Hot on the heels of their huge smash
"Bread & Butter," the Newbeats issued their debut LP in late 1964. Like many such albums of the period, it was kind of thin and strung together, with nothing else on the album matching the big hit (which led off side one, of course). Padding out the record were inferior cover versions of several
rock & roll oldies (
"Bye Bye Love," "Ain't That Lovin' You Baby," "So Fine") and then-recent hits (
"The Shoop Shoop Song (It's in His Kiss)," "I'm Blue (The Gong Gong Song)") that added nothing of note to the originals, save
Larry Henley's distinctively screeching falsetto vocals. Not that the rest of the album was much better, with a derivative stomper,
"Pink Dally Rue," in the mold of
"I'm Blue (The Gong Gong Song)" (a problem considering that the latter song was also included on the LP); a
John D. Loudermilk tune,
"Everything's Alright," that sounded like little more than a knockoff of
"Bread & Butter" (though it did manage to make the Top 20); and a crappy hot rod number,
"Tough Little Buggy" (actually the original A-side of
"Bread & Butter," oddly enough). The one track of note other than
"Bread & Butter" is the original version of
Loudermilk's
"Thou Shalt Not Steal," which
Dick & Dee Dee quickly covered for a Top 20 hit in a similar arrangement.
"Bread & Butter," "Thou Shalt Not Steal," and
"Everything's Alright" are all on the compilation
The Very Best of the Newbeats (along with two other tracks from the LP), which makes
Bread & Butter necessary only for completists. If you are one of those completists, though, you might want to pick up the album as part of
Ace's two-fer reissue combining
Bread & Butter with their second album,
Big Beat Sounds, adding on both sides of a non-LP 1966 single. ~ Richie Unterberger
