Junk Box Jury

Taken from the LP ‘The Partridge Family Notebook’ | (Bell Records BELLS 220) 1973

The Partridge Family Notebook is the sixth studio album by The Partridge Family. Released in November 1972, the album entered Billboard’s Top LP’s chart in December, peaking at no. 41 in January 1973 – the same week in which its lead single, a cover of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil’s “Looking Through the Eyes of Love”, peaked at 39 on Billboard’s Hot 100. The album remained in the Top 200 for 16 weeks, and was the first by the Partridge Family not to reach the Top 40.

A second US single, “Friend and a Lover”, was released in March 1973 but stalled at no. 99 on the Hot 100.

The Partridges’ version of “Looking Through the Eyes of Love” – originally a hit for Gene Pitney in 1965 (US 28/UK 3) – fared better in the UK, where it peaked at no. 9 in late February and early March, at the height of both the glam rock era and David Cassidy‘s career as a teen idol solo star in Great Britain and Ireland.

The Partridge Family | “Friend And A Lover” | (Bell Records)

The single, which shared the Top Ten with glam giants Slade, the Sweet and Gary Glitter, immediately followed Cassidy’s solo hit “Rock Me Baby” in the charts (UK no. 11/US 38) and slightly overlapped with Cassidy’s next UK solo hit, the double A-side single “I Am a Clown / Some Kind of A Summer” (UK no. 3), which was not released in the States.

‘Notebook’ also featured a cover of “Walking in the Rain” – a 1964 Ronettes classic also by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, but co-written with Phil Spector. The Partridges’ cover, which was not released as a single in America, reached no. 10 in the UK in June 1973. The album did not chart in the UK despite yielding two hit singles there.

The ‘Notebook’ album cover was designed to resemble a standard school notebook. The cover of the UK and Europe album releases, as with the CD reissue many years later, featured a picture of the family in their usual red velvet suits. (Wikipedia)

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cost of record: £2
from: British Heart Foundation