- Included among the Record Descriptions of Favorite Albums (Part 1).
- Here’s to You is Hamilton Camp’s second solo album, where most of the songs were written or co-written by Hamilton Camp.
Hamilton Camp – Here’s to You (1968): The same friend who introduced Charlie and me to Cabaret had a relatively small but fascinating record collection that I admired for years. Among his albums was a 1964 album called Paths of Victory by a folksinger named Hamilton Camp; I knew of Camp, but as an actor, not a musician, and his career turned out to be mostly in acting. Hamilton Camp had a supporting role in one of my favorite sitcoms of all time, He & She, starring Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss as a married couple who were a cartoonist and a social worker, respectively. Camp played the folksy handyman or “super” in the New York apartment building where the couple lived. In real life, Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss have one of the longest-lived Hollywood marriages ever (60 years and counting).
One of the Benjamin character’s cartoons, called Jetman had been turned into a television show; the egomaniacal star of the TV show was the perfectly cast Jack Cassidy (father of teen idols David Cassidy and Shaun Cassidy, whose mother is Shirley Jones of The Partridge Family – that show was based on the real-life family singing group the Cowsills). Kenneth Mars starred as a fireman who regularly visited the apartment by extending a plank from the fire station next door. Despite the stellar cast and innovative plotlines, not to mention a lead-in from the long-running sitcom Green Acres, He & She only lasted one season; and the show is now regarded as being ahead of its time and paving the way for many legendary television programs, such as the MTM shows The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Bob Newhart Show. Our friend knew nothing about He & She, but the album was an instant favorite of mine, mainly since it contains a total of 7 (!) Bob Dylan songs, most of which were not known to me at the time, and some of which I still have scarcely ever heard elsewhere, despite having hundreds of Dylan songs in my personal collection. I finally got a CD of Paths of Victory from Amazon a few years ago, after it rested at the top of my album want list for decades. Here’s to You is Hamilton Camp’s second solo album; whereas Paths of Victory had only one original song – though it is his best known; “Pride of Man” was covered by Quicksilver Messenger Service, Gordon Lightfoot, and Gram Parsons – most of the songs on Here’s to You were written or co-written by Hamilton Camp. The album producer is Felix Pappalardi, who also worked with Cream on the Disraeli Gears album; two of the songs were co-written by Pappalardi and his wife Gail Collins. Under his real name, Bob Camp, Hamilton Camp is also known for the gospel song “You Can Tell the World” that he co-wrote with his musical partner Bob Gibson of the duo Gibson & Camp, and included as the opening track on Simon and Garfunkel’s debut album, Wednesday Morning 3 A.M. (1966).