Hey, if
Albert Finney could cut an album, and
Richard Harris could actually score a hit record, why shouldn't
David Hemmings have gone and tried adding "pop singer" to his resume? At least
Hemmings had starred in movies with
Gene Vincent and
Jerry Lee Lewis, giving him a greater hipness-by-association factor than most of his thespian colleagues, and he had performed in a few London folk groups before striking it big as an actor, so he had some actual experience in front of a microphone. In 1967, MGM Records signed
Hemmings to a record deal, and flew him to Hollywood to cut sessions with producer
Jim Dickson and arranger
Jimmy Bond;
Dickson brought along his friends
Roger McGuinn and
Chris Hillman from
the Byrds to play on the project (along with noted jazz drummer
Ed Thigpen), and an unreleased
Gene Clark track (produced by
Leon Russell) was salvaged for the album, with
Hemmings overdubbing a new vocal over
Clark's scratch track. With a back story like that, one might imagine that
Happens must be some great lost masterpiece of 1960s folk-rock, but that certainly isn't the case. It's not a
Golden Throats-type embarrassment, either --
Hemmings has a good-if-not-great voice and a clear sense of what to do with it, and
McGuinn adds plenty of his patented Rickenbacker raga on several tracks, while
Bond's arrangements are excellent, period studio craft. However, though
Hemmings is an okay singer, he was a much better actor, and whoever suggested he contribute stream-of-consciousness verse while the band jammed behind him should have been pink-slipped early in the proceedings -- "Good King James," "War's Mystery," and "Talkin' L.A." all sink into the shallow well of the ridiculous by the time
Hemmings brings them to a hyper-dramatic close. Too bad, since his versions of
Clark's "Back Street Mirror,"
Tim Hardin's "Reason To Believe," and
Bill Martin's "After the Rain" are all pretty solid faux-hip folk-rock stuff -- if he hadn't tried so hard to express himself, the guy could have made a pretty good album.