He's In Town

A very youthful Carole King & Gerry Goffin

Someday, with any luck, there will be a really great boxed set anthology of all of the amazing songs written by Carole King & Gerry Goffin that were recorded by other artists. While there are a couple of cd's out there from Ace Records in the UK, it's time that a definitive set was compiled stateside, even though it would probably be a licensing nightmare. In most cases, these were tunes that Goffin & King had no intention of releasing themselves. The songs were written at their day job for the publishing houses in the Brill Building days of the very early 1960's.

This was a time when the Doo-Wop sounds of the 1950's were still alive & well, just prior to the British Invasion. If you're gonna borrow (or steal), do it from a good source and songwriters at the Brill Building were fishing for hits. Today's featured song has a composition structure very similar to any of the hits by Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons, with a healthy dash of Phil Spector's musical drama thrown in. One could say there's a whiff of the Beach Boys sound present, but it was a bit early for them to have been influential in New York. I do admit that the song is something of an obscurity, but I like the overall sound of it and the mood created by the vocal harmonies inside the chord progression.

The Tokens

I first heard the Goffin-King song "He's In Town" as a cover version by The Rockin' Berries on a British Rock compilation. Turns out that the original American version by The Tokens was one of a few different B-sides of their most famous recording, "The Lion Sleeps Tonight". The Tokens' recording has something of the tentative feel of a demo to it, but that has its own charm. The Rockin' Berries' version feels more assured, with lots of cool tropo-surf guitar and replaces the brief but cloying sax solo with simple vocal la-la's. Really, they're the same, just different.

Here's the 1963 version by The Tokens.

And now, here's The Rockin' Berries' recording from October of 1964. This single reached #3 in the UK charts. I've always been amazed by the ability of British musicians to reinvent American music, sell it back to us and have us believe it was their idea all along. Go figure.

By the way, I discovered an interesting footnote regarding The Tokens. Beginning in late 1963, members of The Tokens also began serving as record producers for other artists, working on such classic recordings as "He's So Fine" and "One Fine Day" for The Chiffons, "Denise" by Randy & The Rainbows, and "See You In September" and "I Got Rhythm" by The Happenings. They also ran their own record label, B. T. Puppy Records. Nice bullet points on anyone's resume.

You can find some good stuff at Amazon from both the Tokens and The Rockin' Berries, along with the afore-mentioned Ace compilations of the Goffin-King material. Don't forget to look at the excellent, but out of print series from Rhino, The British Invasion. Have fun shopping!