Touch Of Your Lips, The/I Don't Want To Be Hurt Anymore

Reissue producer and annotator James Ritz acknowledges that his decision to pair the Nat King Cole albums The Touch of Your Lips and I Don't Want to Be Hurt Anymore on a single CD "on the surface...may seem odd," and it does, since the LPs are so different stylistically. Ritz's excuse is that both albums were arranged and conducted by Ralph Carmichael, Cole's most frequent collaborator in the last half-decade of his career. Nevertheless, The Touch of Your Lips and I Don't Want to Be Hurt Anymore still sound very different from each other. As a note on the back cover of the original LP put it, The Touch of Your Lips (released in April 1961) is "In the romantic mood of The Very Thought of You and Love Is the Thing...," previous Cole ballad collections devoted to the wonders of love. On it, Carmichael supported the singer with a buoyant sea of strings and kept the tempos very slow, the better for Cole's rich tone to convey the bedroom ambience. This was music for the adults of 1961, adults who remembered many of these songs as swing standards of the 1930s and '40s when they were performed by the likes of Ray Noble (the title song and "You're Mine, You!"), Jimmy Dorsey ("I Remember You"), Glenn Miller ("A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square"), and Ozzie Nelson ("Lights Out"). Those were all bandleaders, of course, and Cole had little trouble putting his own stamp on songs sung earlier by band singers Al Bowlly, Bob Eberly, and Ray Eberle. But he also borrowed no less than three selections ("Poinciana [Song of the Tree]," "Sunday, Monday, or Always," "Only Forever") from the repertoire of Bing Crosby, and that was more of a challenge, one he did not entirely meet. Still, The Touch of Your Lips succeeded in taking its place alongside Cole's other effective ballad albums. On the other hand, I Don't Want to Be Hurt Anymore (July 1964) might as well have had a sleeve note describing it as "in the country tradition of Ramblin' Rose and Dear Lonely Hearts," the 1962 LPs on which Cole adapted Ray Charles' approach on his recently released Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. Cole had scored a Top 40 hit with "I Don't Want to Be Hurt Anymore" in the spring of 1964, and, as one did in those days, quickly went into the studio to cut an album of similar songs. The result was a thematic collection treating romantic disappointment in tunes like "I Don't Want to See Tomorrow" (which became another Top 40 hit), "You're Crying on My Shoulder," and "I'm All Cried Out." The album suffered from a lack of strong material and arrangements, with the sad sentiments undercut by relatively quick tempos and a perky choir. Amid the strings and backup singers, the dominant instrument was Don Robertson's piano, playing in the slip-note style popularized by Floyd Cramer, and if one strained, one occasionally could hear James Burton and Glen Campbell getting in some tasty licks on acoustic and electric guitars. ~ William Ruhlmann|