Of all the early rock & rollers,
Del Shannon is the hardest
to classify. He came on the scene a little late -- his first hits,
"Hats off to Larry" and "Runaway," arrived in 1961, five years after
rock & roll came crashing in, a long enough period of time where
his music felt much, much different than the three-chord ravers of the
first wave of rock & roll. He arrived during the peak of teen idol
pop and was handsome enough to ride that wave, but he was older than
Fabian and Ricky Nelson, scoring his first hits in his mid-twenties.
Shannon could be seen as a kindred spirit of Roy Orbison, favoring
dramatic ballast to blues boogie, threading a sense of melancholy into
his biggest hits, but he never verged on the operatic the way Orbison
did. He was comfortable enough with country to cut an album of Hank
Williams tunes in 1965 and hip enough to go psychedelic when the times
shifted in the late '60s. He wrote his biggest hits but also had
exceptional taste in other songwriters, being one of the first American
rockers to cover the Beatles, along with such '60s pop hits as Bobby
Hebb's "Sunny," Brian Hyland's "The Joker Went Wild" and the Lovin'
Spoonful's "Summer in the City."
None of this restlessness brought Del Shannon big hits -- his run
peaked early, with the back-to-back Top 10 hits of "Hats off to Larry"
and "Runaway," with the latter reaching number one, then he bounced
back in 1965 with the Top 10 "Keep Searchin' (We'll Follow the Sun)" --
but it did result in a singularly fascinating body of work, one that's
compiled in its entirety on Bear Family's box Home and Away: The Complete Recordings 1960-1970.
