Tommy Sands Man, Like Wow! The Sands Collection 1957-1963 CD

While Bear Family's 30-track compilation The Worryin' Kind also covers Tommy Sands' late-'50s and early-'60s material, and offers some songs that don't make it onto this later anthology, Man, Like Wow! is a slightly superior buy. There are a few more songs (a whopping 33 on a single CD), and it covers a slightly longer period of his early career, including ten of his chart hits and a few cuts that hadn't previously been issued on compact disc. It doesn't make a compelling case, it must be said, for Tommy Sands as a notable rock & roller; in fact, his stuff was among the most whitebread of any of the early white singers to score rock & roll hits. Sands was really more a mainstream pop singer, with some country flavor, who was put into some quasi-rock & roll arrangements (and marketed to the rock & roll audience) in order to fit into the trend of the day. Even when he tried to rock out and sound menacing, relatively speaking, on "Blue Ribbon Baby," "Man, Like Wow!," "I Ain't Gettin' Rid of You," the "Fever" sound-alike "Doctor Heartache," and "The Worryin' Kind," he wasn't going to give Gene Vincent (who, like Sands, was on the Capitol label in this period) any sleepless nights. However they judge his talent, early rock & roll collectors might be interested to find a few obscure songs by notable writers here, including Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller ("Chicken and the Hawk"), Atlantic executives Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, Bobby Hart, Al Kooper, and Paul Anka, even if none of those tunes are first-rate. As conscientiously assembled as this is, it's fairly tepid rock & roll without much in the way of memorable material, though not quite as mediocre teen idol fodder as some have led listeners to expect. ~ Richie Unterberger

Cool and swish Tommy Sands goes rockin', rollin' and reelin' through no less than 33 of his hottest tracks from the late 50's and early 60's. "Man, Like Wow!: The Sands Collection 1957 - 1963" includes rare single and LP cuts on CD for the first time, informative liner notes and a stack of period photos, all prepared with the assistance of Tommy Sands himself.