Chris Clark - Chris Clark - Selected Best Tracks (1968-1969)

I recently posted two albums of material from Chris Clark. This is the third and last, because she only had a relatively brief recording career, from 1965 to 1969. If you don't know who she is, she was a soul singer for the Motown label. But she didn't have much commercial success despite being very talented. The fact that she was a tall, platinum-haired white woman singing a type of music beloved mainly by black audiences at the time didn't help.

She put out an album in 1967 called "Soul Sounds," and my last post on her was my drastically changed version of that. She put out her second and last album in 1969, called "CC Rides Again." Unfortunately, it was a mess. Most of the songs were predictable covers of the biggest hit songs of the year. She gave good performances as usual, but clearly Motown wasn't giving her good material.

On top of that, many of the songs began with long instrumental passages from famous classical pieces that had absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the song. Apparently, it was some kind of failed effort by the producers to appear hip or experimental. For the songs I've chosen from the album, I've lopped all those sections off.

But I didn't do that very much, because it turns out that only four of the 14 songs here come from "CC Rides Again." As I said, that just wasn't a very good album. She was recording much better material but it stayed in the vaults until decades later. Another eight songs are from 1968 or 1969, but not officially released at the time.

The last two songs are strange, because they come from much, much later. After 1969, she basically gave up on her music career, but stayed with Motown Records and moved her way up in the company until she was the head creative director. (She did record a few songs in the later 1970s, but they're disco tracks and not worthy of inclusion here.)

However, her reputation as a soul singer has grown over time, and in the 2000s she began performing some concerts, especially in Britain, where the classic Motown sound is more appreciated by the "Northern Soul" crowd. That led to her recording two new songs in 2011. I've added them at the end. If you didn't read this, you probably wouldn't notice the massive time gap, because they're good songs and they sound exactly as if they were recorded in the late 1960s instead. It's too bad she hasn't recorded more in recent years, because her voice hasn't lost any of its power.

By the way, I couldn't come up with a good name for this album, so I decided to simply call it "Chris Clark."  I was influenced by the cover art I chose, which has her name is massive letters, without really having room for more text.

01 Feelin' Good (Chris Clark)
02 I'm Gonna Be True (Chris Clark)
03 He's Good for Me (Chris Clark)
04 Bad Seed (Chris Clark)
05 Can I See You in the Morning (Chris Clark)
06 If You Let Me Baby (Chris Clark)
07 C. C. Rider (Chris Clark)
08 One (Chris Clark)
09 In the Ghetto (Chris Clark)
10 You've Made Me So Very Happy (Chris Clark)
11 My World Is Empty without You (Chris Clark)
12 The Last Thing on My Mind (Chris Clark)
13 Dream or Cry (Chris Clark)
14 Hang It Up (Chris Clark)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15100216/ChrisCrk_1968-1969_ChrisClrk_atse.zip.html

For the album cover, I used the cover of an EP as the framework. But the lower half contained the names of four songs with a very tiny photo of Clark. I erased all that and replaced it with a much larger photo of her.  Good color photos of her in her late 1960s heyday are very few and far between. I actually found two different versions of the same photo that had been cropped to show only parts of her head. I stitched them together to show her full head. I'm happy at how that turned out.

Chris Clark - Soul Sounds - Alternate Version (1967)

This is the second of three albums I've made of my favorite songs performed by Chris Clark. Clark is a tall, white, platinum blonde who sang soul music for the Motown label. See my previous post to get a run down of her life story.

Clark only released two albums, "Soul Sounds" in 1967 and "CC Rides Again" in 1969. This is only very loosely based on "Soul Sounds." In fact, only four of the songs on this version were released on that 1967 version. (Two more made it on my compilation of her 1965 and 1966 songs, since they predate 1967.)

One reason Clark never got her just due was because Motown didn't really know what to do with her. They released some sub-par stuff (often as part of Motown's strange obsession to entice the Las Vegas-esque "supper club" crowd), and they kept the vast majority of her recordings unreleased until decades later. So all but the four "Soul Sounds" songs mentioned above, plus one B-side and one other from the album, were unreleased at the time.

