IMO by far the best song on the Red Hot RnB album. Very well done. Easily one of my favs of the RCA period. Anyone else like? Love?
IMO by far the best song on the Red Hot RnB album. Very well done. Easily one of my favs of the RCA period. Anyone else like? Love?
Love this track. One of my favorites from that album.
Summertime is the absolute top pic on RHR&B. one of her best performances of the 80s
I do agree Selfish One is a good tune on the lp. Tell Mama and Cross My Heart were both strong tracks too
Personally i like There Goes My Baby but others seem to think it's lacking
Tell Me Again unfortunately sounds like a Whitney Houston knock-off which is ironic cuz Whitney stole Masser and was doing her own powerballad knock offs of the Masser/Ross songs lol
"Selfish One" is one of her best RCA tracks. That was a bizarre LP but it had its moments.
On the whole, I think RHRAB is one of Diana's best RCA albums and a nice way to wrap up that era.
SELFISH ONE is fine but my absolute fave is IT'S HARD FOR ME TO SAY, followed by CROSS MY HEART.
Interestingly, in a 1967 ROCK AND SOUL SONGS interview, Diana named Jackie Ross [[the original singer of SELFISH ONE) as one of her favorite artists.
Selfish One was good but Summertime was better.
i think the lp had its moments. but it is uneven. the idea of doing a mix of old and new seemed like a good move. but some of the new really seems out of place.
Dirty looks
Stranger in paradise
summertime
shine
tell me again
Selfish one
cross my heart
there goes my baby
it's hard for me to say
shockwaves
non US tracks & songs from TV special:
Mr Lee
Tell mama
99 1/2
Sweet soul music
i think you could have assembled a strong package with:
Sweet Soul Music
Summertime
Dirty Looks
Cross my heart
there goes my baby
Selfish one
Mr lee
99 1/2
Stranger in paradise
Tell Mama
It's hard for me to say
Shockwaves
“Selfish One” as a song is one the early 60s greats. In the battle of the Rosses, Diana does a very good rendition but Jackie’s version knocks it out of the park. Not only are her vocals superb but the backing track is as good as it gets. It almost hit the Billboard top ten and in some markets it went quite a bit higher.
https://youtu.be/vdOZ_HPIFJA
Last edited by mowest; 10-28-2019 at 05:41 PM.
I am with you on this one. It's hard for me to say, cross my heart and summertime are my three picks from that uneven album. They stand up alongside her finest Motown recordings.
Selfish one is nice but basically just a carbon copy of Jackie Ross's original.
Incidentally Summertime was Diana's personal favorite from the album.
were you involved with the UK side of RHR&B? were there additional tracks being considered that weren't used?
I know the initial idea was to focus on classic r&b. But i'm puzzled as to who thought that concept, at that particular point in her career, was a good idea? she did ok with the Swept Away collection, Missing You was very strong. But title track and the duet only made Top 20 and Telephone didn't do much. Then the Eaten Alive debacle [[at least in the US). So she needed to come up with a major pop record and nothing on RHR&B nor pretty much anything from that "classic" concept would have delivered that.
I liked the album minus the sugary Tell Me Again.
I think had this album been releases in 83 it would have hit.
I liked Shine...Summertime...Hard to Say.. Cross my Heart...Selfish One
One of my three favorites from RHRB!
I listen to Missing You, It's Hard For Me To Say, Summertime, Selfish One and Chain Reaction far more often than any of the other RCA tracks.
I love the vocals, production and good feelings I always get from these recordings.
Last edited by lucky2012; 10-29-2019 at 08:14 AM.
Love RHR&B and LOVE LOVE LOVE Diana's cover of 'Selfish One'. If there need be remakes this is the way to go. Just a perfect record.
this is reaaalllly good.
Could it be my favorite RCA years recording by her?? On this day, YES! I've never heard it before , nor the original from 1964 by Jackie Ross , which is also spectacular . I like the handclaps on it and Jackie's vocal closing out of the record.
But Diana's rendition is spot on , respectful and true to the original. Has a bit of a Rose Royce feel to it. No fake instruments ,only the real stuff, and not a synth in earshot. . At first I thought her voice seemed too high , but I've changed my mind.
Great song I'm happy to learn of.
Not a favourite Diana album.
I find Selfish One nondescript with a vibe similar to Gettin' Ready For Love.
Maybe I shouldn't admit it but I loved Shockwaves - it was released as a single in the UK and got a certain amount of airolay but it missed the chart by just one place.
It wasn't a great time for Diana in the UK with minimal promotion from her record company - had it been released a few years earlier it would have been some size of hit.
Dirty Looks was released to great reviews but was only a minor hit and the awful Mr Lee was also a minor hit when released as a single.
