history I think we were all making history. To be around and to be part of that I just treasure it because it's something that's not going to happen that way ever again."
John Goodman's Top 10 Albums: http://www.nsnews.com/entertainment/music/year-in-review-sharon-van-etten-delivers-stellar-set-1.1663119
