Del Shannon: Rock On : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Every fan of the late Del Shannon's will be glad that he left an album's worth of material that is now being released, but most will wish that it provided a more stirring epitaph than this. While the Tom Petty-produced Drop Down and Get Me, from 1981, showcased Shannon as a vital, contemporary artist – even its remake of "Sea of Love" had a modern edge to it – Rock On! is more reductively nostalgic.

Produced primarily by Jeff Lynne for Petty's Gone Gator label (with Heart-breakers guitarist Mike Campbell handling the rest of the tracks), the album has an aura of sock-hop revivalism to it. The opening "Walk Away" (written by Petty and Lynne with Shannon) consciously recalls "Runaway" with its yearning falsetto and keyboard break, as well as its title, as if attempting a follow-up thirty years later. Elsewhere, remakes of "I Go to Pieces" (the Shannon-penned hit for Peter and Gordon) and "What Kind of Fool Do You Think I Am?" also conjure that earlier era, while the arrangements of the Lynne-produced tracks suggest an early-Sixties-meets-late-ELO time warp.

Though the material is slight by Shannon's standards, his performances recall the obsessiveness and emotional urgency that made his best music so compelling. Amid the radio blandness of the early Sixties, his musical minidramas were charged with a haunted, hard-boiled desperation that was closer in spirit to film noir than Top Forty. Through most of Rock On!, Shannon still sounds like a doomed romantic with a hellhound on his trail.