Danny Cox - Birth Announcement (1969)

Double-LP debuts by unknown singers on independent labels consisting solely of cover versions were not exactly standard procedure in the late 1960s. Add to that Cox's fair but profoundly ordinary folk-rock-soul vocal talents, and one has the sense that somehow or another someone involved in this record let the project get out of hand, due to personal enthusiasm or friendship. Perhaps it was noted producer Gary Usher (who had recently done some of the Byrds' best albums), who also did the arrangements, co-engineered, designed the sleeve, and wrote the liner notes, in which he remarked that he'd known Cox since 1964. In any case, if you're going to do two discs of cover versions -- and not exactly real obscure ones, featuring four Beatles songs, a couple of Dylan tunes, Leonard Cohen, Ian Tyson, and some traditional songs -- you had better be a damned good interpretive singer, perhaps on the level of Judy Collins. Cox is not. He's inoffensive but faceless, as are the late-'60s rock arrangements, which usually, in keeping with the times, extend matters too long. As a background act in a coffee house, Cox wouldn't have been bad, but despite Together's hipness (it did important archive LPs for early Byrds and Byrds-related material), this is an uninteresting rarity.~Birth Announcement Review by Richie Unterberger