1-LP 10″ vinyl with bonus CD, 14 tracks (LP), 25 tracks (CD). Total playing time 28 min. (LP), 48 min. (CD)

A rocking 14-track LP on Bear Family Records® from one of the original Memphis rockabillies, Eddie Bond, backed up by a 25-track CD featuring original and cover versions of some of Eddie’s songs.
Mostly from the mid-1950s, these tracks sparkle with the life and excitement of the new rocking music.
Eddie started and finished as a country singer, but he embraced the new rockabilly music and he soon became the Rockin’ Daddy described in his best-selling disc from 1956.
Eddie’s backing bands include two of the best guitarists of all time – Reggie Young and Hank Garland – and they don’t disappoint.
The ten-inch LP contains one song from Eddie’s first label, Ekko, six from his rockabilly heyday on Mercury, two from his originally unissued sessions at Sun in 1958, and five tracks from local Memphis labels in the 1960s.
The bonus CD contains also a further 11 tracks by other artists, providing fascinating other versions of songs Eddie recorded. Artists include Sonny Fisher, Lattie Moore, Ray Charles, and Elvis Presley.

Back when Eddie Bond recorded Talkin’ Off The Wall for his first ever disc in 1955, he was indeed caught up in a musical moment that was ‘off the wall’ – in other words seen as highly unusual, strange, eccentric, bizarre. It was the time of the emergence of rockabilly and white rock and roll.

Briefly, the ‘rockin daddy from ding dong Tennessee’ was hot stuff, playing shows with Presley, Perkins, Cash and all the other singers from Memphis whose music talked off the wall to a whole new generation. Today, it does so again.

The CD version of ‘Talking Off The Wall!’ contains all the 14 LP tracks plus another 11 recordings illustrating other ways of playing some of the songs Eddie recorded.

Two of the alternative tracks are by Eddie himself; a 1975 later version of his signature Mercury recording from 1956, Rockin’ Daddy, and another take on Boo Bop Da Caa Caa, released on his Stompertime label in 1959 within a year of his rejected Sun version.

Eddie Bond’s long career as a country disc jockey as well as a singer put him in a fine position to pick interesting songs to record, sometimes when they were new and other times when he thought they could be given new life. It was a rare thing when Eddie didn’t match or improve on other versions.

Sonny Fisher wrote and first recorded Rockin’ Daddy in 1956 and we include that along with an alternative version, also from the 1950s.

Lattie Moore had first made Juke Joint Johnny for Speed Records in Nashville in 1952 and then adapted it as Juke Box Johnnie in 1956. Red Sovine soon recorded it again as Juke Joint Johnnie, all well before Eddie Bond’s version.

Hank Penny had recorded a strange western-swing-pop version of the offensive song Look Like A Monkey in 1952 for RCA, again years before Eddie recorded it.

On the other hand, Eddie’s recording of Slip Slip Slippin’ In was made very soon after Lou Millet’s version on Nashville’s Republic label in 1956. Finally, we can see here that Eddie’s version of I Got A Woman was made a year after Ray Charles’s original but before Elvis Presley’s take on the song in 1956. The comparisons are all fascinating stuff.

The compilation was done by Nico Feuerbach and the liner notes by Martin Hawkins, universally recognized music historian and expert on the music of Memphis, Tennessee.