In the Days when Hot Pop Was On
Top
It is 1926. Two years after the birth of his brother, the poet
Michael Hamburger, Paul Bertrand Wolfgang Hamburger is born. By 1965 he goes by
Paul Hamlyn, a last name he picked out of a phone book, or preferably Baron
Hamlyn of Edgeworth, and has been in the publishing business for 15 years. He
has struck a deal with EMI to create Music for Pleasure Records, specializing
in low budget repackages of odds and sods by names as big as The Beatles, Pink
Floyd, Blondie, The Beach Boys, Hendrix and The Animals, cashing in on dreg
leftovers cut by sellable names. The label also goes on make and market their
own original recordings, mostly of showtunes, studio cast recordings of South
Pacific, Carousel, and The Sound of Music. Music for Pleasure
was not the most reputable name in the music industry, but reputation or no,
they sold records. Their Sound of Music sold 250,000 copies. All over
the UK, people in grocery stores were drawn in by the idea of listening to
someone kind of a little like Julie Andrews singing “Do-Re-Mi”, quietly,
because they are likely the kind of people who listen to music quietly when
they listen to it at all. A new market
for music was born.
It is London 1967 and Bill Welling enters the scene. He is a
former male model, an Australian, and a pioneer in the concept of the covers
album. His idea was, pick some semi-hits from the charts, cut soundalike
recordings of the songs using studio musicians, then sell the records on the
cheap, hope no one notices. Vocalists
were cast for songs on a weekly basis, a better living based on the number of
hit voices they could pull off. Elton John played as a studio musician on some
of the early Music for Pleasure hits collections, and the same is rumored to be
true of David Bowie, but no one knows for sure, since all of the MfP covers
albums are completely anonymous except for the songwriting credits.
They began
with Hits ’67, and once it sold the hits just kept on coming—Hits ’68,
Super Hits, Hit Hits, Smash Hits, Hits Again, and
finally Hot Hits, volumes 1-20. They were putting albums out rapid fire,
every couple of months, using temp talents, and an arranger who would figure
out how to play the songs by listening to the originals over and over.
Typically the arranger had ten days from when a song was picked to when it was
recorded, but sometimes, in order to guarantee the inclusion of the most
up-to-date hits, and therefore longer shelf life on the checkout counter at
Woolworths’, they would knock out a song start to finish in a day or two.
By the end of the decade, a number of other labels caught on to
the budget knockoff game, from the Marble House Chartbusters series to
Fontana’s Sounds Like Hits, to Rediffusion’s Pick of the Hits, to
Deacon’s Pick of the Pops, to Pickwick’s Top of the Pops. The
latter began in 1968 as a knockoff of Wellings’ first cover albums, with
recording faster and cheaper, but with a slicker sales force smart enough to
take on a name that was recognizable to all of England because of the TV show,
yet wasn’t copyright protected. In another brilliant marketing move, Pickwick
put a hot chick on every Top of the Pops cover, yanking images from
model agency portfolios of young up and comers. Soon Top of the Pops
overtook Music for Pleasure’s hits releases in sales, and from that day forth
Welling insisted a woman be on every Hot
Hits album cover.
Not knowing how Top of the Pops got their cover girls, MfP
arranged photo shoots, at first modeling their cover shots after the Pickwick
girls, then later settling on a single photographer and crew, and a theme, for
continuity. Beginning with Hot Hits 6, their biggest seller, each album
cover had a sports theme. The tradition began with a girl in a bikini playing
cricket, and led to hot shots of soccer, rugby, boxing, skiing (also bikinied),
archery, tennis (or dry humping the net, it’s hard to tell), holding the Olympic
torch, race car driving while wearing wreath made of tires, sledding (also
bikinied), scuba diving, billiards, motocross, croquet, and finally, for the
very unnecessary Hot Hits 20, listless fishing.
While none would match Music for Pleasure’s greatest cover album
success, Lennon & McCartney Tijuana-style, the budget cover album
concept as a whole, and Hot Hits in particular was turning out rather
successful. Acknowledging the success, in 1971 Record Retailer created a
Budget chart that ran alongside their top albums chart. Sales savvy Top of the Pops ruled the chart from the start, with Hot
Hits trailing. Then came the day, August 7th, 1971, when Record
Retailer decided to make the two charts one, letting the budget releases
run with the big boys, and Hot Hits 6, with its dream game of hot
cricket, became the #1 album in England, with Top
of the Pops 18 coming in sixth.