Besides Shockwaves the best track for me was It's Hard For Me To Say, surely one of her best ballads in a long while which makes one wonder how a full album produced by Luther Vandross would have worked out.
Who knows how the album might have done in the US had there been any sort of promotion behind it rather than besides the TV Spectacular - although I understand it did well?
"Summertime" sucks for me. I'd rather listen to "Pieces Of Ice".
I agree about "Tell Mama" and "Cross My Heart", the latter of which I've only recently realized is actually very good and in line with a sound I think fit Diana during this period. When I first learned Diana had covered "Tell Mama" I cringed. Diana covering Etta James? And not Etta during her jazzy period, but Etta during her hard r&b period. No, no, no! But when I finally heard it I was really surprised that she didn't mess it up. I'm not crazy about the way she approached the chorus, but the verses were cool.
I love Diana's version of "There Goes My Baby", mostly because we finally get to her do the tune she was apparently so good at during the Primettes days. I dig the vocal but find the backing track a bit on the boring side. For the longest time "Selfish One", "Shockwaves" and "There Goes" were my only go to songs from this album's original release, but "Cross My Heart" is creeping up there.
"Tell Me Again" sucked.
Last edited by RanRan79; 10-29-2019 at 09:32 AM.
The title is a throw off. It wasn't red hot and the r&b could sometimes be difficult to discern. Had it been titled Shockwaves or Dirty Looks, the song choices might have been easier to swallow.
Try as I might, I can't get into "It's Hard For Me To Say". And that's hard to admit because I love Luther. But I find the song so very boring.
Thanks for the Jackie Ross info. I recall you mentioning that before. Sounds like an interesting interview.
"Sweet Soul Music" was a surprisingly well done cover. I wouldn't have guessed it. Diana does it very well. Interestingly, the version Martha Reeves did in the 60s was originally assigned to Diana. I wonder how that one would've turned out.
I fell in love with DIRTY LOOKS the first time I heard it on the radio. When I first saw the album in the stores, I was intrigued to see that Tom Dowd was the main producer. Knowing his Atlantic history and reading the title, I was expecting more R&B. But in the end, the title really didn't throw me all that much. Knowing that she had a tv special coming up with the same name, I just figured it was sort of cross-promotion. Plus I still ended up loving the album.
Re SELFISH ONE, for the longest time I thought it was sung by Brenda Holloway. They used to play it quite often on a weekend oldies show here, THE TIME TUNNEL. I think the dj might have misidentified it and I didn't bother to look it up.
Actually, the ROCK AND SOUL SONGS interview was more like a bunch of facts moreso than a real interview. I don't remember any quotes. I think the cover read "THE TRUTH OF THE SUPREMES AND THE BLUEBELLES" and had small photos of each group. Inside, there was one page on each group with photos of DMC at Expo '67 and the Bluebelles as a trio. I believe the Bluebelles page ended with the info that Cindy was now singing with the Supremes.
"Selfish One' was my instant favourite when RHRAB was first released. It felt like a return to form for Diana after the years of awful music she had been releasing. Still love it!
probably the track i listen to most from this lp is There Goes My Baby. i like the arrangement, although i do agree the backgrounds are a bit too sugary. and it would have been nice if Diana attacked the vocal just a bit more. she does at the very end and it's great. perhaps bring that approach a little earlier than right at the fade
Interesting idea about having the lp titled Dirty Looks. I think that song would have done ok with better promotion. but it's not unique or exciting enough to be a smash hit. Shockwaves is sort of "Son of Chain Reaction." and i don't think it's a strong either. But a motown-esque throwback could have possibly done well. and being included on a better album set than Eaten Alive might have helped it.
But if she was going to do an album entitled Dirty Looks, very few of the tracks here would have fit in there.
I liked this album, didn't love it. Everything sounded too homogenized for me - not red hot, not r&b. Summertime is the standout for me. I heard that Mick Hucknall had written Shine for Diana and she took so long to record it that he did his own version with Simply Red. The Simply Red version has some energy in it that is lacking in the Diana version. RHRAB is a nice album but not inspired.
Compared to her first two rca albums, RHRAB is a masterpiece.
I think "Tell Me Again" and "Shockwaves" are awful, "Dirty Looks" weak. The rest is all fairly pleasant if a tad vanilla. "Summertime" is the highlight for me. Blues and Soul magazine hated "Shockwaves", asking "why does she do this?"
At that period in time Diana really needed a strong r&b/pop album. It really was a case of wrong album for the time.
The pics on the inner lp sleeve were stunning.
That's what I felt too upon first hearing it yesterday. SELFISH ONE is a return to something more substantial. I don't know this album at all, but now I'm a little more curious.
