Bobby Darin

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Bobby Darin (born Walden Robert Cassotto; May 14, 1936 – December 20, 1973) was an American musician and actor. He performed jazz, pop, rock and roll, folk, swing, and country music. He started his career as a songwriter for Connie Francis. He recorded his first million-selling single, "Splish Splash", in 1958. That was followed by "Dream Lover", "Mack the Knife", and "Beyond the Sea", which brought him worldwide fame. In 1962, he won a Golden Globe Award for his first film, Come September, co-starring his first wife, actress Sandra Dee.
During the 1960s, he became more politically active and worked on Robert F. Kennedy's Democratic presidential campaign. He was present at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles at the time of Robert Kennedy's assassination in June 1968. During the same year, he discovered the woman who had raised him was his grandmother, not his mother as he thought, and learned that the woman he thought was his sister was actually his mother. Those events deeply affected Darin and sent him into a long period of seclusion. Although he made a successful comeback (in television) in the early 1970s, his health was beginning to fail following bouts of rheumatic fever in childhood. The knowledge of his vulnerability had always spurred him on to use his musical talent while still young. He died at the age of 37 after a heart operation in Los Angeles in 1973. 
(Read more at Wikipedia)
== Links to Peel ==
Peel saw Bobby Darin perform at the Liverpool Empire in 1960, on a bill with his lifetime favourite Duane Eddy. At the time, Darin was in the middle of a run of hit singles for Atlantic Records's subsidiary label Atco, and although some of these may have appealed to the DJ, others were closer to the Las Vegas showbiz style that JP had little time for. As a result, the singer didn't become one of Peel's preferred artists of that era, but nonetheless he recalled Darin's performance well enough to mention him on a show almost forty years later.
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However, Bobby Darin worked in a wide range of styles. He collaborated with producer Terry Melcher and had 12-string guitarist Jim (Roger) McGuinn in his backing band, both of whom later became well-known via the work of the Byrds. He shared an admiration for Robert F. Kennedy with Peel, and in the second half of the 1960s began to record material by songwriters JP admired, notably Tim Hardin. 
Darin's version of Hardin's "If I Were A Carpenter" was a hit in both the US and UK, and although Peel seemed to prefer Hardin's own versions of his songs, Peel did play tracks by Darin in the late 1960s, in the period when he was recording albums of his own songs, and briefly renamed himself "Bob Darin". (In 1969, Darin returned the favour by providing Tim Hardin with a song he had written, "Simple Song of Freedom", which was a US single hit for Hardin and was played by Peel.) Peel commented approvingly on Darin's change of style and his new songs of protest and social criticism, but after this period Darin made few more records and, as Wikipedia points out, his main success during his final years was as host of a U.S. TV show. 
== Festive Fifty Entries ==
*None
== Sessions ==
*None
== Other Shows Played ==
*30 October 1968: ?
*26 January 1969: (Peel plays a track from Bobby Darin's new LP of self-penned material, a change of style for a singer known for his connections with Las Vegas and "showbiz things", as JP puts it. He says that Darin "got fed up with it and wrote a bunch of very good songs…did the whole thing himself". JP recommends the album to his listeners as "a very nice LP and not a con or anything".) - I Can See The Wind (LP Bobby Darin Born Walden Robert Cassotto) Direction
*17 August 1969: (Peel introduces the new Bobby (or Bob) Darin album and talks about the singer's change of style - “something amazing has happened to him”.) - Distractions (Part 1) (album - Commitment) Bell SBLL 128
*08 November 1973: (John saw Duane Eddy with Bobby Darin at the Liverpool Empire and it was one of the great musical evenings of his life - probably on either March 28 or 2 April 1960 according to tour dates. )
*08 November 1998 (BFBS): (Peel remembers seeing Clyde McPhatter at the Liverpool Empire with Duane Eddy and Bobby Darin around that era, "and amazingly good he was too.")
== See Also ==
*Atlantic Records
*Gigography 1954-1966
*Del Shannon
== External Links ==
*Wikipedia
*Discogs
*ThisIsBobbyDarin 
Category:Artists