You can’t tell what’s electronic and what’s not. The new version of “Bette Davis Eyes” is state-of-the-art ’80s synth-rock. Carnes gives the credit to keyboardist Bill Cuomo, who came up with the gooey bit of synth magic that completely transformed the song. But producer Val Garay reworked the song with Carnes’ band. “More Love” producer George Tobin brought “Bette Davis Eyes” to Carnes, who didn’t think it could become a hit. DeShannon’s version of the song, a sort of big-band boogie-woogie blues thing, was not a hit. It’s a 9.) DeShannon had co-written “Bette Davis Eyes” with Donna Weiss, who’d had the idea for the song after watching the 1942 Bette Davis film New Voyager. (DeShannon’s highest-charting single, 1969’s “ Put A Little Love In Your Heart,” peaked at #4. DeShannon, like Carnes, was a music-business survivor - one who started out as teenage country and rockabilly prodigy in the ’50s before tasting chart success in the ’60s. Jackie DeShannon released the original version in 1974. Carnes’ version did better, making it up to #10. The original “More Love” had peaked at #23. (It’s a 5.) That same year, Carnes scored another hit with “ More Love,” a cover of a 1967 song from Smokey Robinson’s Miracles. On that album, Rogers and Carnes sang the duet “ Don’t Fall In Love With A Dreamer,” which became a huge hit, peaking at #4. She was around.Ĭarnes had her first real success in 1980, when she and Ellingson wrote all the songs on Kenny Rogers’ Gideon, a concept album about a Texas cowboy looking back on his life. She wrote songs for David Cassidy and sang backup on his records. She co-created a not-that-successful bubblegum group called the Sugar Bears. Carnes sang “ Nobody Knows,” the end-credits theme from the great 1971 car-chase movie Vanishing Point. In the late ’60s, she and her husband Dave Ellingson, another former New Christy Minstrel, started writing songs together. Carnes grew up in Los Angeles and, in the mid-’60s, did a couple of short stints in the New Christy Minstrels, the LA folk institution that also produced previous Number Ones artists like Kenny Rogers, Barry McGuire, and the Byrds’ Gene Clark. She sounded older.Ĭarnes had been around for years before “Bette Davis Eyes,” doing the sort of peripheral music-business jobs that seldom lead to actual stardom. This is fun to think about.) Carnes was 35 when she scored her one massive hit. (Apparently, lots of people thought “Bette Davis Eyes” was a Rod Stewart song when they first heard it. With her raw cigarettes-for-breakfast gargle-howl, Carnes is unmistakably a product of the ’60s, a blues-rocker to her bone marrow. Kim Carnes was not a ’60s-vintage rock star, but she may as well have been.
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