Top of the Pops hit #1 again
around Christmas, with Volume 20, until it was beaten out by Led
Zeppelin IV. Wellings followed with Hot Hits 8, which got to #2 but
couldn’t beat out T-Rex’s Electric Warrior. Major labels took notice of
the bold chart success these knockoff albums were having and complained about
it, so after only a year Record Retailer stopped including budget
records in the charts, and sales began to slow.
Wellings’ Hot Hits bowed out and went fishing with Hot
Hits 20, while Top of the Pops managed an epic 92 volumes, lasting
all the way into the future: 
Despite the massive number of these budget records that were
released, they remain largely a mystery. Their selling point now, as when they
were first released, has much more to do with the album covers than the covers
on the albums, and the images have lived on in the digital world, scattering
themselves among dozens of websites dedicated to tacky retro eye candy. Yet, it
is nearly impossible to find details about the musicians who played on the
albums, which makes sense in a way. Musicians didn’t get into the covers game
for fame and glory—it was a faceless business, aside from the one on the cover,
and many of the albums lack even production credits, listing only the
songwriters. The biggest unanswered question is how these labels were able to
make these albums to begin with—were song rights that cheap, did these records
predate our obsession with intellectual property and copyright profit, or were
they just pulling a fast one? All I know of the records, aside from some
internet scouring, comes from a pile of 30 or so that I was gifted by a
stranger in Coal Country, PA. It is a variety pack of budget releases—mostly of
Hot Hits and Top of the Pops, but also some of the lesser names
like Chartbusters, Sounds Like Hits, Pick of the Hits, Pick
of the Pops, and even a few that never caught on to the hot chicks
marketing scheme, all from England, which brings up further questions of
whether copyright laws were more lax under the Queen, if the records were
really that much cheaper in the States given import costs, and whether I should
be using “cheeky” more often in my descriptions.
The only print press I’ve been able to track down does actually
names names, focusing on Pickwick’s Top of the Pops. The sadly brief two
page spread by Kieron Tyler in the September 2000 issue of Mojo is
mostly taken up by pictures of the album covers, but includes some brief
interview snippets with session singer Tony Rivers, who stands by the work he
did, saying of the cover versions, “nobody would notice the difference at a
party”, and Bruce Baxter, who headed up production of Volumes 4 through 79.
Baxter details the breakneck production, explaining how a committee of label
folks picked 12 hits from the charts every Wednesday and sent the songs to him
that night, tasking him with writing a score for each track by listening to the
original 45s, booking the necessary musicians and studio space, and passing the
songs along to the scheduled singers, who had to figure out the lyrics.
Recording often began just two days after the songs were chosen. “It wasn’t
fair to the singers,” Baxter says, “they had 15 minutes at most”.
The Mojo article resurrected some interest in the Top of
the Pops records, and BBC4 followed up later that same year with a half
hour radio program on the same subject, again interviewing Baxter and Rivers,
and playing snippets of their works, including what is considered to be their
crowning achievement, “Bohemian Rhapsody”,
which they recorded in a single night, compared to the three weeks and 180
overdubs it took Queen to make the original. There is something astounding
about what they were able to accomplish, and under what conditions, and
something very punk rock as well. They were DIY to the core, taking the piss
out of the glorification of rock stardom, the seemingly unique genius and
untouchable nature of the huge hits they were counterfeiting. And in their
working class efforts and makeshift methods, they were in a strange sense paving
the way for the endearingly unremarkable essence of indie rock.
The BBC radio bit was about as big as the resurgence got, and the
program is sadly absent from the recesses of the web. The attention must have
given Tony Rivers a refreshing ego boost though, as he subsequently made a website
about the Mojo article and the BBC show, offering further details on how
he came to be involved in the Top of the Pops records, as well as a list
of 8 or 9 other studio singers who picked up the mic for the cause. You’ll also
find Rivers in the comments section of the few other websites that offer their
takes on the Top of the Pops era, he the voluntary spokesman, moved by
any sign of appreciation for their work, but the records remain of little more
than kitsch value, and are more or less reviled for the crass cash-in they
represent. The Hot Hits series, arguably the better quality imitation
musically, has far less documentation, and information about some of the more
obscure budget records are virtually non-existent, in a day and age when
everything exists virtually. In a way, the critical derision these records have
faced is a bit misdirected. I mean, sure, the intentions of the whole endeavor
is questionable, and the recordings themselves were motivated by profit and not
some stroke of creative inspiration, but there is earnestness to many of the
recordings that speaks to the true intentions of the performers. They may not
have been the famous rock stars they were aping, but they were talented
musicians nonetheless, and if things had turned out just a little different,
theirs could have been the names everyone knows.
