Bobby Hatfield

The blue-eyed soul brother’s Verve and MGM recordings anthologised on CD for the first time, including seven previously unissued masters.

Unfinished lost album from former tenor of blue-eyed soul duo The Righteous Brothers. In 1971, record producer Richard Perry was at the beginning of his long ascent into superstardom as one of popular music’s most legendary and successful producers. During the previous 12 months, Perry had struck gold with Barbra Streisand (Stoney End), produced two albums by the seminal all female rock band Fanny, and finished his masterwork, Harry Nilsson’s Nilsson Schmilsson, an album that would receive worldwide critical and commercial success with Top 10 singles (“Without You,” “Coconut”), Grammy® awards and Gold and Platinum records.

The intention of the Universal Music Group compilation series called The Definitive Collection is to occupy the price point in between its more expensive two-CD Gold series and its budget-priced 20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection series. It is, thus, aimed at the fan who wants a reasonably complete single-disc anthology of a particular artist's hits. In that sense, the Righteous Brothers' edition of the series is a good example. The duo reached Billboard magazine's Hot 100 21 times between 1963 and 1974, and 17 of those chart entries are contained on this album. (The most notable exceptions are the two follow-ups to the novelty comeback hit "Rock and Roll Heaven," "Give It to the People" and "Dream On," which UMG didn't choose to license from EMI.) Also included are a couple of LP tracks and a solo track each by Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield. All have been digitally remastered and are in excellent sound.

Bruce Springsteen has always been steeped in mainstream pop/rock music, using it as a vocabulary for what he wanted to say about weightier matters. And he has always written generic pop as well, though he's usually given the results away to performers like Southside Johnny and Gary "U.S." Bonds. Sometimes, those songs have been hits - think of the Pointer Sisters' "Fire" or Bonds' "This Little Girl Is Mine." Occasionally, Springsteen has used such material here and there on his own albums; some of it can be found on The River, for example. But Human Touch was the first Bruce Springsteen album to consist entirely of this kind of minor genre material, material he seems capable of turning out endlessly and effortlessly - the point of "I Wish I Were Blind" is that the singer doesn't want to see, now that his baby has left him; "57 Channels (And Nothin' On)" is about TV…