Handy Man: The Best of Del Shannon in Bloomington, MN

Del Shannon
was one of the greatest rock & roll singers to emerge before
the Beatles
changed the rules of the game in 1964, and while his time as a hitmaker was relatively short -- he reached number one with the instant classic "Runaway" in 1961, and his last song to crack the Top 30 was the superlative "Stranger in Town" in 1965 -- few of his peers created as interesting a body of work, or evolved with the times with the same grace.
Shannon
wasn't a teen idol, he was a singer whose best music had an understated but strikingly effective emotional power. He could give a cheerful love song a realistic depth, and would lend a story of teens on the run a doomstruck paranoia that no one could match. (Happiness was never simple in
's universe.)
didn't chart much after "Stranger in Town," but he never sounded like a spent force, cutting a fine collection of
Hank Williams
covers (1965's
Del Shannon Sings Hank Williams
), dipping his toes into psychedelia to impressive effect (1967's
The Further Adventures of Charles Westover
), making a superb album in England with
Rolling Stones
producer
Andrew Loog Oldham
(1978's
And the Music Plays On
, reissued as
Home and Away
in 2006), and cutting a pair of great "comeback" LPs produced by friend and fan
Tom Petty
(1981's
Drop Down and Get Me
and 1991's
Rock On
). There are plenty of
collections that cover his hits and near-hits of the '60s, and a few that go deeper into his later work, but 2022's
Handy Man: The Best of Del Shannon
is unusually thorough, collecting 61 tracks on two discs, leaving no significant area of his career uncovered. Two of the most impressive things about the set are how consistently great the songs are (many written by
himself) even as the styles shift, and that
actually got better at making records as he went along; if the stuff on disc two is short on numbers you're likely to know, he never lost his footing as a singer, and made savvy use of the recording studio right up to the end of his career. Sitting somewhere between
Rhino
's excellent single-disc set,
Greatest Hits
(1990), and a massive box set like
Bear Family
's
Home and Away: The Complete Recordings 1960-1970
(2004),
has all the hits you remember along with enough lesser-known music to make a fun and informative road map to the whole of
's music. The remastering and the liner notes are also top-shelf, making this one of the finest
collections you can buy. ~ Mark Deming