Her 19th Billboard Top 40 solo hit came a year later with “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)”, a highlight from the Mermaids soundtrack, a film in which she also starred. Though she’d rack up hits #20 (“Love & Understanding”) and #21 (“Save Up All Your Tears”) before the year was through, it was evidently time to turn the page once again.
THE VALLEYS: Six years would pass before the release of her next album, revealing yet another side of Cher both to herself and to her insatiable public. Before entering this current phase, however, it’s worth taking a moment to note some of the more intriguing ‘in-between’ projects---recording projects, that is---that have escaped all but the most die-hard Cher fans’ attention. Over the years, these have included some of her most interesting recordings of all.
A number of ill-fated projects for Warner Brothers that began when her tenure at MCA Records ended in the mid-1970s have gone on to become not only cult classics, but highly-prized collectibles as well. Case in point is an album called Stars, featuring an amazing rendition of “Geronimo’s Cadillac”. Although it’s been out of print for years, it is generally considered one of her best, and demand for pristine copies of the album remains high. Equally rare is an incredible single called “A Love Like Yours” from the same period that reunited Cher with producer Phil Spector (with whom Sonny & Cher had started over a decade before). Spector tested, but never released, this particular single with the intention of using it to launch his own, short-lived Warner Brothers specialty label. It was a one-off duet on which Cher was teamed with Harry Nilsson (“We were just coming in to do backup…the song was supposed to be for John Lennon”). Their spur-of-the-moment recording, however, turned out to be brilliant (it contained one of the catchiest choral hooks ever recorded) but legal complications prevented it from ever hitting the market. Both the single and the Warner/Spector vanity imprint disappeared quickly and were forgotten.
Cher’s only studio venture with second husband Greg Allman is also part of the long lost Warner Brothers cache. Though the album they recorded together, Allman & Woman, is decidedly unremarkable in terms of its being any sort of recording landmark for Cher, it contains a deliciously boisterous love song called “I Love Making Love To You” that holds up incredibly well almost two decades later. Allman basically sleepwalks though his part, but Cher’s enthusiasm is so irresistibly infectious that she all but carries the track by herself. If the Allman & Woman set was meant to bolster Cher’s rock & roll credibility, it backfired. Her own fans’ response was lukewarm at best, and the Allman contingent (both press and public) considered the project downright blasphemous. The press was only slightly kinder to Cher’s subsequent pairing with Meat Loaf on “Dead Ringer For Love”, the controversial title track of the latter’s widely panned second album. Over the years, Meat Loaf himself has steadfastly defended his choice of Cher for the ‘girl part’, insisting then and now that she was the only one capable of delivering the power and passion that the track required. Dead Ringer, the follow-up to Meat Loaf’s groundbreaking Bat Out Of Hell album, is only now getting the respect it deserves.
