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Album: Clyde McPhatter – Lover Please!

Found at: Love Garden, $1

Label: Mercury

Sometimes I miss the backroom dealin’. Those days when you could walk into a dusty backroom, sift through a pile of records and wonder just what you might come up with. In the days of the old, upstairs location of Love Garden there was the shotgun room, or bargain room, as many of you surely remember. Everything in it was only a dollar and all sales were final. I didn’t often wander back there myself, but only because there was so much good stuff up front I didn’t often feel compelled to dig through the super deals.

I picked this up on one of my few forays into bargain territory. I knew of Clyde McPhatter as the former singer of Motown R&B act The Drifters, and there was a ridiculous looking doily heart on the cover, so I thought it was surely worth a dollar gamble. He’s a supreme vocal talent, there were a few recognizable cuts on it and it was on Mercury, a solid label. The record was cut after McPhatter’s time singing with the dominoes and his star making turn with The Drifters. He kicks things off with the title track, his silky smooth vocals pleading with a scorned lover. The pace is a sight more movin’ on the next two tracks “Pretty Girls Everywhere” and “Money Honey.” The latter is a call back to his Drifters days, and the version contained herein is worthy counterpart to the original, with Clyde slyly taking on both parts in a male/female conversation. He tries doing everything for her, but it comes down to money, honey. That’s what it’s going to take.

McPhatter wasn’t above doing covers, adding his own twist to smash hits like “Rockin’ Robin,” Don Gibson’s country hit “Oh Lonesome Me” and the Dominoes’ “Sixty Minute Man.” They all work well enough, with the possible exception of “Sixty.” McPhatter’s voice is smooth enough to deliver the barely concealed sexual innuendo, but just doesn’t have the dirty gravitas of Bill Brown’s bass voice on the 1951 original. That version, by the way, hit No. 1 on the R&B charts and was one of the first songs by a black group to cross over into the pop charts, eventually reaching No. 17.

The majority of these tunes are good time R&B numbers, made to get teens on the dance floor. I’m sure they were successful in that regard, but the real highlight of this disc, for my money, is “Next to Me.” An absolute heartbreaker, it dispenses with the good times and boasts of sexual prowess for a broken man to commiserate with a woman going through her own hard times. McPhatter’s voice soars, dropping pain in its wake as he wrenches every bit of emotion out of the line “You’re the saddest person I know/Next to Me.”

I was a bit sad when I brought this record home for the first time. I didn’t inspect it very closely and it turns out side one was covered in mold. I got it out again expecting only to play side two and curse Mary Ann Berskey, whose name is handwritten on the back sleeve, for not taking better care of her records. But apparently it’s been long enough for the mold to die of old age, and now the first side plays with just a bit of static. It turns out this is a backroom deal that paid off slowly.

Clyde McPhater - Lover Please! by MikeKrings