One Thousand Six-Hundred Sixty-One Seconds of Del Shannon

AMG Review of One Thousand Six-Hundred Sixty-One Seconds of Del Shannon

Bruce Eder
All Music Guide

Del Shannon's fifth LP, and his third for the Amy Records label, is an amazingly good effort that holds up very well 40 years later. Recorded at Bell Sound in New York in 1964 and 1965, and released right in the midst of the British Invasion, the music shows the influence of the British bands of the period without compromising Shannon's own sound -- his originals, mostly hook-laden, achingly beautiful, and bracing, including "Why Don't You Tell Her," "Stranger in Town," "I Go to Pieces," "Keep Searchin' (We'll Follow the Sun)," and "Over You," mix well with covers of "Do You Wanna Dance," "Needles and Pins," "Rag Doll," "I'm Gonna Be Strong," and "Running Scared." "Needles and Pins" shows Shannon adopting the Searchers' approach to the song while also adapting it to his style, while "Running Scared," in addition to being a great track in its own right, is intriguing as it slots in with the notion, floated briefly at the end of the 1980s, that Shannon was in line to be Roy Orbison's successor in the Traveling Wilburys. With Harry Balk producing in a manner akin to Phil Spector-lite, there's lots of reverb throughout the album, but at its core was a powerful guitar sound (courtesy of Shannon), Dennis Coffey, and Bill Knight, and emphatic bass -- there's not a lot of use of the musitron, apart from numbers like "Keep Searchin' ." Even "Rag Doll," one of the more dispensible tracks here in terms of originality, which emulates the arrangement and pacing of the Four Seasons' original, has a punchier rhythm section that makes the vocals sound all the more impassioned. One Thousand Six-Hundred Sixty-One Seconds With Del Shannon runs less than 30 minutes, making this a neatly bite-sized album that goes down very easily even today, with at least as much musical value as the typical British Invasion material of the same period -- it was reissued on CD in 2000 by Unidisc Music Inc. of Quebec as a budget release, fully annotated and in crisp stereo, and is worth tracking down.