Bobby Hebb - That's All I Wanna Know - 2005

Bobby Hebb Biography: Bobby Hebb made his stage debut on his third birthday, July 26, 1941, when tap dancer Hal Hebb introduced his little brother to show business at The Bijou Theater. This was an appearance on The Jerry Jackson Revue of 1942 even though it was 1941, "that was how Jerry, a big man in vaudeville in the '30s, '40s, and '50s, did things" noted the singer. Harold Hebb was nine years of age at the time and the young brothers worked quite a few nightclubs before Bobby Hebb entered first grade. Nashville establishments like The Hollywood Palm, Eva Thompson Jones Dance Studio, The Paradise Club, and the basement bar in Prentice Alley as well as the aforementioned Bijou Theater found Bobby and Hal dancing and singing tunes like "Lady B. Good," "Let's Do the Boogie Woogie," "Lay That Pistol Down Babe," and other titles that were popular at that time. Hebb's father, William Hebb, played trombone and guitar, his mother, Ovalla Hebb, played piano and guitar, while his grandfather was a chef/cook on the Dixie Flyer, an express train on the L&N – Louisville & Nashville railroad. Brother Harold Hebb would eventually join Excello recording artists the Marigolds, documented in Jay Warner's biography of singer Johnny Bragg, the book Just Walkin' in the Rain; while Bobby Hebb, with so much musical influence and inspiration, would go on to pen hundreds upon hundreds of tunes, among them, BMI's number 25 most played song on their website in 2000, the classic "Sunny." Georgie Fame and Cher, charted with the title in England, but it was the Bobby Hebb original which reached the highest on charts in Europe and America. Covers by Frank Sinatra with Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Stevie Wonder, Frankie Valli, Nancy Wilson, the Four Tops, Wilson Pickett, Dusty Springfield, and so many others, insured the song would reach audiences outside of those who heard and continue to hear it on Top 40 and "oldies" stations. But the song reached out beyond Top 40, climbing the country and R&B charts as well. Kal Rudman calls this a rare industry "hat trick" in the liner notes on the 1966 Phillips' album, but what no one could predict is how the song would find versions by Boney M. and Yambu bringing it to dance clubs, while jazz musicians explored the nuances of this amazing composition in their world. Hebb himself, in 2001, has performed the title with the Kubato Power Jazz Unit and Michael Shea Trio, the latter band featuring Thomas Hebb, Bobby's nephew, on bass. Noted author James Isaacs, whose liner note essays appear in some of the Sinatra boxed sets, provided a list of jazz musicians who have covered Hebb's signature tune: guitarist Pat Martino, singers Ernestine Anderson, Bill Henderson, Anita O'Day, organist Joey DeFrancesco, drummer Don Houge, pianists Joe Bonner and Hampton Hawes, trumpeter/flugelhornist Marvin Stamm, alto saxophonist Sonny Criss, and guitarist Stanley Jordan, among others.

Bobby Hebb's influence goes far beyond "Sunny". When he joined Roy Acuff's Smokey Mountain Boys around 1952 in Nashville, he was one of the first African American artists to perform on The Grand Ole Opry before Charley Pride. Hebb moved to Chicago in 1954: "I wanted to play some music, and I wanted to advance my career, I didn't find the jazz I was looking for, but I ran into a lot of blues…I worked with Bo Diddley, maybe on an early Ellis McDaniels album." The song was "Diddly Diddly Diddly Daddy" with the Moonglows and Little Walter, recorded at Leonard Chess' studio in the back of his record shop on Cottage Grove Ave, "Leonard was the engineer," Hebb noted while telling this part of his rich history. Hebb joined the navy in 1955, playing the trumpet: "I learned West Coast jazz in the navy." The navy band was the USS Pine Island Pirates and they played "the whole time we were on board," including Hong Kong, performing for Madame Chiang Kai-shek (Sooong Mel-llng) at an event. The band got to meet Chiang Kai-shek as well. Around 1958 Bobby Hebb tracked "Night Train to Memphis," a song written by Owen Bradley for Roy Acuff's Smokey Mountain Boys. The tune was re-released in 1998 on a Warner Bros. box set, From Where I Stand, which also included "A Satisfied Mind" from the 1966 Sunny album. After that Hebb worked with Dr. John and left Nashville for New York. Disc jockey John "R" Richbourg, owner of Rich Records, which had released "Night Train to Memphis," got Hebb a gig at Sylvia Robinson's Blue Morocco Club. "I went for two weeks and stayed two years.

