Del Shannon in 1966

Two album-length portraits of the artistic struggle

Hello music lovers and welcome to 2026!

Just prior to 2025 saying goodbye, I had a review published in The Metropolitan Review, a fast-growing literary publication here, on the debut book by Chris Dalla Riva (who runs his own fast-growing publication here too!), Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us About the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves. The review is mixed but I hope I was as upfront as possible on what I liked about Chris’ book and to highlight his success both on Substack and in getting a book published (that’s no mean feat!). Here is the review in case you haven’t checked it out.

This Is Top Forty

For my first essay for 2026, I thought I would take a look at two interesting yet confounding albums by Del Shannon, both recorded and released in 1966: This Is My Bag and Total Commitment. Neither could be called a classic but both document the artistic struggle to remain relevant and to try to find one’s place in an environment that was quickly changing. They are worth checking out and I hope you will share your thoughts on them as well.

Until next time, may good listening be with you all!

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Del Shannon in 1966
By: Robert C Gilbert

There are many reasons to curse streaming. The lousy metadata, the lousier fake artists and the lousiest thing of all, the miniscule royalties paid for streams. These are just for starters.

Yet, there are upsides to streaming in the midst of all the downsides. For example, there is no way I could have listened to so much new music last year if not for Spotify. But to get a whole lot out of it, you need to put a whole lot into it. In other words, the exact opposite to how platforms should work.

A far more esoteric compliant about streaming is that when catalogue albums are finally made available, the only way to usually find out about them is to stumble upon them or on, let’s say, the 50th time or so searching for an elusive album, there it finally is. Obsessive music fan I am, such a discovery when it does happen is always accompanied by a gasp and true to form, I do so last summer when I found This Is My Bag on Spotify and then again just a few weeks ago, when I found Total Commitment there too. They are the two albums that Del Shannon recorded and released in 1966.

Shannon remains one of the most intriguing of the artists that came to prominence in the time between Elvis Presley—then Private Presley—embarking for 16 months of military service in Germany and the Beatles touching down at JFK Airport. He was one of the singers who brought a new range, both emotively and octavely, to the rock singer as well as a frenzied vulnerability beneath the bravado.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing about Shannon’s music in the early sixties can be found on ‘Little Town Flirt,’ which he co-wrote with Maron McKenzie and which came out in late 1962. It was his third big hit, a year after the one-two procession of ‘Runaway’ and ‘Hats Off to Larry,’ and more sedate than either of them as groove supplanted pure emotionalism. And what a groove it is, powered by a snare backbeat and the steady comping of a guitar, very similar to the Orlons’ ‘The Wah-Watusi’ but, even more importantly, expressing a telepathic synergy with a certain rhythm that would distinguish many of the early Beatles’ sides (think here of ‘All My Loving,’ ‘Ask Me Why’ and ‘There’s a Place’).

Shortly after ‘Little Town Flirt’ made its climb up the charts, Shannon would tour with the Fab Four in England and soon after that, he would be the first artist to put a Lennon and McCartney song—‘From Me to You’—onto the Billboard Hot 100. That he not only recognized the genuine invention of what was coming out of Britain (fueled, to an extent, by Shannon’s own genuine invention) but was also able to express his own brand of artistry within it through something like the devastating ‘I Got to Pieces’ which Peter and Gordon memorably recorded speaks to a dynacism in Shannon’s music that easily gets lost by fixating a little too much on ‘Runaway.’

He was not milquetoast as it could be said of some of his peers whose fortunes seemed to change almost overnight in the winter of 1964. Not even Roy Orbison, who had a tremendous influence on Shannon, could hold off the inevitable. It would happen to him as well.

In the fall of that year, Shannon had a big hit with the urgent ‘Keep Searchin’ (We’ll Follow the Sun).’ The break-heavy recording underlined with handclaps plus lyrics like “I’ve gotta find a place to hide with my baby by my side / she’s been hurt so much, they treat her mean and cruel” illustrates a danger that is never fully explained yet is fully understood. His follow-up single, ‘Stranger in Town,’ from which Shannon and his girlfriend “run / yeah we run / yeah we run” was even more existential in its portrayal of danger with its stops and starts that culminate in the refrain proclaiming the need to get away right away.

The two singles that came after, ‘Break Up’ and ‘Move It on Over,’ are just as interesting in how they showed Shannon's openness to garage rock, the snarl of the Rolling Stones and in the case of the latter, the Cajun soul of the Sir Douglas Quintet. Neither went anywhere but after them came a new record contract, Shannon’s first with a major label; in this case, Liberty, then home to the Ventures, Gary Lewis & the Playboys, Cher and Jan & Dean. And it was on the label that quickly came two albums by Shannon: This Is My Bag and Total Commitment. They stand as two of the fascinating curiosities of sixties rock which is why I gasped when both finally became available for streaming. They portray Del Shannon trying (often desperately) to find a new sound.

This kind of search often yielded uneasy results in how they conflicted with an artist’s public image and how the listening public was accustomed to hearing him or her. There was also the nagging feeling that embracing change was done more for expediency than any artistic reason. Some of the results from there efforts succeeded despite whatever dubious motivations may have been behind them. I think here of ‘Twinkle Toes,’ Roy Orbison’s fuzz-drenched final top 40 before his 1988 renaissance, ‘Devil’s Child,’ a driving album cut from 1967’s The Hit Sounds of the Everly Brothers and Another Side of Rick Nelson on which the attempt to branch out Nelson’s sound to folk, contemporary rock and even psychedelia worked far better than it had any right to.

