Ray Stevens Best Friend turns 40...

It's early Monday morning and I find myself putting together a 40th anniversary spotlight on a Ray Stevens album from 1978 titled Be Your Own Best Friend. This is one of Ray's finest albums and it includes quite a lot of love ballads...more than, I'd say, any Ray Stevens album up to that point in time. Unusual for an album it features nine recordings...rather than the standard ten or eleven. It is one of Ray's under-rated albums in a career that has seen a lot of them due to the common practice of focusing on single releases at the expense of the LP (long-play album).

If you do not own this vinyl album then I suggest searching for it on-line and purchasing it. It's, as I said, one of his finest albums. One of the things that grabbed my attention regarding this album is the visuals. This is an image of the album with it's shrink wrap not removed and so if you click the image you'll see the annoying glimpses of shiny distractions but if you don't want to see that then just look at the image as it appears off to the left. As you can see the album's visuals feature a striking all-white background with a tanned Ray Stevens decked out in a white suit and black dress shirt seated at a table or he may be seated at the side of a piano. I never came across any information in my years as a Ray Stevens fan explicitly stating if he's seated at a table or piano. Anyway...once I got a copy of this album the thing that leapt to mind was it's visuals and then I listened to the album. I was familiar with several of the songs already because Warner Brothers had issued a 3 volume set of material Ray had recorded for them in the mid to late '70s. Those releases arrived in 1995. I didn't get my copy of the vinyl Be Your Own Best Friend until several years after that. As a fan of Ray Stevens I had joined his fan club in 1995...with some money I had gotten during my high school graduation party. One of the first things I received was a list of his albums. I was excited to see this because I didn't realize, at the time, he had released so many albums. It also made me curious as to what songs made up those albums because throughout my childhood I was only familiar with the songs on the several cassette tapes owned by my grandfather but I wanted to know more and more about Ray and so I started my quest to find out everything and anything about Ray Stevens...but that's a story for another day...getting back to this 1978 album...

Ray recorded it during his years at Warner Brothers. Even though the material he recorded for the label has more or less been kept out of print you can find his studio albums on-line if you search auction sites...specifically eBay. Given his reputation for recording comedy/novelty songs it's no surprise that the few selections from his Warner Brothers years that have managed to remain in print on various greatest hits/best of collections are comical in nature. One of those being 1979's "I Need Your Help, Barry Manilow" and the other being his chicken-clucking version of "In the Mood" from late 1976.

The album kicks off with a sensational recording called "L'amour". This song has a very interesting origin in that it originated overseas and had been a major hit for it's writer, Gilbert Becaud. If you search for that artist and the song's name you're likely to come across video footage from overseas of him performing the song in his native language. I've watched his performance several times and even though I don't understand a word of it (he's singing in French) the melody is the same and I'm hearing Ray's English language lyrics in my head. In the early '90s Ray was a guest on Ralph Emery's early morning radio series, Take Five for Country Music. Ray remarked that while on tour in Europe in the mid '70s he had heard a song he didn't understand but he loved the melody so much he decided to write English lyrics to it. Years later I hear "L'amour" for the first time and see it's credited to both Ray and a writer named Gilbert Becaud. Eventually I discover that Gilbert was a leading pop singer of his day and putting two and two together I realized "L'amour" must be the song Ray had heard during a European tour and just had to adapt it for English language listeners. I don't care what your political or social leanings are if you do not find yourself smiling from ear to ear and eventually singing along as you listen to the song then consider yourself human personification of a stagnant pond...or at the very least a sourpuss.

After the rousing opening of "L'amour" you'll be treated to a couple of back to back love ballads well over four minutes in length. The bouncy "Two Wrongs Don't Make a Right" clocks in at four minutes and twenty one seconds. In it Ray takes the familiar proverb to examine the stubborn nature often on display between couples, in general, and that if true love exists between a couple then the idea of revenge or getting even shouldn't enter the equation. Ray approaches the song from the point of view of the man learning his girlfriend or wife, it's not specified, has cheated on him and at first he wants to get even but self-control kicks in and he realizes that cheating on her just because she cheated on him solves nothing. This is followed by a re-recording of "You've Got the Music Inside", a song he had previously recorded on his 1973 album, Nashville. The 1978 recording has a much more polished, pop heavy arrangement and Ray has a much more softer vocal delivery...the 1973 recording features much more uncontrollable vocals and even some gravelly, throaty vocalization here and there. I love each recording equally. If you've had the opportunity to see a performance of Ray on Pop! Goes the Country in 1979 (hosted by Tom T. Hall) you were treated to a performance of "You've Got the Music Inside" with a much different arrangement...and to date a performance with this arrangement has never been recorded by Ray. "Hidin' Place" closes Side One of the vinyl album.

