Gary Lewis and the Playboys: "Save Your Heart for Me"

August 16, 1965 (1 week)

Let's have some fun and look at some numbers! (My dad was a math teacher so I come by a love for stats naturally) From 1957 through to 1964, there have been an average of just over twenty-one number one hits per year. (This figure goes up to just over twenty-two if '57 is disregarded for only accounting for just over half the year) There were just nineteen chart toppers in both '59 and '63 while on the other end of the scale '64 has the highest total to date with twenty-six. For the most part, these seem like good totals: this means that on average a number one hit spent two or three weeks on top.

But let's look again at '64 because it's a key year in the history of the Canadian charts. During the first twenty-five weeks of the year there were just seven number ones (and that includes The Kingsmen's "Louie Louie", a holdover from the end of the previous year). It was at that point that the changeover was made from the Toronto-based CHUM charts to the more national RPM listings. For the remainder of the year there were nineteen number ones in just twenty-seven weeks. Welcome to the era of the one-week wonders.

Thus, 1965. We are now only at the midway point of August but a record has already been shattered. Billy Joe Royal's "Down in the Boondocks" was the twenty-seventh number one of the year but it only took another week for it to be smashed again by Gary Lewis and the Playboys with "Save Your Heart for Me" — and so forth for the remainder of the year. Hard as it may be to believe, there are even more number ones waiting for us in 1966.

If it seems to you like just about any old shit could get to number one in Canada under these conditions — unless, of course, you happen to have been signed to the Motown label — then you would be proven correct with "Save Your Heart for Me". While the first major Lewis-Playboys hit "This Diamond Ring" was no great shakes itself, it was catchy and memorable enough that it doesn't seem out of place as a number one hit on both the Billboard Hot 100 and the now second fiddle CHUM chart. It was even notable enough to be played on those old K-Tel Sounds of the Sixties compilations ("just listen!", "here's more!", etc., etc.)

"Save Your Heart for Me" doesn't even have the modest upside of a "This Diamond Ring" even though I suspect there's a passable hit hiding in there somewhere. Songwriters Gary Geld and Peter Udell had initially submitted it to Brian Hyland, who had previously had a big hit with their composition "Sealed with a Kiss". Already on a downward trend, the teen idol seemed to be moving away from pop and heading towards Nashville which his version leans heavily into. Hyland sounds like he's been on a strict diet of Everly Brothers. It no doubt helped that Geld and Udell produced and arranged it as well. The result is a lonesome drifter's lament, the song's distinctive whistling lulling listeners into a sense that it is carefree but what's really going on is the singer that has been rendered a free spirit since there's nothing else he has to live for.

There's no such similar depth from Gary Lewis and the Playboys. If some of the original's carefree tone remains it's only because that's how the son of comedy legend Jerry Lewis liked it. Communicating any kind of dark side is completely beyond his abilities as a singer and performer. Compounding problems is that Lewis doesn't have the tiniest fraction of Hyland's vocal range. He would've been better off hamming it up than the pathetically grinning effort he put in here.

The one thing that rescues it (albeit only slightly) is Leon Russell's arrangement. While normally an ace session player at around this time, he pieced together the blueprints of a recording that Brian Wilson could have made. The studio tricks are a welcome addition but they ultimately only manage to reaffirm just how boring this single is. And this is an important, if rather remedial, point: you can have all the studio boffins with their state-of-the-art equipment and willingness to experiment but if what you're working on is an okay composition being played by a mediocre band, audiophile wizardry can only take you so far. Sure, it could take you all the way to number one in Canada but virtually everyone was capable of such a feat. The modestly talented were more than welcome.

Score: 3

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Can Con

This week's number one is dismal but much of the rest of RPM's Top 40 is solid. One of the pleasant surprises is Vancouver's The Nocturnals with the garage rock-flavoured "Because You're Gone", a song that doesn't just surpass Lewis' ultra lame "effort" but even holds its own up against tunes you'd actually choose to sit down and listen to. Sit down and listen? Uh, how about get up and dance instead? One that gets better with each subsequent listen as the multiple shifts in tempo become less jarring. Fantastic. They must've been a treat down in the clubs around Gastown and Kitsilano or wherever the hip bohemians of sixties' Vancity would congregate. The punks of the seventies should've covered this banger. I'm going to have to explore more from these guys.