Shannon’s initial efforts to do so on Liberty were far more tentative, favouring covers over originals written or co-written by him. This Is My Bag came out in the summer of 1966 and was produced by Snuff Garrett and had arrangements by Nick De Caro and Leon Russell. Leading it off was the only Shannon recording that dented the Billboard Hot 100 in 1966 (and just barely at that). ‘The Big Hurt,’ best-known through Toni Fisher’s phase-heavy recording from 1959, is the kind of song that was tailor-fit for Shannon. It's broadly emotional and features a sweeping melody that builds to a majestic release as well as the feeling that its ending does not auger anything even remotely like a happy resolution.

Shannon sings the song well, if not entirely convincingly. The layering of phasing effects, particularly as the recording reaches the conclusion, build a sound that is futuristic and would soon become commonplace once the brewing musical counterculture began to boil over.

This Is My Bag is a strange album. The three originals are easily dwarfed by the covers. There are two reasons why. The first is that their obscurity rests anxiously against the songs Shannon is given to interpret and the second is that none of the interpretations deviate markedly from the versions that remain well-known. Sometimes the approach works.

It’s no surprise that Shannon digs into ‘Oh, Pretty Woman’—his “yeah” at the end of the first verse is a nice touch—or that songs like ‘When You Walk In the Room,’ written by Jackie DeShannon, another American artist who immediately got the British beat and ‘Everybody Loves a Clown,’ one of seven straight top 10 hits by Lewis & the Playboys, which are both rooted in the ache of young love, have Shannon fitting into them nicely.

He also makes personal contact with Bobby Goldsboro’s hooky ‘It’s Too Late.’ One wishes he could have done the same with the Northern-soul like ‘The Cheater,’ the only hit by Bob Kuban and the In-Men. More glaringly, having Shannon tackle ‘Lightnin’ Strikes,’ a Lou Christie number-one hit that is indebted, in part, to his ‘Runaway,’ can only be attributed to the crassness of the record business.

Of the originals, only ‘Never Thought I Could’ stands out. ‘Hey! Little Star’ sounds five years too late and ‘For a Little While’ is marred by Shannon trying to sound overly tough.

It’s that same mannerism: yelling instead of singing, that he uses on his cover of the Rolling Stones’ ‘Under My Thumb,’ a song graced by a fiendishly catchy melody and chord structure that is marred by lyrics that are just plain ugly. Shannon sounds entirely out of place as a guy who throws away his customary gallantry to offer put-downs that are too cruel to quote here. This most unfortunate of covers leads off Total Commitment, which was released just three months after This Is My Bag. It is another confounding recording.

Primarily produced by Dallas Smith, who would soon work with Canned Heat and Hour Glass, Gregg and Duane Allman’s group before the Allman Brothers, Total Commitment is an unflinching portrait of an artist wondering where to go. Nothing more clearly illustrates this then on several of the album’s cover songs which replicate their hit-recording counterparts so closely that it seems to me that the backing tracks for them are used for Shannon to sing a vocal over them. There is a pronounced separation between Shannon and the musicians that doesn’t appear elsewhere on the album, and no discernable deviation between, for example, how Crispin St. Peters’ ‘The Pied Piper’ sounds and Shannon’s take on it. The gambit doesn’t work here, to say the least, and comes off only slightly better for Bobby Hebb’s ‘Sunny’ or ‘Time Won’t Let Me’ by the Outsiders (horn rock before there was such a thing).

The four originals on the album—three by Shannon and the other by Roy Nievelt—point to a greater ease with rock heavy on the backbeat and Shannon fits well into it even if none of the songs have a lasting impact after hearing them.

There is a kind of grace, however, reached on a fourth of Total Commitment. He finds a toughness in the bubble-gum sound of Paul Simon and Bruce Woodley’s ‘Red Rubber Ball,’ the Crykle’s biggest hit, singing the resolution to the refrain how Simon and Garfunkel would on a recording of them performing it live at the Philharmonic Hall in the winter of 1967 that would be released thirty-years later. He also sounds at ease covering ‘The Joker Went Wild,’ written by Bobby Russell and recorded by Bryan Hyland, someone whom Shannon would work with later in the sixties and into the seventies.

But, to me, that most revelatory track on Total Commitment is his take on P.F. Sloan and Steve Barri’s ‘Where Were You When I Needed You,’ drenched in folk-rock jangle and Dylan-esque lyrics. Here, Shannon sounds powerful and strikes the balance between delivering a brutal kiss off and the admission that doing so comes out of a personal hurt. It’s true that to laud a recording like this that is, in a sense, karaoke—the backing track is original but again, replicates the sound of the hit record Shannon was covering—is trying to redeem music by an artist who is trying to find a place in a rapidly changing environment where there may well not be a place for him or her. But, striving, even if done in a misguided way, has virtue and, in Shannon’s case, poignancy.

Even as he realized an original vision of his music through a psychedelic lens on 1968’s The Further Adventures of Charles Westover and steered Hyland to a mini-resurgence in 1970, Del Shannon would sadly remain on the periphery for the rest of his career. This Is My Bag and Total Commitment are documents of the artistic struggle, both of Del Shannon’s as well as of all who strive to create. They are worth hearing.