The “Golden Hits Of The 60s”
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CURTIS LEE
“PRETTY LITTLE ANGEL EYES”
(Tommy Boyce, CURTIS LEE)
Dunes 2007
No. 7 August 7, 1961
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Curtis Lee (b. Oct. 28, 1941, Yuma, AZ) was a vegetable picker. Blue-eyed and blond, he sounded on his best
days a mite like Bobby Rydell (on other days, he could sound more like a flat Fabian). In 1960, Ray Peterson,
the teen crooner noted for that masterful piece of “death rock,” “Tell Laura I Love Her,” happened to catch
one of Lee’s sets at a Yuma nightspot. Curtis was hot that night, and Peterson liked what he heard enough to
tip off Stan Shulman, his manager and with him owner of the Dunes label. Despite Lee’s poor track record
on the Warrior, Sabrina, and Hot labels, Shulman rushed the kid into the studios to cut “Special Love”; then
a cover on KEN COPELANDS’ “Pledge of Love.” Like Lee’s earlier sides, both disks nose-dived, as did
another single, “D in Love.”
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In 1961, the production and songwriting team of Leiber & Stoller recommended to Shulman the dial-
twiddling skills of an up-and-coming producer named Phil Spector. Up to this point in his career, Spector
was known only for being a former member of the TEDDY BEARS. Phil produced Ray Peterson’s “Corinna,
Corinne” for Dunes, then turned his attention to the hitless Curtis Lee.
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Curtis had dashed off some tunes with an L.A. singer/songwriter named Tommy Boyce; the latter, later half
of the successful duo of Boyce & Hart, creators of a numerous Monkees tunes; and sometime Monkee,
himself. Spector listened to the rough outlines of the song and arranged to record “Pretty Little Angel Eyes”
and some other numbers at the Mira Sound Studios, in the now defunct Hotel America on New York City’s
West 47th Street. Brought in to provide that catchy doo-woppin’ background were the HALOS, a recording
act just an instant away from their own success with “Nag” (#25, 1961). “We came in and [Spector] gave us
the lyric sheets and told us to do what we felt,” Arthur Cryer of the Halos told Mark Ribowsky, author of He’s
a Rebel. “We stole all those ‘bomps’ and ‘ha-ha-has’ from the Spaniels and Cleftones.”
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”Angel Eyes” was a magnificent piece of rock’n’roll, as was the Spector-produced Lee and Boyce tune,
“Under the Moon of Love” (#46, 1961). Soon afterward, Spector and Dunes Records parted company. Try
as he did with C & W tunes, Del Shannon-like numbers, and fine material provided by Otis Blackwell and the
team of Gary Geld and Peter Udell, Curtis Lee never again managed to get that “right” sound.
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