Coming off of a an out-of-nowhere number one smash, Getchen Christopher, Barbara Ellis and Gary Troxel were faced with an issue that was probably even age old at the time: how would we follow it? This tends to be more of a problem for groups who had to rely on the songwriting skills of others so it shouldn't have been as much of a worry for The Fleetwoods. They had, after-all, written their previous number one "Come Softly to Me" while they were still in high school. At this point it's easy to imagine their manager and/or producer in a Seattle or Los Angeles studio turning to them and asking the logical question, "so, what else do you have?"
Like a lot of people who enjoy writing about music, I was once a hopeless musician. I was in a junior high band that couldn't get its act together. Our jam sessions were always a mess and we seemed incapable of playing in unison. We did, however, have a knack for songwriting. We never wrote anything decent but we made up for it by being prolific with what we churned out. Our songs were rarely played; instead we would scribble them out for the others to inspect. We would've called these works 'poems' but two things got in our way: (1) poems don't usually have choruses and (2) we wanted to be rock stars and we wrote songs! At around the same time there was a group in the Toronto neighbourhood of DeGrassi called The Zit Remedy (later simplified to The Zits) who had one song and one song only, the immortal "Everybody Wants Something", a song that band members Joseph Jeremiah, Archie Simpson and Derek Wheeler tinkered on for years. As a teen looking on at a rival band, I could only shake my head:
The Fleetwoods seemed to operate along The Zit Remedy model, which is fair enough. I would've auctioned off vital organs to have had one song be as big as a fictional high school hit, let alone a full on international number one so I'm not about to judge their approach. So, when their manager/producer inquired about further self-composed material and they admitted that they had nothing in their collective back pocket, the search began for something by a professional songwriter. Thus, "Mr. Blue" by DeWayne Blackwell came into their orbit. Did it constitute having 'sold out'? Probably not but facts never stopped bitter fans and jealous rivals before so why should it in this instance?
Comparing it with "Come Softly to Me" is probably inevitable since this was The Fleetwoods' second number one in both Canada and the US in a short period of time. Their breakthrough hit is a little more spirited but there's no escaping the fact that "Mr. Blue" is a stronger composition and is better recorded. Whereas I praised "Come Softly..." for its simplicity, this one sticks to much the same blueprint but with some added touches. The gentle country-jazz guitar playing of Roy Lanham is lovely as is the delicate trombone parts played by Si Zentner. It doesn't quite stick with you the way their last big hit did but its yet another more than satisfying listen.
The two number ones by The Fleetwoods present a choice between writing your own songs and doing other people's, without quite being able to take a side in the matter. On the one hand, they had the opportunity to express more of their real selves in their first major hit though it's a relatively weak self-composed song; on the other hand, they a decent song to work with and a bigger budget though their individuality ended up being compromised a little. Either way, they did all right which is more than can be said for either The Zit Remedy or my feeble (but prolific) attempts at songwriting.
Score: 7
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