Friday, May 22, 2009

L. David Sloane

Before most of America fell in love with her as Karen McKenzie on television's "Knot's Landing", Michelle Lee cracked the pop charts with her 1968 hit "L. David Sloane" ... a call back to an earlier era that was somewhat reminiscent of the Barbra Streisand hit "Second Hand Rose".

Although it never charted here in Chicago, I remember liking this one when it was out ... so SOMEBODY must have been playing it!!! (Odds are, I caught Michelle singing and dancing on a television variety show or two as well!)

It didn't make much of an impression on the national charts either, peaking at #52 in Billboard and stopping at #60 in Cash Box ... but it's a nice memory of what Michelle Lee was doing BEFORE she came to be known as a popular television actress!



















ANOTHER CRITIQUE: We first featured this song several years ago in Forgotten Hits ... probably around 2001 ... and sent a copy out via email as a wav file. In order to be able to present an MP3 copy for the website, we turned to the ever-reliable Tom Diehl ... who had THIS to say about this record:
This is just about the worst song to ever come out of the 60's ...
When I was 14 or so, my parents bought me an ebay lot of 600 45's for Christmas ... the seller shipped the wrong batch to me but since I couldnt open them until Christmas, which was a few months later, I was stuck with them. Inside were multiple copies of a lot of horrible records ... well, I liked some of them, but I didn't need 47 copies of "Painted Tainted Rose" by Al Martino or 29 copies of "L. David Sloane" by Michele Lee! I kept very few records from that batch! I kept one copy each of the various Al Martino 45's, some Eagles reissues

and a few others that I can't recall. Most of the 45s in the boxes hit the garbage trail pretty fast. "L. David Sloane" and it's follow up (of which I seem to recall there being 12 copies of in the boxes) were not among the ones I kept! Even if I found this song in stereo I don't think I could enjoy it!
-- Tom Diehl