Young Love

Tab Hunter was an unlikely candidate for a pop star, even if actors like Sal Mineo and Robert Wagner had launched successful music careers. His 1956 single, “Young Love,” would change all that, and bring an unanticipated avalanche of controversy and legal troubles in its wake. Due to Tab’s seven-year contract with Warner Brothers, the company saw his recordings for Dot Records to be a breach of contract, leading to the creation of Warner Brothers Records (who would eventually house superstars such as Prince and Madonna) and banned all Tab Hunter singles created with Dot Records from being released. There was only one problem: Tab had already recorded an album’s worth of music.

Coinciding with Tab Hunter’s music tour with Sal Mineo and the Everly Brothers, 1961’s Young Love would offer Tab Hunter fans the music they’d protested for in 1957. Including Tab’s three best-selling singles smuggled out before the ban, “Young Love,” its B-side “Red Sails in the Sunset,” and the independently released “Ninety-Nine Ways,” Young Love was a compilation of all of the music Warner Brothers had withheld from the public for nearly half a decade. Released in the wake of Tab’s ended contract with Warner Brothers Records, it would offer a final look at Tab’s music career before its resurgence in the 1980s.

Similar to his three albums for Warner Bros., the album revolved around love songs, whether happy or sad. “But I Do” parallels the Warner track “I Wish I Didn’t Love You So,” and “Bye Bye Love” seems something like a sequel to the movie studio’s “I’ll Never Smile Again.” In spite of these differences, Tab seemed to favor Dot over Warners:

[Young Love’s songs] were tunes that I really liked. Randy [Wood, owner of Dot Records] was terrific. I loved the whole Dot operation; they were just fabulous people over there. I mean, everything was done on a handshake, and it was like real family. They were the best. Whereas Warners was more of a factory, and they were just starting out and really wanting to move on forward.

Even if they rereleased to an eager fanbase, nothing was quite like the original success of “Young Love.” Featuring Elvis Presley’s backup singers, The Jordanaires, the song would remain at number one on the Billboard charts for seven weeks, beating Presley himself. It would become the fourth most successful song of 1957 and earn Tab, by his own admission, “more money than [he] was making as a contract player at Warner Brothers.” The proceeding “Red Sails in the Sunset” was “about to chart,” alongside “Ninety-Nine Ways,” before the legal debacle at Dot. Through it all, it seems that Young Love will forever be a testament to Tab’s genuine recording career, not the one fueled by Warner Brothers:

Billy Vaughn [a producer at Dot Records] was excellent. That whole year of working with Randy [Wood], with Billy Vaughn, and with Milt Rogers [another producer at Dot Records]—they were family. It was a good group.