Here's the original which is now also on my radar:
It's nice that Diana kept this favorite one of hers in her back pocket all those years to bring it out again so much later.
The video that was made for it which I posted up above...makes me wonder if she intended it as a single?
Last edited by Boogiedown; 10-29-2019 at 02:58 PM.
In the early years, Diana Ross presented something fresh and exciting with each new record. [[Even the two dismal singles I'm Living In Shame and The Composer were unexpected, whether or not one was overly enamored of them, and so, at the time, I liked them to some extent.)
But I'm Gonna Make Me Love You was, in my opinion, a major mistake. It was a remake of someone else's minor hit, and it came off as a Bit Of Liverpool kind of output, although the production values were better. It did not belong to Diana, or Eddie and Diana, in the way that Reflections or Baby Love or any of the others had. She was simply giving voice to a song, but she was not revealing what seemed to be her private feelings or her personal story.
On the other hand, she succeeded with many standards, such as the Rodgers & Hart material, because clearly she was maturing, learning something beyond her experience, and it was fascinating to see how well she made the songs fit. She was committed to shaping those songs to work for her, and many of them came across as confessionals, showing us who she was and how she felt.
In fairness, she also put thought and energy into most of the best covers on Supremes A' Go-Go, Baby I Need Your Loving and This Old Heart Of Mine in particular. But on some of the rejects from that project, her voice was fine, if it sounded a bit tired at times, and there was too little apparent immediate connection between her and the songs' respective storylines.
Similarly, on her first solo album, Ain't No Mountain High Enough found her sounding engaged and challenged, while You're All I Need and Keep An Eye were bland, pointless exercises and came across as very flat filler material.
When she moved to RCA, again most fans, understandably, anticipated something new and unusual and forward thinking. Instead, she gave us a 30-year-old song that was vaguely familiar from "oldies" radio, yet not far enough removed, like the Rodgers & Hart material, to give us a new glimpse as she evolved and grew. Or, more to the point, she gave us a precursor of the karaoke sound that would become all too familiar over the next few decades. If you've had enough to drink, you, too, can sound like Levi Stubbs or Aretha Franklin or [whomever], at least to yourself. And that's what Diana sounded like; she gave us an okay imitation of someone else singing his song, but never, ever, did the song belong to her. Through the RCA years [[and after) she gave us way too many "oldies" and never, once, did any of them make me forget about the real versions; they were just unnecessary covers. She wasn't Fontella Bass; she wasn't Mick Hucknell; she wasn't Jackie Ross or the Bobbettes, and her readings of those songs came across as lazy and unsatisfying. She wasn't taking the time to make a song or a sound her own; she was just repeating someone else's vision.
I also hated almost all of the physical covers of her RCA years; the outfit she wore on the first album looked somewhat cheap and vulgar, her makeup was wrong and the photographer was one of the least talented to work with her; that cover had all the appeal of the worst imitator of a 101 Strings album cover from 1961 or so.
I continued to buy all of her albums and for the most part discovered at least two or three interesting cuts on each. [[Working Overtime was an exception.) But it was rare to feel that she was the same talented interpreter I once admired wholeheartedly. She still achieved artistic success when challenged, for instance in some of her work with The Tenors. But all too often, she sounded like she was sleepwalking through drab terrain from 1980 onward. She was in a forest, mostly hidden by the trees, and while she still glowed when the sunlight touched her, there were far too few spaces open to the sun, and mostly the shadows diminished what was there.
This is one of the best posts I've witnessed here on the DRATS forum. Lots of stuff to ponder benross. I'd like to focus on your impressions of her remakes, SELFISH ONE in particular , since its the topic of this thread.
I was most impressed by this tune when I first heard it, thought it's composition remarkable for an '80s release , so I have to admit , I was a little disappointed when I learned it was a remake, a duplication really, of an earlier hit. Wasn't quite as remarkable after all, although it certainly explained it.
This is not to take away from giving Diana credit for breathing new life into it, I think its a great number as does she. And is then the point of performing it to transform it into something of her own , to make it 'hers' , or is it just as legitimate a reason to just want to pay homage to it by performing it in a straightforward way, as closely to the way it was originally intended as possible. I mean when someone sings THE CHRISTMAS SONG in the style reminiscent to the way Nat sang and arranged it originally, is that lazy , or too easy, or is it simply a capturing of the song in its intended essence? That isn't valid? And then if someone strays too far..... at some point, why do the song at all??
When WHY DO FOOLS was released , I have to admit, I thought , "For this you left Motown?" And , like your examples, I never thought for a second the song had become 'hers'. A basic , throw away remake. Just as I WILL SURVIVE will never be hers, although for some reason she seems to think it is . So I get your point.
