Funny Girl - help or hinder?

[floyjoy678]

As someone else said I don't think it helped nor hindered them. But I have to say the group had gotten incredibly corny by this point. Thank God they put out Love Child.

I do love the R&H set but think that should have been it with releasing albums with standards. They desperately needed to go in a new direction and they just kept on with the same old same old.

[RanRan79]

As someone else said I don't think it helped nor hindered them. But I have to say the group had gotten incredibly corny by this point. Thank God they put out Love Child.

I do love the R&H set but think that should have been it with releasing albums with standards. They desperately needed to go in a new direction and they just kept on with the same old same old.

I agree, the R&H set should have been the last of the specialty albums. The focus should have been entirely on progressing the group's image in a changing music world. I think that could be accomplished while maintaining Diana's solo test run.

The only other "specialty" album that I would have been okay with the group doing post R&H is another Christmas album. I don't know why that wasn't on the to do list for the group- both DRATS and the 70s Supremes- nor why there wasn't a Christmas album from Diana in the 70s. I wonder if "This Christmas" was going to be the start of a Christmas album for her, or if it was always intended as a one off. I also wonder if it was her idea to do the song. I also wonder if she has a collection of Donny Hathaway albums that she regularly listens to. But that last one is neither here nor there. A Christmas album instead of LTISH or Ross78 would have been perfect.

[sup_fan]

I agree, the R&H set should have been the last of the specialty albums. The focus should have been entirely on progressing the group's image in a changing music world. I think that could be accomplished while maintaining Diana's solo test run.

The only other "specialty" album that I would have been okay with the group doing post R&H is another Christmas album. I don't know why that wasn't on the to do list for the group- both DRATS and the 70s Supremes- nor why there wasn't a Christmas album from Diana in the 70s. I wonder if "This Christmas" was going to be the start of a Christmas album for her, or if it was always intended as a one off. I also wonder if it was her idea to do the song. I also wonder if she has a collection of Donny Hathaway albums that she regularly listens to. But that last one is neither here nor there. A Christmas album instead of LTISH or Ross78 would have been perfect.

i thought the original Merry Christmas continued to be released and was a strong seller. at least through the 60s. so since that was holding it's own, maybe they figured why bother investing in another set when the first is still selling just fine. i don't disagree that having a more mature singer would have been a nice contrast to the first Xmas set, which has them as more youthful. and of course i think having the Jean lineup doing something would be great too

perhaps the concept albums needed to evolve from being an MOR set like Sam Cooke or R&H to concepts like the original idea of Love Child with social commentary or our revised playlists that we've done on the NW set to be more cohesive and focusing on peace, love, nature and god

in some of the interviews MJC did, they talked about how the Touch album was Frank sort of working through the phases of love [[i'm sort of paraphrasing and trying to remember exactly what they said). so maybe concepts like that are more about artistic statement with their OWN music rather than always just highlighting their versatility singing other music