In the late 1960s, conventional wisdom in the record industry held that traditional pop singers should turn from the showtunes of the interwar era they had been focusing on since
Frank Sinatra's concept albums of the '50s and accommodate the rock revolution to the extent of covering soft rock songs written by the more sophisticated of the contemporary rock & roll songwriters, starting with
John Lennon and
Paul McCartney of
the Beatles, and including such others as
Burt Bacharach and
Hal David. Still in her early 20s,
Liza Minnelli may have been younger than many of the rock & rollers, but by 1968 she had been recording like a traditional pop singer for years, and when she signed to A&M Records after three solo LPs on Capitol, the label made the expected transition with her, picking
Lennon &
McCartney and Bacharach-David songs for her label debut, significantly titled
Liza Minnelli. (Also included were tunes by the relatively unknown
Randy Newman,
Sonny Bono,
Minnelli's husband
Peter Allen, and her favorite Broadway songwriters, Kander & Ebb.) It didn't work commercially (the idea rarely did), and A&M became gun-shy about releasing any more
Minnelli albums, although it put her in the recording studio later in 1968 and then sat on the results. With songs from the rock musical Hair all the rage in 1969 (the 5th Dimension's "Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In,"
the Cowsills' "Hair,"
Oliver's "Good Morning Starshine"), A&M had
Minnelli cut the quirky "Frank Mills" from the score and released it as a one-off single, but that didn't work, either. Then,
Minnelli starred in the film The Sterile Cuckoo, which opened in October 1969. Its theme song was
Fred Karlin and
Dory Previn's "Come Saturday Morning," a wistful ballad performed on the soundtrack by
the Sandpipers, an A&M act. The label released both a
Sandpipers single of it and a version by
Minnelli that included some dialogue she had spoken in the film. When the Academy Award nominations came out in early 1970,
Minnelli was nominated, and so was "Come Saturday Morning," which caused
the Sandpipers' recording to take off in the charts and led A&M to conclude that the time finally was right for a new
Minnelli album, consisting of material from the 1968 sessions, plus of course "Come Saturday Morning," which became the title track. It's another album like
Liza Minnelli, combining then-current soft rock favorites like the 1968
Richard Harris hit "MacArthur Park" (actually only an excerpt from the lengthy song, coupled with another
Harris-sung tune written by
Jimmy Webb, "Didn't We"), the recent
Peter, Paul & Mary hit "Leavin' on a Jet Plane" (written by
John Denver), and songs by
Newman,
Gordon Lightfoot, and
Harry Nilsson, plus a couple of old chestnuts and another song by
Peter Allen.
Minnelli gamely handles the newer songs (her reading of
Newman's satiric "Love Story" is particularly clueless), but characteristically comes alive only when she gets to sing the old Tin Pan Alley song "Nevertheless (I'm in Love with You)" (copyright 1931), which is more her style. Oscar nominations or not, the public didn't bite, and
Come Saturday Morning was
Minnelli's fourth consecutive album to miss the charts. ~ William Ruhlmann