As with the previous Clark collection I've posted, I've tended to favor more upbeat material over ballads. Clark could sing just about anything soulfully, but I think she excelled more on the upbeat stuff. Any number of these songs should have been hits in a better world, especially the first two.

This album basically ends with four bonus tracks, even though I didn't label them as such.  Last week, when I was getting ready to post my three Clark albums, I did a double check on YouTube to see if I missed anything. I stumbled across an audio recording of Clark in concert, and it turns out it had been posted to YouTube just two hours earlier! On the plus side, the sound quality is surprisingly excellent, as good as any official album of that era. On the minus side, it's only 12 minutes long in total, plus two of the songs are versions of songs presented earlier on this album.

This is the only live Clark from her 1960s prime that I've ever heard of, so I've included it here despite the duplication of the two songs. It shows Clark must have put on an impressive live show. Hopefully, more of her live recordings will someday emerge (in the same way this live recording emerged for the first time mere days ago), and I'll be able to spin that off to an album of its own.

01 From Head to Toe (Chris Clark)
02 I Want to Go Back There Again (Chris Clark)
03 Got to Get You into My Life (Chris Clark)
04 Whisper You Love Me Boy (Chris Clark)
05 Day by Day or Never (Chris Clark)
06 I Love You (Chris Clark)
07 Take Me in Your Arms [Rock Me a Little While] (Chris Clark)
08 You've Got What It Takes (Chris Clark)
09 It Hurts to Be in Love (Chris Clark)
10 Since I Fell for You (Chris Clark)
11 Sweet Lovin' (Chris Clark)
12 I Just Wanna Be Lovin' You (Chris Clark)
13 Sweeter as the Days Go By (Chris Clark)
14 From Head to Toe [Live] (Chris Clark)
15 talk [Live] (Chris Clark)
16 Who Can I Turn To - It's Not Unusual - Yesterday - Feelin' Good - Who Can I Turn To [Live] (Chris Clark)
17 Got to Get You into My Life [Live] (Chris Clark)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15100214/ChrisCrk_1967_SoulSounds_atse.zip.html

At first, I was just going to use the official album cover, even though the music here is mostly different. However, I realized the photo of Clark in the middle of the cover is the exact same one as the one I used for my 1965-1966 Clark album. So I did use the exact official album cover, except I swapped out the center photo for a totally different one. I think that's fitting to show that this album is similar, yet different.

Chris Clark - Love Gone Bad - Selected Best Tracks (1965-1966)

I'm a very big fan of music from the Motown record label in the 1960s and early 1970s. Their songs were very hit or miss, but when they hit, it was fantastic. But as great as those many Motown hits were, there were many songs, and even entire artists, who were overlooked. Chris Clark is one of those overlooked artists, so I'm going to try to raise her profile here.

In the 1960s, Clark had a remarkable, soulful voice. But she was white. Not only that, but she was white, tall (six feet high), and had platinum blonde hair. This was a problem, because she didn't just want to do "blue-eyed soul" mainly targeted at white audiences, like the Righteous Brothers or Mitch Ryder did, she wanted to do the same type of music as the big Motown stars, and be treated like them. But the 1960s were a decade of great racial tensions. When her songs were played on the radio, listeners would assume that she was black at first. But then her records often would no longer be played when it was eventually discovered she was white, and she sometimes even got booed when she played in front of black audiences. And yet her music was too "soulful" for most white audiences.

On top of all that, it turns out that Clark was romantically linked to Berry Gordy, the head of Motown Records, for a couple of years. This led many people to assume that she probably had no talent and was just given a chance to record some songs due to sleeping with the boss. On top of that, Gordy was black, and interracial romances were controversial back in those days.

