Get your own Free Home PageJan & Dean
As already chronicled, Jan & Dean had a history of hits on Arwin, Doré, and Challenge Records. At Liberty for a year now, their numerous releases had yet to crack the national top 40. In 1963 Jan & Dean were making ambitious plans, if not hits. After having three Liberty singles fail to reach the magic circle of the top 40, their stock at Liberty was pretty low. The Liberty motto -- when all else fails, cut an LP -- saved Jan & Dean! With no national hits to speak of on Liberty, Liberty naturally and audaciously released Jan & Dean's Golden Hits!
Their manager, Lou Adler, had acquired the rights to some of their old songs. From Doré was leased Jan & Dean's early songs "Baby Talk" and "We Go Together" for Golden Greats. From Challenge, Liberty leased 1961's "Heart and Soul." 1958's "Jennie Lee" from Arwin could not be acquired, so Jan & Dean recorded a new version, with Dean singing Arnie's part. The rest of the LP was made up of the 1962 Liberty cuts which had been regionally popular, "Tennessee" (a remake of "Jennie Lee") and "A Sunday Kind of Love" (which shared a lot in common with "Heart and Soul"). That left just six songs needed for the even dozen required for an LP, for which new recordings were produced. FredJan &dy Cannon's "Palisades Park" (1962), complete with roller-coaster sound effects, Ritchie Valens "In a Turkish Town," and two other tunes, "Queen of My Heart," and "Poor Little Puppet" were chosen.
The final two remaining cuts prepared for Golden Hits deserve special mention. The original Jan & Dean sound had been developed on the 1958 single, "Jennie Lee," attributed on the label to Jan & Arnie. Arnie Ginsberg was a friend who left the group when Dean Torrence returned from the Army Reserves in 1959. And rumors of Dean's involvement notwithstanding, William Berry, Jan Berry's father, convincingly states positively that Dean did not sing on the original "Jennie Lee" hit record.
But the "Jan & Dean Sound" (as their Doré LP had been titled) ever since "Jennie Lee" had quite simply been "bomp- bomp-bomp." The "bomp" sound was subsequently aped by many artists used on many records. A partial list includes "Blue Moon" (1961) by the Marcels and "Barbara Ann" (1961) by the Regents, as well as almost all of Jan & Dean's recordings on Arwin, Doré, Challenge and Liberty. Composer Barry Mann even had a top-10 record called "Who Put the Bomp (in the Bomp-Bomp-Bomp)" in 1961.
Many black artists, from Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers to countless unrecorded a capella street corner groups from the '50s used bomp-like nonsense lyrics when they sang years before Jan & Anybody ever put anything on tape. But Jan & Dean (and Arnie) can legitimately lay claim to being the top-40 popularizers of the specific "bomp" refrain.
Jan & Dean knew that they were the ones who had put the Bomp in the bomp-bomp-bomp, so they recorded their answer song to Barry Mann's "Who Put the Bomp" hit on their Golden Hits LP: "We Put the Bomp!" (Several other artists also recorded variations, such as Frankie Lymon's "I Put the Bomp.")
For the final song on their LP, Jan & Dean decided to do "Barbara Ann," a recent hit by the Regents and itself a direct "bomp" descendent of "Jennie Lee."
Jan sang the low, bomp part as usual on "Barbara Ann." Using Liberty's overdubbing facilities, Jan & Dean provided background harmony parts themselves, while Dean, as usual, provided the falsetto. But, in all of their recordings to date, Dean had never before sung a lead part in his high falsetto. Thus the sound on "Barbara Ann" was unique for Jan Dean, with the lead vocal done in falsetto. At this same time, a new group on Vee Jay Records was coming off of three hits with harmony and falsetto leads, "Sherry," "Big Girls Don't Cry," and "Walk Like a Man." Each of these new Four Seasons' records featured the same basic sound as Jan & Dean's sound on "Barbara Ann."
Keying off the new Four Seasons' sound and the new Jan & Dean sound on "Barbara Ann," in mid-March of 1963, Jan & Dean unveiled their new Four-Seasons-style sound with a song called "Linda" (Ray Nobel and Buddy Clark, 1947; Charlie Spivak, 1947). "Linda" was written by Jack Lawrence in the 1940s for a baby named Linda Eastman who later married Paul McCartney. Jan & Dean's idea of choosing an old song came from the old songs revived with bomps by, for example, both the Marcels on "Blue Moon" (Mel Torme, 1949), "Melancholy Baby" (Tex Beneke/Glenn Miller, 1940), "Heartaches" (Ted Weems, 1947; Harry James, 1947), "Summertime" (Bob Crosby theme), and Jan & Dean's own "Heart and Soul" (Larry Clinton and Bea Wain, 1938, the Four Aces, 1952) and "A Sunday Kind of Love" (Claude Thornhill Orchestra with Fran Warren, 1940s) but this time the bomps were replaced by "Li-Li-Li-Li-Linda" and the lead was in falsetto.
It worked! After more than a year on Liberty without real chart success, Jan & Dean had their first top-40 record. Of all the Liberty artists who eventually had a string of good hits, only Jan & Dean had taken so long to get going!
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