Ballard

The Midnighters were an American R&B group from Detroit, Michigan. They were an influential group in the 1950s and early 1960s, with many R&B hit records. They were also notable for launching the career of lead singer Hank Ballard, and the world-wide dance craze The Twist. Between 1953 and 1962 The Midnighters scored almost two dozen hits on the National Pop & R&B Charts. Their big hits included the million-selling Billboard Top 10 pop hits "Finger Popping Time" (for which they received a 1961 Grammy Award nomination), and "Let's Go, Let's Go, Let's Go".The Midnighters also enjoyed 13 Top 10 R&B Hits,including 3 R&B # 1's.

Russ Ballard's first solo album is, surprisingly, a bit rootsier than one would've expected coming from an ex-Argent member, trying for a good, pounding beat on most of its length, interspersed with some anthemic-style numbers. There aren't too many interesting or diverting hooks on this album's worth of originals, and at his best Ballard is a decent if unexceptional hard rock singer here. The record as a whole is as much a somewhat bland extension of Ballard's mid-'60s work with the Roulettes, as it is a distillation of the core Argent sound, with the strongest songs being the material on the original LP's side one.