Summer Holiday

Years before starting the soft rock sensation Bread, a young Jimmy Griffin followed his boyhood friends Dorsey and Johnny Burnette from his Memphis, Tennessee home to sunny Los Angeles, quickly starting a career as a songwriter. Just days out of his teens, Griffin was signed by Reprise in an attempt to add a little youth and vibrancy to the label's Rat Pack-heavy roster. In 1963, Griffin arrived with his first album, a breezy collection of cover tunes called Summer Holiday. The album was standard pop singer fare for its day, 12 above average tunes with excellent arrangements by famously cool conductor Jack Nitzsche and Griffin's croon running through versions of "Summertime Blues" and the like. This re-release finds the album available in digital form for the first time, remastered and including nine additional bonus tracks, mostly B-sides from the same time as the album. The bonus tracks (all in mono, where the album tracks are in stereo) include early soul touches on "Little Miss Cool," a swinging take on the Beatles' "All My Loving," and some inexplicably moody production moments on the somewhat spooky "Marie Is Moving."