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VIP 25019 (A), June 1965
b/w Please Don’t Turn The Lights Out
(Written by Jimmy Webb)
Huh.
Jimmy Webb, who later found much greater fame as a singer, songwriter and producer away from Motown, got his start in the industry by demoing this song to Frank Wilson at the Motown LA office; Wilson saw the young writer’s potential and signed him up, and so This Time Last Summer duly became the first Webb song to be released on a Motown 45, the début (and, as it turned out, only) single by one Danny Day.
I know it’s a good song, because I was already familiar with the (excellent) version by Blinky from 1970, which uses the exact same string-laden proto-Philly backing track and still manages to sound bang up to date; she managed to tease out so much of the beauty and pain in Webb’s song that it quickly became a favourite of mine. So, when I cued up Day’s version, I had the advantage of knowing what the song was meant to sound like. But Danny, who absolutely cannot sing, ruins it beyond any hope of salvation.
So, I’d written Danny’s awful performance off as the inept squeakings of a tenth-rate Four Seasons tribute act, a man who’d ruined a perfectly good song with a dreadful lead vocal; the only mystery was why Motown had released it in the first place. But on doing the research, it turns out Danny Day is a pseudonym for the great Hal Davis, head of Motown’s West Coast operations and a brilliant writer and producer in his own right. Not only that, but this wasn’t even Davis’ first attempt at “singing” – he had a whole load of performer credits under his belt by the time he came to tackle this.
Like I said… Huh.
We’re up to almost 600 reviews now on Motown Junkies, and I thought the days of half-arsed one-shot favour deals like this getting through Quality Control were behind us. Apparently not.
I feel confident in saying that Hal Davis, as Danny Day, is comfortably the worst singer we’ve encountered in four years’ worth of Motown singles. Not since the days of the Contours’ appalling Funny (a horrific attempt by everyone’s favourite raucous rockers at a spine-tingling doo-wop harmony ballad), and white radio DJ Joel Sebastian (who had a singing voice like a drunken corncrake), has a vocal performance this awful been passed for release.
I actually had “Danny” tabbed as a random white guy when I first heard this, assuming his astonishingly poorly-judged attempts to leap the entire scale in one bound (on the word SEASONS!, for instance), ending up so far outside his range he’s quite literally screaming, were him going for a Four Seasons (do you see?) falsetto vibe. But the effect is less Frankie Valli, and more one of the Bee Gees with their testicles trapped in a door.
To discover it’s actually by an all-time Motown great like Hal Davis is like discovering Joel Sebastian was really Brian Holland or something. But I’m not going to start re-evaluating this record in the light of this new information; it’s still almost hilariously unlistenable.
(Penny for co-producer Marc Gordon’s thoughts when this was being played back in the booth. Davis and Gordon produced so many amazing records together, and their working relationship was super-important, important enough for someone to smile and nod right the way through while listening to the playback of his friend’s vocal track here… but it surely can’t have been a comfortable experience.)
I’m loath to give it the lowest possible mark, just because I really like the (beautiful) song, and I really like Hal Davis when he’s not singing. But this is just some guy doing piss-poor karaoke; it’s a genuinely godawful record and there’s no excuse for it at all.
MOTOWN JUNKIES VERDICT
(I’ve had MY say, now it’s your turn. Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment, or click the thumbs at the bottom there. Dissent is encouraged!)
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Hal did a pretty bad job on it. I have about 10-12 non-Motown 45s of him. They are ALL sung in Falsetto-style. But none sung so badly. Many of them are very good (“Merchant of Love”, “My Mother’s Eyes”, etc.). I wonder why he sung this way on his two Motown sides? I agree that it’s a very well-written song. I bought this record new (as a DJ copy in a bargain bin) only a few months after its issue.
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LMAO! Loved the Bee Gee’s joke!
I was only able to hear a snippet of this song, so I can’t really judge it.
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Big thanks to 144man for the stock copy scans of both sides of the single, much appreciated.
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Actors usually want to be singers and singers want to be actors. Thank God producers don’t always want to be singers.
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Hal Davis is my father and your words of his singing were very hurtful and nasty. But hey your an expert at what you do criticize. If you ever really listen to any of the Jackson 5 material produced by Hal Davis you might be surprise to hear that same falsetto voice that you so loathe. Its great to know that the rest of the public bought and loved it.
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Well, I’m sorry if you were offended, but if you want hagiography this isn’t the place. Hal Davis, as I thought I’d made clear, is someone I have the utmost respect for – as a writer and as a producer he is among Motown’s best, and even as a singer, the links I posted to his earlier vocals and Robb’s comment above both show some real talent. But this one is comfortably his worst vocal performance – it’s a bad record, and I’m not going to pretend I feel otherwise just because I admire him. Even Babe Ruth struck out a few times.
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If only Motown could have held on to Jim Webb, think how much composing/publishing revenue he’d have brought them during 1967 to 1969. An absolute genius of a song writer. However, this isn’t one of his strongest numbers, but it could have been a lot better if a different vocal had been used. If this is Hal Davis, it’s a good job he stuck to his producing and writing talents because he sure couldn’t hold a tune. Perhaps, he would have been better a couple of octaves lower, but he is embarrasingly bad with his falsetto attempts on this song. Some nice touches in the arrangement and some pleasant melody segements but as a whole the song doesn’t flow easily to my ears.
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I must say I’ve waded through loads of hideous songs that command high prices from Northern Soul collectors. Raw and rare doesn’t mean good. However, This Time Last Summer is truly gorgeous. The flaws actually work in its favor. There were some vocal moments that were stretching it, but I find myself not caring and returning to it every day. The potential for this earworm is fantastic. Why is wasn’t cleaned up and given the full Motown treatment is a shame.
I liked the ascending vocal corn. What can I say, I’m smitten!
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I like Brenda Holloway’s and Blinky William’ versions better, but I don’t like them all that much. i think the song, itself, is flawed. It’s not much like most of Jimmy Webb’s other songs. It has little, if any structure, wandering all over the place, sort of like Frank Wilson’s solo-written songs. I agree with Mr. Nixon, that this is, by far, Hal Davis’ worst singing performance (on record). His versions of “Merchant of Love” and “My Mother’s Eyes” are 1,000s of times better, and they are also sung in his falsetto voice.
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This is the same guy that wrote Dancing Machine, Love Hangover and heap other funky Motown songs in the 70’s. My good.
Side note. Blinky is absolutely amazing. For me Its Gladys, Brenda, Blinky, Kim, and Martha. and In that order lol..
Back to this song. This shouldn’t have been released at all. I don’t think this would have been a good demo.
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