But it turns out she was more than just a pretty face, or even just a pretty face with a great voice. She had many talents beyond singing. For instance, she actually cowrote many of her songs, though she usually went uncredited. After her singing career petered out at the end of the 1960s, she stayed with Motown and took on a variety of creative roles, eventually becoming "head of creative affairs" for the whole company. She got an Academy Award nomination for cowriting the screenplay to the movie "Lady Sings the Blues." Later in life, she's made a career out of being a painter. In an alternate universe, she could have had a big and long singing career if she'd been able to direct that creative energy towards music.

Ironically, given her romance with Gordy, she actually was treated badly by Gordy and Motown when it came to her musical career. Gordy had a consistent history of pushing the vast majority of his company's resources to promote his favorite artists, especially the Supremes, and all but ignoring many other artists who arguably had more potential. Clark was in the latter category. Motown did release some singles from her, and two albums, one in 1967 and the other in 1969. But she generally got the leftover songs the big Motown stars didn't want, and the vast majority of what she recorded never got released until decades later.

This is the first of three Chris Clark albums I plan on posting. There isn't much overlap between the songs on those three albums and her two studio albums, since most of her best stuff remained in the can at the time.

One song on this album, "Yester-Me, Yester-You, Yesterday," is a case in point. Clark was the very first artist to record this song, in 1966. Her version should have been a hit, but it went unreleased. Stevie Wonder later did a version of it that was closely modeled on Clark's version, and he had a big hit with it in 1969, going all the way to number two with it in Britain.

Clark's recorded output is littered with similar should-have-been hits, including songs that actually were released as singles but went nowhere. For instance, "Love's Gone Bad" is her best known song. It has become better known over the years, thanks to it being included in lots of Motown various artists hit compilations. If you listen to it, it sounds like a sure-fire hit. But actually, it only made it to 105 on the US pop chart, and 41 on the US R&B chart. So even that one wasn't a hit. Perhaps her being a white woman singing soul music at a time of considerable racial tension doomed her chances, but I think more of it had to do with Motown merely going through the motions of promoting her.

Happily, the things that held her back in the 1960s become increasingly moot as time moves on. Today, we can just listen to the music and not worry much about what was unreleased or not promoted, and judge it on its own merits. I think Clark was a great soul singer who would often take B-quality material and make it sound like A-quality material. In a better world (including a color-blind world), she should have been one of the Motown greats, especially if she'd been given better material. I hope you'll listen and agree.

All the songs on this album pre-date her first album, which would come out in 1967, though a couple of the songs would end up on it. Only five of the 13 songs here were released at the time. I haven't come close to including all of her stuff. Gordy had a bad habit of trying to saddle his Motown artists with "supper club" music, cheesy mainstream pop supposed to appeal to white audiences. I've tended to avoid that and favored her more upbeat songs that are truer to the real Motown sound.

This album is only 37 minutes long, but that was typical of Motown albums for that era. In fact, it's probably longer than average. Clark's 1967 album, which I will deal with in my next post about her, was 31 minutes long.

01 Do Right Baby, Do Right (Chris Clark)
02 Don't Be Too Long (Chris Clark)
03 In the Neighbourhood (Chris Clark)
04 I Just Can't Forget Him (Chris Clark)
05 Check Yourself (Chris Clark)
06 Everything Is Good about You (Chris Clark)
07 Yester-Me, Yester-You, Yesterday (Chris Clark)
08 Do I Love You [Indeed I Do] (Chris Clark)
09 Love's Gone Bad (Chris Clark)
10 Mighty Good Lovin' (Chris Clark)
11 Put Yourself in My Place (Chris Clark)
12 Something's Wrong (Chris Clark)
13 Never Trust a Man (Chris Clark)
14 I Still Love You (Chris Clark)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15100181/ChrisCrk_1965-1966_LoveGoneBad_atse.zip.html

I named this album "Love Gone Bad" instead of "Love's Gone Bad," the title of her almost-hit, because of this  cover I found that uses the phrase "Love Gone Bad." (I'm guessing it was some kind of repackaging of her first album.) I made a change by replacing a "mono" logo with a "stereo" one, since most or all of the songs are in stereo.