In a way, the cover record phenomenon was before its time. In case
you hadn’t noticed, 2010 has been the year of the cover. With the accessibility
and ease of exchange when it comes to music today, it is not uncommon for
artists to be covered by their peers, and those covers, rather than lurking in
obscurity on some rare 7 inch or bootleg tape, are often just as accessible as
the originals. YouTube is riddled with people you don’t know playing songs you
know and love, and some acts, such as the heartmeltingly adorable duo Pomplamoose have achieved
legitimate fame and success in doing so. Beck has gotten in on the game with
his Record Club series,
where he invites colleagues to help him record an entire cover album in a day,
much in the spirit of Bruce Baxter and company. The Onion AV Club and Budweiser
teamed up for the Undercover series,
where they invited a string of bands to the Onion office to pick a song off a
list and record their own take on it, and Levi’s followed suit with their Pioneer Sessions,
not to mention the enormous success of Glee and its
soundtrack albums, or the horrors of The Squeakquel. Take for instance this shattering fact: in 2010, the cast of Glee broke the Beatles’ record for most
appearances on the Billboard singles chart.
In honor of this lost era of imposterism, and in light of an era
that takes lack of artistic originality as a given, I have collected the finest
moments from the thirty or so budget records I have, in an effort to show that
these recordings should not be written off so quickly as soulless manufacture.
However, a sign of my own bias against imitation, I found myself drawn mostly
towards songs I didn’t know, minor hits abroad that never caught on in the
States, where I had no sense of the original works that were being mimicked.
So, the collection doubles as an archive of minor Brit hits of the late 60’s
and early 70’s, those artists who may now be as obscure as the anonymous studio
folks playing them. And in many cases, I found that the budget versions, while
not exactly sounding identical, often sounded better than the originals. So,
without further ado, I present:
The Endless Records Bloomsburg
HOT POP PRIMER
Volume 1
- “Sugar Sugar” from
Marble Arch Chartbusters Volume 3
Maybe the most amped up version of this song ever recorded.
Everything is pushing itself into your ear, the sputtering bass hammering
crudely at your attention until the fuzz solo spits its way into the song just
before the two minute mark. The singer only sings half the words, to make you
feel like you are failing the song if you do not sing along. The toms are
stomping.
It is said to be one of George W. Bush’s favorite songs, and it is
what inspired Def Leopard to pen “Pour Some Sugar On Me”. The original version, the #1 Song of the Year in 1969, was
the biggest hit for The Archies, an imaginary cartoon band with music performed
and recorded by a bunch of studio musicians likely not paid much more than
these Chartbusters folks.
Kurt Russell
covered it for his 1970 debut, Kurt Russell. Wilson Pickett’s version was a top forty hit that same year. But I say even the Wailers’ cover pales in comparison to this version by
a bunch of Marble Arch anybodies. The miracle of it is that the song hardly
sounds like the original at all, which is strange since these people were being
paid specifically to mimic. Are these jammy rogues sticking it to the label
suits by rocking it out in their own way? No, life’s not that good. They were
actually covering awesomely-named British band Sakkarin’s version. Well,
lack of originality is basic physics, and for what it’s worth I think the
Marble Arch folks make the best “Sugar Sugar”.
- “Harlem
Shuffle” from Top Hits
You recognize the song from the first horn bleat, but then a
different song starts. Sorry, no House of
Pain. It is Bob & Earl’s “Harlem Shuffle”, a minor hit in
the US, slightly bigger in the UK, and perhaps the inspiration for Nelly and P.
Diddy’s “Shake Your Tail Feather”. I. The pink suit jacket-era Rolling Stones
covered the song godawfully, which inspired this music video featuring animation by John Kricfalusi, who would go on
to create Ren & Stimpy,
a video which may itself have been the inspiration for the rap career of MC Scat Cat.
French-Moroccan singer Vigon, who made a career of recording
popular soul and funk covers, also did
the “Harlem Shuffle”, but this one’s a case where nothing beats the
original. I am not sure what it would look like to do the Harlem
Shuffle, but I like that it’s fine if it takes all night to move to the right.
