Duane Eddy - Especially for You

Duane Eddy's second LP contained just one hit, "Yep," although "Peter Gunn" would enter the Top 40 when it was issued later in 1960. Unlike his debut Have "twangy" Guitar Will Travel, it was not built around singles with a few songs to stretch it to album length, with all of the songs (except "Yep") being recorded in a week. Give Eddy this much credit: at a time when virtually all rock & roll LPs were hasty, knocked-together jobs, he did at least try to vary the program. There were slow blues ("Only Child"), pop standards (Rodgers & Hart's "Lover"), a rather long jazzy workout ("Quiniela"), original material in the mold of his hits, sax-driven R&B (a cover of Noble "thin Man" Watts' "Hard Times"), and poppy stuff with strings and wordless female backup vocals that sounded like themes for B-movie westerns ("Along the Navajo Trail"). It still added up to a pretty inconsequential instrumental album in which the hits ("Peter Gunn" and "Yep") boasted much more arresting hooks than the surrounding tunes. Eddy sounds like he's tearing a page from Les Paul's book on "Lover," with its very atypical (for Eddy) arrangement of hyper-fast guitar licks. The 2000 CD reissue has five previously unreleased bonus tracks, but all of these are in fact alternates: "Some Kinda Earthquake" (a hit single recorded at the sessions but held off the album) and "Only Child" with alternate overdubs, take one of "Yep," "St. James" (actually a retitled version of "Quiniela"), and an undubbed version of "First Love, First Tears," a ballad that was also held off the LP. ~ Richie Unterberger, All Music Guide