MIXED EMOTIONS, liner notes about our last record

“MIXED EMOTIONS” was written by another former member of the Atlanta coterie, Harry Middlebrooks (he’d co-written the Classics IV’s “Spooky”), who’d moved to Los Angeles some years earlier and was under contract to Heller and Cobb’s company. The song, with lyrics unheard here, had been written for a film that was never released, and was originally recorded by another Cobb-produced act, Stark Naked and the Car Thieves – their name notwithstanding, more of a smooth-rock act who became fixtures for years in Las Vegas.

Todd Everett says he’s been “kicking around the entertainment industry and journalism for decades” here in Los Angeles. I ran across this article on his site about Liberace and about the record that he did at Seymour Heller’s request to get an album out with a lot of popular music on it. There was a lot of information about the last record Stark Naked and the Car Thieves recorded while I was in the group. In the book, Emory Gordy Jr. was our first audio engineer and later produced a great bunch of sessions for a later version of the Car Thieves. Emory, who played bass with Elvis, also was in the Classics IV with Harry Middlebrooks, who wrote Mixed Emotions, a coincidence not lost on me. We were playing in Las Vegas in the Flamingo Skyroom when Eddie Cobb called to tell us we’d been picked to record this as the title song for a movie. I won’t go into the detail I went into in Things We Lost in the Night, but it was a tough session. I wish it had gone better because I think Harry had written a potential hit. Soon afterwards we heard the movie went on the rocks so it was released as a single but not much happened with after that.

Todd decided he wished he could have done the liner notes for this album released by in 19688 but did get to do them for a re-release of the album and the very difficult to reach Emory Gordy, Jr. agreed to do the interview. I really enjoyed reading about the background notes from the interview all the way back to including Eddie Cobb’s years at Hollywood High and the Four Preps. Hope you like it, too.

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