Peggy Lee

Mail-order reissue firm Collectors' Choice Music here licenses Peggy Lee's antepenultimate and penultimate LPs for Capitol Records, 1970's Make It with You and 1971's Where Did They Go, combining them on a single CD and throwing in a non-LP B-side ("Pieces of Dreams") and three previously unreleased tracks from the late '60s for good measure. The early '70s were a difficult time for Lee, as for all traditional pop singers, who, having been elbowed aside by the British Invasion of the mid-'60s, were now being buried by the new soft rock stars and sensitive singer/songwriters. (The Beatles may have hurt the careers of Lee and her contemporaries, but it really was the likes of the Carpenters and James Taylor who knocked them out of the charts and off the major labels completely.) Lee, who had always had an affinity for different kinds of material and had never resisted the new rock, fought back by looking for material among the Brill Building and pop/rock songwriters of the '60s, with some success. In particular, she had made a comeback in 1969 with her Top 20 single "Is That All There Is," written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, and arranged and conducted by Randy Newman. Thereafter, she and her handlers at Capitol looked for another song with the same combination of world-weary sentiments and Continental musical flavor. "You'll Remember Me," which reached the Top 20 of the Easy Listening chart in 1970, was one such follow-up, featured on her first LP of 1970, Bridge Over Troubled Water. Inexplicably, it was repeated on her next album, Make It with You, along with another attempt to clone "Is That All There Is," Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield's custom-written "One More Ride on the Merry-Go-Round," which hit number 21 in the Easy Listening chart. The title song from Where Did They Go, released as a single that didn't chart, was yet another. When Lee wasn't hunting for a hit, she was filling up her albums with a typical collection of current movie and Broadway songs and covers of current hits, and that's most of what one hears here. Unfortunately, the highly personal and emotional style of much of this material didn't suit her. Intimate, even lustful sentiments expressed in colloquial language like Bread's "Make It with You," Kris Kristofferson's "Help Me Make It Through the Night," and "I Don't Know How to Love Him" from +Jesus Christ Superstar did not jibe with Lee's cool, uninvolved vocal persona; coming on vulnerable and ingenuous was not the sort of thing she had done at 25, and she certainly couldn't do it at 50. On the other hand, she was no better at rendering a mature, sophisticated confession of romantic pain like Stephen Sondheim's "Losing My Mind" from the musical +Follies; she simply sang through it as if she were sight-reading the lead sheet for the first time. Much the same thing could be said for the wildly inappropriate pop songs she was asked to perform, such as the Beatles' "The Long and Winding Road" and "My Sweet Lord." The best songs here are ones apparently written for her by songwriters with a sense of her style, not only the Sedaka number, but also Paul Anka's "That's What Living's About" and Burt Bacharach and Hal David's otherwise unknown "My Rock and Foundation." Among the three previously unreleased tracks, the best is also the one least like anything else on the album, a swinging revival of the 1930 copyright "You're Driving Me Crazy (What Did I Do?)." Collectors' Choice is to be commended for bringing these "lost" Lee LPs and songs to the digital era at last, even if they are not among the singer's most accomplished efforts. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide