I can warm your coldest night

Continuing my trip back in time through the album charts

29/04/73 : Rock Me Baby - David Cassidy


Our second visit with Mr Cassidy in the year - like Donny Osmond, you suspect they knew the gravy train wasn't going to last forever so they had to get those albums out there for the fans to buy whilst they were still fans.  And I'm not expecting an exactly stellar album.

Well, it's not grrrreat, but it's considerably better than I was expecting - it's got a nicely nostalgic 70s sound to it, it's perfectly listenable and there's more variety there than I anticipated.  "Go Now" was the one I recognised (from The Moody Blues cover) but apparently "How Can I Be Sure" was the one that was successful, getting to #1 in the UK for 2 weeks.  Obviously, I'm never going to listen to it again but I found my toes tapping along from time to time - what higher praise is he expecting?  I'm also loving the "rock" pun on the album cover - he's HILARIOUS!

We're down at #13 in the charts this week on his eleventh week of a 17 week run having peaked at #2 (kept off the top by Elton) - the length of run that albums manage in 1973 appears to have little correlation to whether they're any good or not.  The top five are Bowie (a new entry about to start five weeks at the top - I'll allow him that!), Believe in Music, 40 Fantastic Hits From The 50s And 60s (actually not a bad compilation), Faces and Beatles (Blue - another new entry).  And funnily enough, we have another new entry at #6 - Beatles (Red) and Carly is the highest woman in the charts at #18, but Karen and Nana have reappeared in the lower reaches to bump up the female representation to a massive four albums in the chart this week.

Wikipedia has a few paragraphs on the album which appear to have been written by a Wikipedia completist with absolutely no enthusiasm for the subject ("Here is a fact.  Here's another fact.  And here's another one") and the most interesting facts I learned relate to other people.  Firstly, Kim Carnes wrote one of the songs - apparently she'd been in the song-writing game since 1962 (at the tender age of 17, which I imagine was quite the "experience") but, of course, everyone knows her for "Bette Davis Eyes" (which she didn't write - it was a 1974 number from Donna Weiss and Jackie DeShannon) which won the Grammies for Song and Record of the Year in 1981.  Kim is also obviously a nice person because she's been married to her husband for 55 years (this is my official yardstick for niceness in the music business).

Avoiding David for a moment longer, Wikipedia also tells us that "Rock Me Baby" was also recorded by Brotherhood Of Man at the same time, but they had to ditch it when he had a hit with it.  And you'll never guess how many Brotherhood albums there were over the years - EIGHTEEN!  And there's a small chance we'll meet one in '76 or '78, but most of them didn't trouble the charts in the slightest.

"Customers also listened to" The Partridge Family, The Osmonds and David Soul - musical titans, the lot of them.  This is "fine" though - but why does it feel like I'm going way over the top in describing it as such?

22/05/73 - A musical education
06/05/73 - Thrown together, at best

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