Good stuff to think about. Thanks benross
Although Simply Red's album "Men and Women" [[containing their version of "Shine") was released two months before Ross's "Red Hot Rhythm & Blues," at the time it was emphasized in the pop press that Hucknall wrote the song especially for Ross and that he liked it so much that he "covered" it for the group's album. I do like Ross's version--it's not a typical Ross song but she does make it her own.
Jackie Ross was a singer out of Chicago. She had vocal sound similar to Jean Terrell, who was also from Chicago. Jackie's record was a favorite on Soul radio in the mid sixties. I would never compare the original by Jackie Ross to the cover done by Diane Ross. It would be like Patti Page covering an Aretha Franklin classic hit.
Last edited by marv2; 10-30-2019 at 08:22 AM.
For a long time "There Goes" was the song I listened to most also. I also think she should have given the song more punch vocally throughout the song rather than waiting until the end to move up the intensity. I also still believe that she should have covered this song instead of "Why Do Fools" if she was going to go with a throwback to her favs as her first RCA single.
To your Motown throwback point, I think she actually may have had a winner on her hands if she had styled the whole album in a Motown-esque sound, which had proved a hit several times with 80s audiences. Different title for the album of course.
While I largely agree with nearly every other opinion in your post, I definitely disagree regarding "I'm Gonna Make You Love Me". Done a number of times before the Sups/Tempts got ahold of it, to my ears it still comes across as a different song. The only versions I ever play is Dee Dee and S/T and to my ears they come off as two completely different songs. Dee Dee sings hers so passionately, and there's a sadness to her voice that conveys she's serious about this shit. She might even be a bit stalkerish with the way she's got this dude in her cross hairs. On the other hand, Diana and Eddie make the record sound so romantic. They sound like lovers declaring their love and their intentions on making the other happy right to each other's faces. Of course it wouldn't be revealed for many, many years, but learning of Diana and Eddie's actual romance- probably occurring during this time- makes the chemistry that much more real. Two different interpretations, two different results. IMO both are A grade recordings, with Dee Dee probably getting a little more airtime on my personal playlist than the Supremes/Tempts version because I'm usually more in the mood these days for her more desperate version than the googoo eyed version of the two groups.
Last edited by Bluebrock; 10-30-2019 at 10:51 AM. Reason: Not finished the post
One thing that stands out about RHRAB is that Diana is in glorious voice throughout.
I think had she promoted "Shine" as the first single and shot a great video to go with it the album MIGHT have done a biddy bit better.
In reply to benross post, i agree with many of your opinions, but consider Diana's solo version of "Your All I Need to be superb. One she really puts her own personal stamp on.
^i agree Ollie. I think this is some of the best overall singing while at RCA. the ghastly echo treatment from Silk is gone, the hideous muffled productions of Eaten are gone, she's more engaged that one some of the Swept tracks. It's def not a masterpiece but it's held up better than much of her other output from 80s
I do think Red Hot and Eaten Alive are her two best RCA albums. Both needed a bit tweeking
She failed to deliver a killer album whilst at rca , but there were at least a couple of killer cuts on most of the albums, especially from Ross83 onwards. I just wish she had put as much effort into making consistent albums as she did into making money, but she was a very busy lady during this time and quite literally stretched herself too thinly during this time.
With all due respect Blueblock. I loved her RCA period. To me “Eaten Alive” And “Swept Away” were killer albums. I could also include “Silk Electric”. I know there are a lot of fans who don’t appreciate these albums like I do. But believe me there are many fans that do. That’s what makes this so fun everyone has their own personal choices of what they like.
^ agreed and i'll go ahead and disagree with ya lolol
I think EA is the worst album of her career. I'd rather listen to Workin Overtime or I Love You.
The problem IMO isn't crappy song choice [[like WO) or material in too high/wrong key [[again WO) or poor quality backing tracks [[like ILY). The problems are 1) her vocals are so mushy and blurry and 2) Diana's already nasal vocal tone clashing with the nasal falsetto sounds of the Gibbs on backing vocals. To me, that combo of Gibb and Ross is like nails on chalkboard. Berry's other duet partners had different enough vocal tones that the blend work. here it's ghastly.
The Swept Away album is one i do enjoy, for the most part. I know many fans hate Crazy but i like it. it's fun. Forever Young and Rescue Me are not very strong. like she did 1 take of the vocals and figure, good enough. Children would have been pretty much fine without that damn children's chorus. The 3 singles and Touch are great songs.
Exactly. Variety is the spice of life. It is good to hear differing views. Glad you can appreciate Silk Electric more than i am able to.
I do quite like the final four albums, but as for Why do Fools and Silk Electric i shall just say different strokes for different folks!
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