CD ‘Collectors Series’ Spotlights the Hits of Sinatra, Mercer, Darin

Frank Sinatra, Johnny Mercer and Bobby Darin are among the five artists saluted in the first group of albums in Capitol Records’ outstanding new “Collectors Series,” a budget line of CD retrospective collections.

Most major record labels have taken the easy way out when it comes to “greatest hits” packages. They simply turn to the original vinyl “greatest hits” collections--many of them decades old--and reissue the same lineup of songs and artwork on CD.

Because most of the vinyl albums contained just 10 or so songs, the CD albums were also limited to that number. By contrast, Capitol offers 20 songs on each CD in this new, customized series, complete with brief liner notes and new artwork.

Equally significant, Capitol has not held back some of an artist’s key hits so that the company can later tempt consumers with a “Volume 2.”

The Sinatra package doesn’t include all of the singer’s hits because he had more than four dozen Top 20 singles on Columbia Records before switching to Capitol in 1953 and he had additional hits (including “Strangers in the Night”) for Reprise after he left Capitol in 1960.

But Sinatra did register 17 Top 20 hits on Capitol and all of them are in his just-released “Collectors Series” CD. The selections range from “I’ve Got the World on a String” and “Young at Heart” to “Learnin’ the Blues” and “All the Way.”

Darin too,had numerous hits before he came to Capitol in 1962, including “Mack the Knife” and “Dream Lover.” But his Capitol work is noteworthy, even though he only had five Top 50 hits on the label (chiefly “You’re the Reason I’m Living” and “18 Yellow Roses”). The other tunes on his “Collectors Series” package document how Darin--an especially dynamic singer--experimented with various pop styles (from Sinatra-influenced pop to country) as he tried to establish himself as something more than “merely” a rock singer.

Mercer, a co-founder of Capitol Records, is best known today as a songwriter (he wrote the lyrics for such standards as “One for My Baby” and “Blues in the Night”), but he was also a respected vocalist--one of the few singer-songwriters of the pre-rock pop era. His CD contains 16 Top 20 hits from the ‘40s, including the novelty “Strip Poker” and a duet with Margaret Whiting on “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”

The other artists in the first group of “Collectors Series” releases are country stars Hank Thompson and Ferlin Husky. The second set of CDs is due next month and will include albums by such artists as the Kingston Trio, Merle Haggard, Dean Martin, the Four Preps and Stan Freberg.

AND GET THIS: If you didn’t know better, it’s easy to think all 14 selections on Rhino Records’ “Golden Throats: The Great Celebrity Sing Off” album are put-ons--witty interpretations of how various movie and TV celebrities might sound doing classic rock songs.

But that really is Leonard Nimoy singing “Proud Mary” on the album, which was released last year on vinyl and cassette, but is just available in CD. And that really is Sebastian Cabot doing “Like a Rolling Stone” . . . and Andy Griffith doing “House of the Rising Sun” and William Shatner trying “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.” Limited, but fun.