If you were alive in the year 1980 and had ears, then you no doubt heard Leo Sayer's "More Than I Can Say". The lead single from Sayer's Living In A Fantasy album rocketed up the charts to #2, where it would be held from the top spot by the only two men strong enough to do so: Kenny Rogers (with his hit ballad "Lady") and John Lennon (with his comeback single "(Just Like) Starting Over").
If not for them, Sayer would have locked down his third #1 single in four years, which wouldn't have been the worst thing in the world. After all, Sayer's version is actually a stellar reading of arguably one of the greatest love songs ever written - one that originated out of one of the music world's most horrific tragedies.
Much like the Doors continuing without Jim Morrison, the Crickets released their first album without Buddy Holly less than a year after the singer's death and saw it meet with complete indifference from the press and radio programmers alike.
While In Style With The Crickets would enjoy sizable success in the UK in 1960, without Holly, interest in the band in the U.S. was such that the album couldn't even manage a single week on Billboard's Top 200 despite the fact that the band's new singer, Sonny Curtis, had penned two songs for the album that would go on to become rock & roll classics in their own right.
The first, "More Than I Can Say" was written with Crickets drummer Jerry Allison and would become a Top 40 UK hit. In the U.S., it was relegated to the B-side of their failed "Baby My Heart" single.
A year after releasing their original version, Bobby Vee covered the song and, while relatively successful as a radio single, it missed the Top 40.
Nearly twenty years later, Leo Sayer heard the song on a TV commercial advertising a K-Tel hits collection and immediately decided to record the song.
What was the other "future classic" that Sonny Curtis wrote for the album you ask?
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