CLASSIC SIDES COMING BACK, SAYS TOP EXEC.

Byline: Dan DeLuca Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

With the release of ``The Philly Sound,'' the bulk of the music Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff created for Philadelphia International is readily available.

That's not the case, however, with the catalog of Cameo-Parkway Records, the Philadelphia label whose 1960s success rivaled that of Gamble and Huff's PIR a decade later.

Since the early 1980s, the Cameo-Parkway catalog has been out of print. So while many Cameo artists such as Chubby Checker, Bobby Rydell and the Orlons have rerecorded their hits, their original Cameo recordings have never been available on compact disc.

And Jody Klein of ABKCO Entertainment, the New York firm run by his father, Allen Klein - who bought Cameo-Parkway in 1967, closed it the following year, and still controls the catalog - is familiar with the complaints.

Klein says that the Cameo catalog, which also includes a Clint Eastwood version of ``Rawhide'' and early material by British rockers the Kinks, has been out of print for ``a myriad of reasons.''

The rerecorded versions of Cameo songs have been available in budget packages for so long, Jody Klein says, that it has made ABKCO ``wonder whether it's worth it'' to issue the Cameo catalog at all. And Klein adds that efforts to cut down on bootleggers have been time-consuming.

And now for the good news: Without revealing specifics, Klein says that Checker fans will be able to twist again next year. In 1998, ABKCO plans to release one multidisc box set plus several individual artist albums, the likely candidates being Checker, the Orlons, Rydell, the Tymes, the Dovells and Dee Dee Sharp.