- “I
Didn’t Know I Loved You (Till I Saw You Rock & Roll)” from
Hot Hits 14
This version may be better than the original on a technicality,
because it is not being sung by a man
banned from 19 countries due to child pornography convictions, who fled the UK
on his yacht, sailing to Spain, Gibraltar, Cuba, Mexico, South Africa,
Zimbabwe, Colombia, Portugal, Brazil, Venezuela, and Thailand, before settling
in Cambodia, where he was deported and sent to the Philippines, who did not
want him. The
knockoff rocks well enough, but watch this video of Gary Glitter’s original,
and you will see there is something missing. Glitter had 26 hits throughout the
glam rock era, including one covered by every high school marching band in the country.
I have previous experience with a singing registered pedophile,
and as with Glitter it left me unsure of how I felt, or where to draw the line
between performer and performance. It took place at the Good Old Days, a bar in
Bloomsburg. The bar with, and I quote “the best head in town”.
It was karaoke night, because every night is karaoke night at the Good Old
Days. A flabby man wearing a stained white T-shirt, balding but with a babyish
face, wearing some sort of toy crown on his head, looking like a neglected
child just discovered after 20 years under a pile of crumpled Burger King bags
and fountain soda cups stuck to the couch by unnamable substances, is handed
the microphone. He is a known sex offender and he is heavy drunk. He is singing
Elvis, gyrating his hips so that the flab of him echoes back the motion in
counter waves. He is putting it all into the performance, the kind of obscene
self-embarrassment that karaoke night thrives on. He is singing “Suspicious
Minds”, the song
sung by Elvis impersonators everywhere. The words, as you already know, go: “We’re caught in a trap / and I can’t walk out / because I love you too
much baby”, and I wonder for the first time, just how old is
that baby, and how much is too much? The scene suddenly seemed far more
disturbing. At least as long as he’s singing karaoke, the kids are safe, and,
as I mentioned, every night is karaoke night at the Good Old Days. It makes me
think, if only we could have kept Gary Glitter up on that stage, the world
would be a better place.
- “Children
of the Revolution” from Hot Hits 14
Even the children of the revolution could be fooled by this T Rex
impression. If fact, children of the revolution, the first generation born
after an overwhelming change, are, according to Wikipedia, “a blank slate on which the values of the
revolution are imposed… because the generation has no shared memory of the
prior world they cannot compare the new system with the old and will
uncritically accept the new system as the natural”. In other
words, they are gullible suckers, so the chances the children of the revolution
will be fooled are actually pretty good.
Well, there were a lot of suckers for T Rex at the height of the
glam scene in England. This song made it to #2 on the UK charts, breaking a
streak of four consecutive #1 songs. Marc Bolan and Co. even got some attention stateside,
bolstered by David Bowie’s popularity among young Americans, he a
missionary for glam, as well as the crossover success of their song “Bang a Gong (Get It On)”. “Children of the Revolution”
was actually panned by some fans and critics upon its release, as it slowed the
rhythm down from the boogier beat of earlier singles like “Hot Love”, “Telegram Sam” and
“Metal Guru”, and the song was never included on a T Rex
album. A rumor was parented by the silent majority that the song was communist
propaganda, based on title alone, but, like the best rock songs, it is about
teenage rebellion. For that, the song has remained a popular one to cover, with
dozens of recorded versions out there, including those by Soulwax, Bono,
Little Miss
Sunshine’s Mom, Elton John
with semi-famous puddle of mess Pete Doherty, and lots and lots
and lots and lots of strangers on YouTube.
- “Get
Together” from Rediffusion Sounds Like Hits 11
A mark of my age, I cannot hear this song in any form without
thinking of Nirvana,
Krist Novoselic’s mock cover at the start of “Territorial Pissings”. The most well-known version is by The Youngbloods, which, as the Baja Blues Band reminds us, was included on the Forrest
Gump soundtrack. The Youngbloods’ version is actually a cover of a Dino
Valenti song, one which was previously given a try by The Kingston Trio and Jefferson
Airplane, and has also been covered by the likes of Joni
Mitchell, Skeeter
Davis, and The
Carpenters. What is it that makes this supposedly generic
version of the song the best? Incessant hand claps. And that funked up bass
line helps too.
