1. Click on the title – The Walker Bros. – Sweets For My Sweet – 1964
2. Click on the title – Walker Bros. – Zing, Went The Strings Of My Heart – 1964
Something unusual for The Roundtable tonight. Demo sessions recorded in Los Angeles in 1964 by the soon-to-become Walker Bros. One of those demo tracks did make it release (I Only Came To Dance With You), but the rest, it’s a bit fuzzy. These demo tapes wound up at Vee-Jay Records, who had been slowly changing their focus from strictly Blues and R&B to a more Pop-oriented label, having had the temporary distinction of releasing the first Beatles album in the U.S. and some of the first Beatles singles on the subsidiary Tollie label.
So it would seem a natural that Vee-Jay would be interested and the demo tapes were being offered on a license. Whatever happened, The Walker Brothers had a different set of fortunes awaiting them and these tapes were pretty much forgotten.
Tonight it’s two of those demo tracks, Sweets For My Sweet and the standard, Zing, Went The Strings Of My Heart, done in that inimitable Scott Walker fashion.
I was looking around to see if these demos had been issued in any form. At the moment, they don’t appear to be.
So something unusual, and pretty rare tonight from a group that went on to achieve worldwide popularity and to a founding member who has become an icon over the years.
It all had to start someplace.