Roscoe Shelton's "You're the Dream" (1966) is another song attributed to Bacharach that seems unlikely to have been written by him. It's a bit harder to pin down exactly who did write it though.
Does anyone have any evidence one way or the other, aside from the label of the 2012 seven-inch single on "Sound Stage 7 / Outta Sight"?
The story of how the recording came to be issued for the first time some 21 years after it was recorded is told here.
The short version is that in the mid-1980s, the English record producer Cliff White provided Northern Soul DJ Guy Hennigan with a box of unmarked, never released 1960s masters from Sound Stage 7 / Monument records out of Nashville, and asked Hennigan to go through the material and identify anything that sounded worthy of a new release by Charley Records. Hennigan found "You're the Dream" among the material, and it was first released on the 1987 LP "Strain On Your Heart". The LP had no songwriter credits for "You're the Dream", and there was no discussion in the liner notes of the track. It was marked as previously unreleased.
The track became a favorite in the U.K. Northern Soul scene, turned up in the 1995 movie Blue Juice, and eventually was issued on the previously mentioned 45 rpm single in 2012 by the UK label Outta Sight. From what I can tell, it's this 2012 single that first identifies the song as a Bacharach-David song.
Serene Dominic doesn't mention the Roscoe Shelton recording at all in his "Song By Song" book, but he does have a bit of relevant information, namely that Bacharach & David copyrighted a song titled "You're the Dream" in 1959. Dominic mentions that some collectors linked the song to a 1955 recording by The Marvellos. The Marvellos song appears to be written by "J. Johnson/J. Macon," according to the label on the 7-inch.
Dominic asked Bacharach the following:
"SD: In trying to narrow down the first recorded appearance of a Bacharach-David song, I’ve narrowed it down to three records. There’s one song called “You’re the Dream” by the Marvellos, a black vocal group out of Chicago. There’s some dispute as to whether you wrote it or not.
BB: Doesn’t ring a bell to me."
Dominic ultimately listed "You're the Dream" in his "Off the Record" section of his book, a roundup of songs either copyrighted or recorded for demo purposes but never commercially released. I can't find the copyright registration in Google Books, but I do see it on the ASCAP website.
In any case, just listening to the Roscoe Shelton record, it really doesn't sound like the Bacharach & David of 1965/1966, or really like any of their earlier R&B songs other than possibly "Breaking Point". Specifically, it's I-vi-I-vi-IV-V chord changes just sound too run of the mill for Burt, and the lyrics seem slightly too cliché for Hal David ("You're the cream in my coffee", etc.). It's a fantastic, pounding dance record--it's obvious why the Northern Soul DJs fell in love with it. But even "Breaking Point has a bit more of Bacharach's quirks and his typical subverting of musical expectations (extra measures, unexpected rhythms, etc.). Also, Bacharach doesn't have a lot of ties to Monument / Sound Stage 7 Records, in terms of artists premiering a new Bacharach tune on the label.
All that said, there is one tie to Monument Records in 1966 that might argue for this actually being a Bacharach tune. A group called The Fuller Brothers (not the soul act) released a single on Monument titled "Judge Me with Your Heart" which is a recording of a Bacharach-David tune published in sheet music form as "Trial By Jury". The year of publication for the sheet music was also 1966, but the publisher was not "Blue Seas/JAC" (the entities created by Burt & Hal around 1963), but instead Mansion Music.
"Trial By Jury" also sounds nothing like 1965/1966 Bacharach-David work, and I suspect if the composer credits are accurate, it comes from the late 1950s or early 1960s. If Monument somehow had ownership of some old Bacharach-David copyrights, or had some financial incentive to record a couple of older Bacharach-David tunes, perhaps they put "You're the Dream" in the hands of Shelton and/or his producers and asked Shelton to record it. And it's conceivable that the song might have been tweaked a bit during the arranging process, just as Love simplified "My Little Red Book".
Shelton was himself a songwriter who recorded his own material on occasion, so my hunch is either he wrote "You're the Dream", or it was a writer plugged in to the Sound Stage 7 production team in Nashville. My theory is that Outta Site Records, when preparing the release of the 2012 single, just searched the ASCAP database, found the Bacharach copyright, and assumed they had the correct information.
EDIT: I found the copyright registration, and the Bacharach "You're the Dream" was, like "Trial By Jury", originally published by Mansion Music. (Mansion published several 1959-1960 Bacharach tunes including "I'll Cry Alone", "Boys Were Made for Girls", and "Path of Pride", as well as some Hal David songs not written by Bacharach). Maybe Monument was indeed recording old Bacharach titles for some reason in 1966, and "You're the Dream" was among them. I'd love to hear a demo of the song by Burt and compare his conception of the tune with Roscoe Shelton's, if they are in fact the same tune.
Roscoe Shelton's "You're the Dream" (1966) - not by Bacharach?
Moderator: mark