'This Diamond Ring' Didn't Shine for Everyone

‘200 Greatest 60s Rock Songs’ Book Excerpt

Photo byRMP Global Ltd

The Gary Lewis & the Playboys’ tune “This Diamond Ring” song took a labyrinthine path to №1.

In the early 1960s, keyboardist Al Kooper and lyricists Bob Brass and Irwin Levine were hungry young songwriters hoping to craft their first hit. The trio would write songs all day, every day, and shop them to New York’s music publishers. In his autobiography Backstage Passes & Backstabbing Bastards, Kooper writes that one day the team composed “a bright little R&B item that none of us figured to be worth all that much.”

“We’d written this particular song with the Drifters in mind,” Kooper recalled. “They were hot, riding a chain of hits.” The R&B/soul vocal group had charted three Top 10 hits in the previous two years: “Up on the Roof,” “On Broadway” and “Under the Boardwalk.”

“The Drifters turned the song down, but a West Coast producer named Snuff Garrett, then successfully masterminding Bobby Vee’s recordings, picked up on it . . . Garrett had cut a white version of our tune with Jerry Lewis’s thoroughly inoffensive white son Gary and sent us a copy the day it was released.

“We were revolted. They’d removed the soul from our R&B song and made a teenage milkshake out of it. Never mind that who-were-we-to-be-talking-about-soul in the first place; this was disgusting. We dismissed ‘This Diamond Ring’ by Gary Lewis and the Playboys on one hearing.”

"This Diamond Ring" by Gary Lewis & the Playboys

The song had had an earlier, more soulful release by R&B singer Sammy Ambrose that may have been closer to Kooper’s conception. A Miami native, Ambrose began his career in Florida with a band called the Afro-Beats.

In 1964, Ambrose was in New York and was the first to record “This Diamond Ring.” But Ambrose’s version, released in early 1965, only reached №117 on the Billboard Bubbling Under chart and then disappeared.

"This Diamond Ring" by Sammy Ambrose

Three thousand miles away in Los Angeles, producer Snuff Garrett discovered Gary Lewis and the Playboys and signed them with Liberty Records in 1964. Lewis, the son of comedian and actor Jerry Lewis, told Songfacts how he first heard “This Diamond Ring.”

“Snuffy Garrett called me into his office after we had signed, and he said, ‘We’ve got to be very careful now. We’re going to pick your first song. We want it to be a big one.’ And he says, ‘I’ve got this song that I offered to Bobby Vee,’ because Snuff produced Bobby Vee before me. He said, ‘Bobby doesn’t like it, he doesn’t want to do it.’ And so I listened to a demo of it and I said, ‘Well, yeah, I like the tune. Sure, let’s do it.’ So we went into the studio, we cut the basic track.”

Garrett recruited members of the Wrecking Crew, LA’s premier session musicians, to enhance the basic track laid down by Lewis and the Playboys. Leon Russell, a favorite of Garrett’s, did the arrangement and played keyboards. Guitarist Tommy Allsup and drummer Hal Blaine also contributed. Lewis admitted to Classic Bands that at the time he wasn’t a skilled singer.

“I had the basic stuff you need to record. I could sing on pitch. I knew the notes. I could hear a song once or twice and have it memorized. I didn’t have to look at the words to sing. I had what it took, but I was just brand new and it wasn’t developed yet. So, I did have the basics of it. I wasn’t like a terrible singer that you throw echo on and it’s gonna sound good. A bad singer is not gonna sound good with anything you do.

“I was an inexperienced singer that needed help with doubling voices and echo.”

To get that help, Snuff Garrett called on session vocalist Ron Hicklin. Though his name isn’t well known, you’ve heard his group of studio vocalists, the Ron Hicklin Singers, perform backing vocals on hits by the Monkees (“I’m a Believer”), Mark Lindsay (“Arizona”) and Ringo Starr (“Oh My My”).

In the liner notes of “The Complete Liberty Singles” (cited here), Hicklin said that the Playboys’ session had come to a standstill when he received Garrett’s call.

“They had gotten to the point where they didn’t know what to do, so I said, ‘Let me put a harmony part on with him.’ Snuff thought that my voice, mixed with Gary’s, would smooth his out a little and he liked the lift it gave to the song . . .

“I sang all the leads right along with Gary, the two of us on the same mic at the same time. Whatever he was doing, I could phrase it right with him at exactly the same time, almost as if we were linked mentally. Then we’d do the overdubs, multi-tracking the voice, and then I would do any backgrounds myself.”

Lewis, however, downplays the contributions of Hicklin and the Wrecking Crew. He maintains that much of what is written about his band’s musicianship is myth.

“We went in the studio, myself and the Playboys, and played on every single track we ever did. I mean, we were the track band. And so many people say Gary Lewis & the Playboys never played on anything. I’ve even read write-ups that said Gary Lewis didn’t even sing on his records. All that is just such bull. The Playboys and I played on absolutely everything we ever did, album tunes, everything. And since we were so young and inexperienced, that’s when the Wrecking Crew came in to do overdubs and solos. Now that’s the absolute truth right there.”

Lewis’ “This Diamond Ring” was released shortly after the Ambrose original and topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart on Feb. 20, 1965. “America had finally seen fit to recognize our ‘talent,’” Kooper wrote. “We conveniently forgot our previous animosity toward the record and concentrated on basking in as much of the glory as we could squeeze out of it. The day the record hit №1, we just stared at the charts and laughed and laughed.”

The song’s popularity inspired Lewis’ label, Liberty Records, to release a regrettable answer song by Wendy Hill: "(Gary, Please Don't Sell) My Diamond Ring."

"(Gary, Please Don't Sell) My Diamond Ring"

Gary Lewis & the Playboys followed with a string of hits in the ’60s, including “Save Your Heart for Me,” “Everybody Loves a Clown” and “Count Me In.” Kooper finally recorded “This Diamond Ring” for his 1976 album Act Like Nothing’s Wrong. While Kooper went on to join the Blues Project and co-found Blood, Sweat & Tears, the song would remain Kooper’s biggest commercial success.

"This Diamond Ring" by Al Kooper

Sammy Ambrose, whose original track failed to click with the public, didn’t fare as well. The singer returned to Florida, where he performed as a limbo dancer before drug addiction ruined his career. On Oct. 26, 1976 Ambrose reportedly sold heroin to a 28-year-old Vietnam veteran who died of an overdose. Ambrose was charged with first degree murder and imprisoned. Ambrose, 47, died on Feb. 26, 1988.

Frank Mastropolo is the author of the 200 Greatest Rock Songs series and Fillmore East: The Venue That Changed Rock Music Forever.