The first two weeks I opened up with a Bobby Blue Bland song "Farther on Up the Road." The band playing behind me was Jimmy Castor, later on Bernard Purdie had just come to New York from Baltimore with Jewel Page." Hebb eventually replaced Mickey in Sylvia Robinson's group Mickey & Sylvia, who originally hit with "Love Is Strange." The duo became Bobby & Sylvia after Mickey left for Paris. After Bobby & Sylvia, Hebb was represented by Buster Newman, the man who "got "Sunny" happening in a lot of different ways." All the publishers they went to turned the song down! Newman's partner was Lloyd Greenfield, who managed Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck, adding to his roster Bobby Hebb. While other groups in 1966 like Remains and the Ronnie Spector-less Ronettes opened for the Beatles, Bobby Hebb was headlining the tour with the Beatles, a fact that seems to have gotten lost in the overwhelming history of the Fab Four. After this, Hebb met comedian/composer Sandy Baron and the two got busy writing a Broadway show that never made it to Broadway. However, two of the songs – "A Natural Man" and a tune they were writing about Marvin Gaye, "His Song Shall Be Sung" – were picked up by Lou Rawls and released on MGM. "A Natural Man" the pair had actually rejected from their Broadway play. The original title of the song was "Natural Resource," but they doctored it up and gave it a different groove after Sandy Baron got Rawls interested in what became a huge hit for him. In 2001, the song will be the title track of a best-of Universal released on Lou Rawls. Sadly, Baron passed away in 2001, the year that saw the release of Roof Music's 16-track compilation of artists covering "Sunny," and interest in Europe for the song and the man who wrote and sang the definitive version. On July 28, 2001, two days after Hebb's 63rd birthday, this writer phoned Bernard Purdie at The House of Blues in Cambridge, MA, where Pretty Purdie was performing that night with Masters of Groove and for the first time in over three decades, Bobby Hebb and Bernard Purdie spoke on the phone and got to see each other at the show that evening. Bobby Hebb performed in June of 2001 at the opening of the Martini & Rossi 100 Years photo exhibit in Boston, shortly after graduating mini-med school. ~ Joe Viglione, All Music Guide

Product Description: "A fine chapter from a meticulous craftsman with a huge unreleased catalog, and a good argument to start getting those other albums off the shelf and into circulation." – All Music Guide

In only the third album of his five-decade career, the veteran singer-songwriter Bobby Ebb (who composed his biggest hit, the standard "Sunny," after his father's murder and President Kennedy's assassination had occurred within a day of each other) pays tribute to his peers, in a set featuring songs first performed by a wide-ranging selection of artists, including Lou Rawls, Charlie Rich, Roy Acuff, and G. Love & Special Sauce. Around the year 1962 Bobby Hebb recorded a single with Sylvia Robinson entitled "I Wanna Know", pressed under the duo moniker of "Bobby & Sylvia". Though there are literally over one hundred songs with that name, this one, was quite special, with the name, if not the sentiment, tucked inside the title of Bobby Hebb's third commercially released album, and pressed four decades after that 45 RPM.

"That's All I Wanna Know" is the title of this long-awaited new album, and all you NEED to know comes from the man himself: "There's a big difference between want and need; (there are) quite a few things we need that we aren't aware of, disguised as things that we want. Things we need we are usually able to receive, but we don't always get everything we want." – Bobby Hebb

This album's title is a variation of the James Carr / Roosevelt Jamison track, "That's What I Want To Know", and it is amazing and must be repeated that this is only the third album released (so far) by the "song a day man", a man who has written scores of tunes, Bobby Hebb. It's not that Bobby doesn't have lots of albums in the vaults - he taped a full project in 2002 with his friend Bernard "Pretty" Purdie, tracked an orchestrated collection of tunes in the early 1980s, put together another album in the late 1970s at Fleetwood Recording in Revere, Massachusetts, and has publishing demos galore as well as enough very strong material in the Philips vaults to release the legitimate follow-up to the "Sunny" album. But tuition's release of "That's All I Wanna Know" in late 2005 is the first commercial release by Bobby Hebb since James Flemming Rasmussen produced "Love Games" for Epic Records in 1970, 35 years before the consumer could purchase a new collection of material by the man who wrote and sang "Sunny". Ladwig, who had released two volumes of "Sunny" cover versions on the Trocadero label, conceived this 13 song disc after he first met the artist during Bobby Hebb's June 2002 tour of Germany. "I had the idea doing an album when Bobby played "Cold Cold Night" live at Radio Berlin while promoting "A Collection of Various Interpretations Of Sunny, Part 2". Ladwig general idea for this music, recorded in March of 2003 just as the Iraq war began, was to re-record earlier Bobby Hebb material, track the first ever "duet" of "Sunny" by the original artist, and follow Bobby's musical paths. From "Proud Woman", the Fred Burch/Skip Gibbs tune that Johnny Adams put on disc, to Hank Williams "Cold Cold Heart", which was in the repertoire of Roy Acuff, the man a thirteen year old Bobby Hebb toured with in the early 1950s, "That's All I Wanna Know", is an audio journey touching various aspects of this legendary performer's career.