- “Rosie”
from Hits ‘68
Don Partridge is known in the UK as the
“king of the buskers”. A street urchin at 15, living on what he could burgle,
he began playing guitar on street corners around Europe in the early 60’s, and
soon found he gained more attention by playing as a one man band, sort
of like this, playing guitar, drum, tambourine and kazoo at the
same time. “Rosie”, his first recording, rose to #4 on the UK charts in 1968,
and he had a follow-up hit, “Blue Eyes”, which got up to #3. He recorded
a full-length album and in 1969 he rented out the Royal Albert Hall for a
“Buskers Happening”, a way for him to say goodbye to street performance on his
way to the big time.
His next single flopped, as did the one after that, and by the
1970’s Partridge was back to busking. He’s remained
active and has released a few other albums, one as recently as 2004, and has
popped up occasionally on BBC game shows. He picked up a bit of attention in
2005 when his song “Breakfast on Pluto” was included on the soundtrack to the
film of the same name, and is rumored to be living somewhere in East Sussex.
- “A
Cowboy’s Work Is Never Done” from Plexium Nonstop
Top 20 Volume 7
This one is a song by
Sonny and Cher, their last hit before Cher ditched Sonny for a
solo career. The cover version speeds the song up a notch, and for me it makes
all the difference. It’s hard to top this clip from The Slim Mims Show of a version by Roger & Patti Fay
for overall awesomeness, but there is something about the Plexium
version that is just better, a sharpness to it that makes it some sort of
Bulgarian Ska song if not for the words. I can’t find a single bit of
information about Plexium, except that they also released a Nonstop
Top 20 Christmas Party and, I’m assuming, at least six other volumes of Nonstop
Top 20.
The song’s lyrics are a strange mishmash of rap-worthy braggadocio
(“I was so handsome women cried / and I got shot but I never died”),
what sounds like an S&M allusion with the hint of a Ms clipping (“I
could play, if I'd do everything he'd say / Girls seemed to just get in his
way / Those days we weren't considered fun”), and lines that are just sort
of confusing (“He’d fight crime all the time / He’d always win / Till his
mom would break it up / and call him in”). Perhaps the reason why the Plexium
version is better has something to do with the fact that the female singer
basically takes the lead, rather than trying to divide the already scattered
lyrics into a more formal duet. Sorry Sonny, this time anonymous wins.
- “Come
Back and Shake Me” from Top Hits
Clodagh Rodgers took this song to #3 on the UK chart, with the B-side “I Am A
Fantasy”, in 1969, her first hit, at the age of 22. She had been singing
professionally since the age of 13, scoring a contract from Decca before she
could drive. Though her first name is more suggestive of a Viking grunt, it is
pretty clear Clodagh was going for more of a Mod goddess kind of thing,
Northern Ireland’s own Lulu. Though this would be her biggest hit, and her fame
never made it far out of the UK, Clodagh did manage to be a regular on British
TV (which earned her death threats from the IRA), and even had a few film
roles. In 2001, she appeared in an episode of a web series called “The Bill”.
It was rumored to be a recurring role, though she was never called back in for
another episode.
The song is cloying as hell, especially with gag-worthy lines like
“The sparkle you put in my dolly eyes has gone since that cloudy bye-bye day”,
but there is something about it, especially leading into the chorus, that makes
it sound ripe for She &
Him Volume 3.
- “Coz
I Luv You” from Top Hits of the Year
Pioneering text spellers Slade wrote this song in
under a half an hour, which after a listen seems like a fairly manageable feat.
The band was enormous in the UK, with 17 Top 20 hits in a row. They were
fixtures in the glam scene, yet their biggest hit was Brit seasonal favorite “Merry Xmas
Everybody”. They did manage to make a name for themselves
stateside, but their most recognizable song here, “Cum On Feel the Noize”, is most often attributed to Quiet
Riot, who also had a hit with another Slade cover, “Mama Weer All Crazee Now”, which was also covered by The Runaways.
The Top Hits version skips Slade’s signature electric
violin without losing much, but otherwise plays straight to the original album
cut, right down to the cavernous handclaps.
- “Me
and My Life” from Marble Arch Chartbusters Now!