Side Two kicks off with the album's title track, "Be Your Own Best Friend". This ballad is self explanatory given it's title. It's a song about having confidence and self-worth no matter if there are people out in the world that may give you headache, grief, or animosity. An interesting tidbit I learned just today concerning the single release of this recording is that there's an edited copy and a full length copy. The A-side of the single, which you can see off to the right, clocks in at two minutes and fifty-two seconds...certainly not a very lengthy recording requiring any sort of edit but the B-side features an edited copy of the song which clocks in at two minutes and twenty seconds. I do not own this promotional copy of the single and so I have never heard the edit but being familiar with the song I'm curious as to what was edited out...thirty two seconds is a lot of time when we're talking about an audio recording. I wonder if bits and pieces of the instrumentation was edited out for a collective thirty two seconds of edits or if an entire section of the song was edited out. I'll post the B-side of the single in the next paragraph or two. Anyway...the title track was the only recording issued as a single. It hit the Top-40 of the country charts and the Top-20 on Canada's country chart.

If you're as much of a fan of Ray Stevens as I am then the next song on the album, it's title specifically, should be familiar to you. "The Feeling's Not Right Again" is a song Ray wrote with a writer named Chuck Martin. You can find Chuck on Facebook. The song is great...a devastating love ballad centering around a man that's forever coming close to finding satisfaction in a relationship but each time things just don't work out. The song's title should be familiar because it became the title of Ray's next album release...a 1979 compilation album built around the single "I Need Your Help, Barry Manilow". The song that Ray and Chuck wrote led to the creation of an album cover spoofing Barry's 1975 album...his album was titled Trying to Get The Feeling. "The Feeling's Not Right Again" lent itself perfectly as the title of Ray's 1979 album. One of the few, if only, times that a compilation album was named for a non-hit album track.

This is the B-side of "Be Your Own Best Friend" showing the edited copy clocking in at two minutes, twenty seconds. Now, moving on to the song that followed "The Feeling's Not Right Again" on the 1978 album, we come to "Comeback". This is one of the legitimate uptempo songs on the entire album. There are a couple of mid-tempo ballads and of course the sing-a-long feel of the opening performance of "L'amour" but "Comeback" features a very lively vocalization from Ray and an urgent arrangement...it could have very easily been highlighted as a single release but it never happened. I say that because it has all the ingredients of a hit song...a lot of hooks, a catchy melody/arrangement, and the repetitious nature of the song's title heard in such a way could have proved irresistible for some. If you're familiar with the song then you know what I'm referring to when I describe the repetitious nature. A piece of it goes like "all you gotta do to make a comeback is just come, come, come, COME BACK!". It's one of those clever word play songs in that the spacing of the song's title transforms it's meaning within the context of the recording. This uptempo performance is followed by the mid-tempo "You're Magic". The shortest song on the entire album at two minutes and twenty one seconds but yet, for me, it's the most catchy. Ray sings this song in a very exaggerated soft spoken style...not necessarily Bill Anderson whispering but it's performed with a hushed overtone. You'd have to hear it for yourselves to understand my baffling description. The song comes from the pen of Layng Martine, Jr. and it's the only song on the album not written or co-written by Ray. The album's closing song is the very slow ballad, "With a Smile". It conveys a kind of motivational message much like the title track conveys so it shouldn't come as no surprise that it's the B-side of the commercial single release of "Be Your Own Best Friend". The promotional copy featured "Be Your Own Best Friend" on the A and B side...with the B side's recording edited as I mentioned at the start of this section.

If you figuratively devour Ray's albums as I do then you should also be familiar, to some degree, with the personnel credited on his albums. The musicians and harmony singers credited on this album have been with Ray for many decades. Chet Atkins, believe it or not, is credited as the electric guitar player on this album along with Steve Gibson. Acoustic guitar is credited to Mark Casstevens. The drummer is Jerry Kroon. The bass player is Jack Williams. Horns are credited to both Ray Stevens and Denis Solee. I'd say that Denis handled the lion's share of the horn section (saxophone) while Ray added trumpet contribution. Ray is also credited as the percussionist as well as his familiar role of playing the piano/keyboard/synthesizer. Ray also produced and arranged the album. The harmony singers credited are Lisa Silver, Sheri Kramer, and Diane Tidwell. The engineer is Stuart Keathley who would later double as the bass player on many of Ray's albums until his sudden death in the mid 1990s.

Now, that was only a partial list of credits found on the back of the Be Your Own Best Friend album. There's credit given to the photographer, designer, the string arrangement, etc. I singled out some of the musicians because they've been a part of Ray's albums for decades. If you watch any episode of his television show you'll see Denis Solee, for example, as the saxophone player and the guitarist on the show's been a fixture on Ray's albums for many years, Jerry Kimbrough.

Do yourself a favor and if you don't have this album in your collection seek it out on eBay and add it to your collection. Ray recorded a whole lot of interesting songs in his career and the material he recorded during his brief stay at Warner Brothers is among the most eclectic.