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The Hit
I don’t know Henry Gross’ “Shannon,” but you might if you frequent pet shelter openings…I’ll get to it.
The song has good “mellow-70s-pop” bones - sparkling picked strings with nice reverb, a bass sound that literally slides between passages, gently troubled vocals…and, pow(!) a chorus powered by a falsetto that comes outta nowhere with a harmonic backing vocals to raise it a little higher, all of it goosed with production warm as an Indian summer - but it still strikes me as an odd candidate for a hit. Then again, I was only five years old when it dropped, so what do I know about what the needed to hear? It climbed as high as No. 6 on the Billboard, No. 5 on Cashbox and comfortably went gold.
As for the pet shelter openings, Gross wrote the song in honor of the Beach Boys’ Carl Wilson’s departed dog, Shannon. And, for what it's worth, he wrote some evocative poetry for it. From among the other things he told Goldmine in 2018:
“I had toured with the Beach Boys and Carl Wilson invited me to his home in Beverly Hills for lunch, but two husky dogs knocked our intended meal to the floor. Carl apologized, and I told him not to worry about it as I have an Irish setter at home, named Shannon, and it could have happened there too. Then Carl got quiet. He said that he also had an Irish setter named Shannon and that she was hit by a car and killed a month ago. That was the inspiration for the song on Terry Cashman and Tommy West’s Lifesong label.”
Maybe it wasn’t so odd. Based on what I know about 1976, the world probably needed a sonic equivalent of a hug and a cry…
I don’t know Henry Gross’ “Shannon,” but you might if you frequent pet shelter openings…I’ll get to it.
The song has good “mellow-70s-pop” bones - sparkling picked strings with nice reverb, a bass sound that literally slides between passages, gently troubled vocals…and, pow(!) a chorus powered by a falsetto that comes outta nowhere with a harmonic backing vocals to raise it a little higher, all of it goosed with production warm as an Indian summer - but it still strikes me as an odd candidate for a hit. Then again, I was only five years old when it dropped, so what do I know about what the needed to hear? It climbed as high as No. 6 on the Billboard, No. 5 on Cashbox and comfortably went gold.
As for the pet shelter openings, Gross wrote the song in honor of the Beach Boys’ Carl Wilson’s departed dog, Shannon. And, for what it's worth, he wrote some evocative poetry for it. From among the other things he told Goldmine in 2018:
“I had toured with the Beach Boys and Carl Wilson invited me to his home in Beverly Hills for lunch, but two husky dogs knocked our intended meal to the floor. Carl apologized, and I told him not to worry about it as I have an Irish setter at home, named Shannon, and it could have happened there too. Then Carl got quiet. He said that he also had an Irish setter named Shannon and that she was hit by a car and killed a month ago. That was the inspiration for the song on Terry Cashman and Tommy West’s Lifesong label.”
Maybe it wasn’t so odd. Based on what I know about 1976, the world probably needed a sonic equivalent of a hug and a cry…