"Cold Cold Night" was written by Bobby and Phil Medley. Phil is most famous for "A Million To One", the hit for Jimmy Charles and Donny Osmond, as well as "Twist & Shout" (Shaking Up Baby…), which charted by The Isley Brothers in 1962 and The Beatles in 1964. This is the first time the Phil Medley/Bobby Hebb collaboration has ever been put on an album! Since Lou Rawls won a Grammy with Bobby Hebb and Sandy Baron's classic, "A Natural Man", Hebb wanted to return the favour - so Bobby performs a Lou Rawls staple, "When Love Goes Wrong", in this collection. Song selection runs the gamut - contemporary music like "Willow Tree" (from the catalogue of Philadelphia's G. Love & Special Sauce) to the tried and true - a cover of Richard Shann's "Don't Tear Me Down", made famous by Charlie Rich.

"That's All I Wanna Know" also gives the world updates on Hebb's other chart recordings starting with a very funky reworking of "A Satisfied Mind", the song Roy Acuff loved to play. Joe "Red" Hayes/Jack Rhodes composed this popular title which hit for Porter Wagoner in 1955 and broke the Top 40 in America for Bobby in November of 1966. Also re-cut for this disc is the 1972 sleeper hit in the U.K., the fantastic "Love, Love, Love", composed by "Sunny" arranger Joe Renzetti and producer Jerry Ross. The Northern Soul classic charted in the U.K. six years after it was initially released. A surprise bonus is a re-make of Darryl Carter's "Bound By Love", a Philips 45 that came after "Sunny", but has yet to be on any album.

This third full-length commercial release from Bobby Hebb also has the songwriter/interpreter playing with a new set of musicians, their names available in the credits, which gives the album a uniqueness and special vitality. Bobby discussed these new recordings on August 1, 2005, stating: "My studies of life are basically represented here through different episodes - there are songs like these songs that help us to understand each other."

Review: For Bobby Hebb's first album of the new millennium, executive producer Rüdiger Ladwig wanted to create something that would be unique and new to the veteran's dedicated worldwide fan base – an overview of the songwriter/performer's career, generating a different sound with European musicians. It's an effective move similar to Gordon Haskell's reinvention on the Road to Harry's Bar live DVD. Recorded in Germany the week that the Iraq War began in March of 2003, and originally titled Midnight Adventures by Hebb, the music sounds like an antidote to the troubling situation that was brewing just a few countries away.

But that's the positive attribute of the masterpiece that is "Sunny," here in duet form with vocalist Astrid North, one of two duets tracked at the sessions (the second is available only on the CD single, with Pat Appleton singing in French). Producer Ladwig keeps a very controlled sound throughout the disc, his ingenuity coming from the song selection and his history as a Hebb fan. There's a remake of the lost Philips single "Bound by Love," one of the many follow-ups to the original "Sunny" (which stays close to the original), and a quite wonderful cover of the G. Love & Special Sauce nugget "Willow Tree." "Cold Cold Night" is a treat and another "lost classic," if you will. Hebb wrote this with Phil Medley, co-author of "Twist and Shout," and it has stayed obscure until this release. Hebb sings the material as if he wrote it yesterday, a fresh synergy provided by the very competent new faces with whom he recorded the tracks. The direction is removed from the soulful stir of Love Games, the 1970 release on Epic, and is less pop than the original 1966 Sunny album. There are new versions of "A Satisfied Mind" – Hebb's other 1966 Top 40 U.S. hit – and the British chart entry "Love Love Love" from 1972, while "Don't Tear Me Down" has essentially the same groove that made "Love Love Love" such a favorite, and it could easily break in that Northern soul arena where Hebb is hugely popular. The CD single has an intriguing Dr. Rubberfunk remix of the title track and is worth seeking out as well. That's All I Wanna Know is a fine chapter from a meticulous craftsman with a huge unreleased catalog, and a good argument to start getting those other albums off the shelf and into circulation. ~ Joe Viglione, All Music Guide