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Andy Kim
I Hear You Say (I Love You Baby) / Falling in Love - 7"
Red Bird - 1965
Michael Panontin
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"I was 15 years old, going on 25."
Andy Kim arrived in New York City with $40 in his pocket and his eyes set on fame. He may have been young, but he had grown up in the hardscrabble streets of Montreal and was a lot more streetwise than his pop songs suggest.
"I grew up in the alleyways, you know. I was a street kid," Kim would later tell Gary James on the classicbands.com site. "We did not come from a place that had money. We grew up in the tenements of Montreal. Some of that $40 was money that I collected from coke bottles in the alleyways and sold 'em at 2 cents apiece with my kid brother."
His parents, both immigrants from Lebanon, were naturally dead set against his NYC adventure. But there was no stopping Kim. He had earmarked Jeff Barry before he left and essentially bullshitted his way into a meeting with the esteemed songwriter.
"I was able to walk into the offices of Lieber and Stoller, which is where Jeff Barry was at the time. It's 1619 Broad[way]. You go into the Brill Building. 'Hi, Jeff Barry. Can you tell me what floor? Oh, the 9th floor.' You get in the elevator and some guy takes you to the 9th floor. In those days, they had guys who would run the old style elevators. And then you walked down the hall and it said something on the door and you were able to walk in."
Barry and his then-wife Ellie Greenwich were hired as songwriter-producers at the Red Bird label in 1964 and the results were almost alchemical. Of the label's first twenty releases, fifteen - all of them bearing the Barry-Greenwich name - charted. At the tail end of 1965, Kim, by now also working as a songwriter in the Brill Building, managed to team up with Barry and Greenwich on a song called 'I Hear You Say (I Love You Baby)'.
Red Bird issued 'I Hear You Say (I Love You Baby)' in both the US and Canada, but it failed to chart in either country. It was not for lack of trying. RPM featured an ad in its 27 Dec '65 issue ("Red Bird introduces a great new hit"), while Cash Box fingered it as one of its Best Bets the following February, calling it a "groovy midtempo ditty with a rock beat and a pretty lyrical vocal effort".
'I Hear You Say...' was Kim's only release on that now sought-after label. Success would have to wait a couple of years, when he signed onto Barry's recently formed Steed label. Kim charted a number of hits there, including his breakthrough 'How'd We Ever Get This Way' (#21 in the States and an impressive #9 up here in Canuckistan in 1968) and his chart-topping version of the Ronettes' 'Baby I Love You' (#1 in Canada and #9 in the US the following summer).
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