The original, by the Tremeloes, has nothing on the Marble Arch
cover, especially given the
lame dunebuggy bros and brews music video they shot for it. The
Tremeloes were, in essence, the Shitty Beatles, having auditioned for Decca the
same time the Fab Four did, some Decca exec still rolling in his grave for
choosing the Tremeloes over their goldmine counterparts. The Tremeloes had a
similar type of multiple singers/songwriters approach, and even released a
cover of “Twist and Shout” the same time the Beatles did. What they didn’t have
was the songwriting, yet they managed a string of hit covers in the UK
throughout the 60’s, including Roy Orbison’s “Candy Man”, Dylan’s “I Shall Be
Released”, “Good Lovin’”, “I Want Candy”, “Do You Love Me”, Cat Stevens’ “Here
Comes My Baby” and even “Good Day Sunshine”. By the late 60’s, the band began
writing their own songs, typically penned by Alan Blakley and Len Hawkes. “Me
and My Life”, sung by Blakley, was one of the first and last Tremeloes
originals to chart, but it only reached #4 in the UK, and failed to make a mark
in the States, and nothing the band would do ever matched the success of the
band’s cover songs.
In 2004, bassist Hawkes formed The Class of ’64, with ex-members of The Kinks and The
Hollies. They opened for The Animals on their 40th Anniversary tour,
then headlined a tour and cut an album of covers, but in 2007 the rest of the
band ditched Hawkes and formed a new cover band, called first the Legends of
the Sixties, then The Hitmen.
- “Samson
and Delilah” from Hot Hits 8
This song was the last UK hit for mediocre Scottish pop act Middle of
the Road, a band name that doesn’t exactly raise expectations.
“Samson and Delilah” peaked at #26 in the UK, paltry compared to their earlier,
bigger hits like “Chirpy Chirpy Cheap Cheap”, “Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dum”, and “Soley Soley”, and they never even managed to chart in the
US, not even with “Sacramento (A Wonderful Town)”. While remaining unknown in
the States, the band gained enough of a following throughout Europe to float
them as a touring act through the 90’s. Of their first hit, band member Ken
Andrew admitted, “Ok, ‘Chirpy’ wasn’t the most intellectual song in the world but it did
turn out to be one of the most popular.”
- “The
Slider” from Hot Hits 8
Even the original
version of this song sounds like a T Rex cover, with a bit of
Led Zeppelin tossed in. After abandoning the freak folk of his first
incarnation, Tyrannosaurus
Rex, Marc Bolan, if not exactly covering himself, at least certainly
found a style to stick with, and the T Rex brand of riff rock was a big seller,
so much that the MfP folks must have kept their Marc Bolan soundalike on
call. “The Slider” is from an album of the same name, one with cover art by Ringo Starr, an arresting B&W shot of
Bolan looking a little like a leading lady in some silent film. The album
came on the heels of Bolan’s biggest success, Electric Warrior, and, as
Stephen Thomas Erlewine puts it in The
All-Music Guide to Rock, 1995:
“The Slider offers nothing new --
it's still the same trashy glam-rock that made Electric Warrior and Tanx
sublime -- but that's why it's special. No one else could get away with
"Metal Guru," "Baby Boomerang," and "Chariot
Choogle" without seeming like a fool. Bolan does it with style and grace,
and with a wink.”
There is something wonderfully mindless about T Rex. Something
questionable too, that evil seed that grew into hair metal. Bolan’s delivery is
total put on as he sings nonsense like “I have never kissed a car before”, but
there is something about that blatant sex riff that has you imagining a makeout
session in a fast car in a high school parking lot and one thing leads to
another, lips miss lips and instead kiss the dashboard and, yeah, it could
happen.
On a side note, the band’s publicist tried to sell the public on
“T-Rextasy” as the next Beatlemania, but it never really stuck. But The
Slider did stick, at least in the States, where it outsold even Electric
Warrior, but in the UK the album, the first to be released on Bolan’s own
label, was met with competition in the form of a greatest hits package, Bolan
Boogie, released by his former owners. Bolan’s own shadow was too much. The
Slider couldn’t match the band’s previous success, marking the start of a
slide that would carry through Bolan’s Ziggy impression, Zinc Alloy and
the Hidden Riders of Tomorrow, as well as the electrosoul of
Bolan’s Zip
Gun, on til September 1977 when Bolan and his girlfriend were driving drunk on their way home from a
party and drove into a tree less than a mile from home, killing Bolan two weeks
before his 30th birthday. He had recorded 13 albums
by then.
- “Montego
Bay” from Hot Hits 2
Montego Bay is the second largest city in Jamaica, named Golfo de
Buen Tiempo by Columbus, which later turned to Montego as a bastardization of
the Spanish word for lard, “Manteca”, since it was THE port for lard and
leather transportation. Bobby Boone
instantly whistled a tune from merely being there, penning the song
with Jeff Barry, also his songwriting partner for the Archies’ “Sunlight”.
