Success
With record producer George Martin, the song "Do You Want to Know a Secret?" was a number two UK Singles Chart hit in 1963, and was backed by another tune otherwise unreleased by The Beatles, "I'll Be on My Way". After this impressive breakthrough another Lennon–McCartney pairing, "Bad to Me" c/w "I Call Your Name", reached number one. It sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc. "I'll Keep You Satisfied" ended the year with a respectable number four placing.
Kramer was given a series of songs specially written for him by John Lennon and Paul McCartney which launched him into stardom. "I'll Keep You Satisfied", "From a Window", "I Call Your Name" and "Bad to Me" earned him appearances on the television programmes, Shindig!, Hullabaloo and The Ed Sullivan Show. (Kramer had also been offered Lennon–McCartney's "I'm In Love", and recorded a version in October 1963. In the end, it was shelved and the song was instead given to The Fourmost. In the 1990s, a Kramer CD compilation album included Kramer's version, and included some recording studio banter on which John Lennon's voice could be heard).
The Dakotas, meanwhile, enjoyed Top 20 success in 1963 on their own with Mike Maxfield's composition "The Cruel Sea", an instrumental retitled "The Cruel Surf" in the U.S., which was subsequently covered by The Ventures. This was followed by a George Martin creation, "Magic Carpet", in which an echo-laden piano played the melody alongside Maxfield's guitar. But it missed out altogether and it was a year before their next release. All four tracks appeared on an EP later that year.
The three big hits penned by Lennon and McCartney suggested that Kramer would always remain the Beatles' shadow, unless he tried something different. Despite being advised against it, he turned down the offer of another Lennon–McCartney song, "One and One is Two", and insisted on recording the Stateside chart hit "Little Children". It became his second chart topper and biggest hit. In the US, this was followed up with "Bad to Me". "Little Children" b/w "Bad To Me" is the only debut single of an act on the Hot 100, each of whose sides separately reached that chart's top 10 (#7 and #9, respectively). Despite this success Kramer went backwards with his second and last UK single of 1964, the Lennon–McCartney composition "From a Window", which only just became a Top Ten hit.
Read more about this topic: Billy J. Kramer
Famous quotes containing the word success:
“People seldom see the halting and painful steps by which the most insignificant success is achieved.”
—Anne Sullivan (1866–1936)
“The white man regards the universe as a gigantic machine hurtling through time and space to its final destruction: individuals in it are but tiny organisms with private lives that lead to private deaths: personal power, success and fame are the absolute measures of values, the things to live for. This outlook on life divides the universe into a host of individual little entities which cannot help being in constant conflict thereby hastening the approach of the hour of their final destruction.”
—Policy statement, 1944, of the Youth League of the African National Congress. pt. 2, ch. 4, Fatima Meer, Higher than Hope (1988)
“Seeing is believing, and if an American success is to count for anything in the world it must be clothed in the raiment of property. As often as not it isn’t the money itself that means anything; it is the use of money as the currency of the soul.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)