The Sonny Side of Chér

Think of The Sonny Side of Chér, Cher's second solo adventure from 1966, as Sonny Bono's audition tape for the role of producer he'd given himself. He tries to recreate the folk-rock spark of All I Really Want to Do, then loses his nerve halfway through and reaches for the lounge act.

Lead-off track "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)," already a smash by the time the album dropped, is both its savior and its most theatrical number. It's kitsch, it's camp, it's been covered to death, and Cher nails it almost on autopilot. At least it has pizzazz.

Then come the freshies. Cher reaches for gravitas—or at least claps hopefully in its direction—on covers of Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" and Bob Lind's "Elusive Butterfly." She's still figuring out what to do with this kind of material, but there are glimmers. Her take on "Time" by Michael Merchant is sincere and lands.

But it goes sideways fast. The pivot to lounge-lizard pop—"Our Day Will Come," "Milord"—reads like a hedge: as if thinking Cher couldn't carry a folk-rock LP on her own, Sonny padded the back half with standards aimed at the Vegas-adjacent audience he and Cher were starting to court as a duo. These tracks belong on a different record, and Cher sings them like she knows it—polite, uncommitted, waiting for the take to end. "Ol' Man River" is drowning in its own arrangement, with no lifeboat in sight. Long gone are the fire and commitment that made her debut sparkle.

A few gems, plenty of junk—the whole thing is a yard-sale haul. Worth a look for die-hards and the Cher-curious, but the masterpiece is one album back, and two albums forward.