Bloom also co-wrote “Mony Mony” and served as sound engineer for Louis
Jordan and Shuggie
Otis, among others.
Bloom had a few more hits after “Montego Bay”, but suffered from
immense depression and apparently killed himself on February 28th,
1974. He was 28 years old. It was with a gun, a derringer found near the body.
Jeff Barry, his old songwriting partner, claimed surprise when he found out he
was the sole beneficiary of Bobby Bloom’s life insurance policy.
- “Popcorn”
from Hot Hits 8
This instrumental came out of synthpop’s earliest days, recorded in
1969 by Gershon Kingsley. The band Hot Butter made
a hit cover version in 1972, which became the first electronic song to reach
number one, a top ten hit in six countries. The Hot Butter version remains the
131st best-selling single of all time in France. The song has since been covered a few dozen
times, by the likes of Jean Michel
Jarre, Caustic
Window (aka Aphex Twin), DJ Crazy
Frog, Muse,
Faith No
More, and the Swedish Chef.
- “Mexican
Puppeteer” from Plexium Nonstop Top 20 Volume 7
“The Young New Mexican Puppeteer”, a name shortened by Plexiun to
no doubt pass the savings on to you, was a minor hit for Tom Jones in 1972,
barely cracking the Top 100 in the U.S. but reaching #6 in England. The song,
written by a slew of folks, reportedly borrows a melody from Disney’s Pinocchio,
and “tells the story of a puppeteer from New Mexico, who uses puppets to
encourage social and political change”.
In what is likely Los
Lunas or Rio Rancho, maybe Bernadillo, since there aren’t really many towns near Albuquerque, there is this kid who gets to thinking about
how down and depressed everybody is and decides that a puppet show is the
answer.
With frowns and worries in
their faces, they’re lost and don’t know where to go.
He said “I’ll get the people
straightened by putting on a puppet show”.
The young New Mexican
puppeteer, he saw the people all lived in fear.
He thought that maybe they’d
listen to a puppet telling them what to do.
So he assembles the Fantastic Four of motivational puppetry: Young
Abe Lincoln, MLK, Old Mark Twain, and Jesus. And the crowd goes wild. Needless to say, the song is not among the
most covered in the Tom Jones catalog.
- “Resurrection
Shuffle” from Hot Hits 4
A live staple for Tom Jones in the 80’s, “Resurrection Shuffle” was the one
big hit for the group Ashton, Gardner, & Dyke. Members Tony Ashton and Roy
Dyke came from The Remo Four, who worked with George Harrison on the
music for the movie Wonderwall,
while bassist Kim Gardner previously played in The Birds and The Creation. "Resurrection
Shuffle", from the band’s 1971 album, The Worst of Ashton, Gardner, & Dyke, got to #3 in
the UK and #40 in the States, earning them a one-hit wonder tag. The band
petered out through three albums, including What A Bloody Long Day It’s Been and Let It Roll. Their final work was for the soundtrack
of a B movie starring Joe Namath, called The Last Rebel. Tina Turner
and Cher made it a duet, and the song has also been covered by
the Johnny
Eisenhower Blues Band and Cattletruck.
- “Double
Barrel” from Hot Hits 5
The song was an early breakthrough for ska worldwide, reaching #1
on the UK singles chart, and #22 stateside. The drummer on the original hit by Dave and Ansell Collins was none other
than a 14-year-old Sly of reggae institution Sly & Robbie, playing on his
first record. That may be him playing in this clip
from the TV show coincidentally named the same as the budget record label
selling cover versions of the songs the show plays, Top of the Pops.
It’s hard to tell because I can’t take my eyes off the village witch doctor on
bass. The Hot Hits version mostly leaves out the grass skirt, playing up
the song’s American soul elements.
- “Black
Skin Blue Eyed Boys” from Top of the Pops Volume 15
This is a song by The Equals, one of London’s first racially integrated pop bands,
formed in the 60’s by Mr. Electric
Avenue himself, Eddy Grant,
who according to Rocktober magazine sought out his bandmates after building a guitar for himself in shop class.
“Baby Come Back”, their first
single, released in 1966, failed to make a mark in the UK initially, but went
to #1 in Germany and The Netherlands, and eventually found its way to the top
in England, as well as to #32 on the U.S. charts. It would be their biggest
hit, and their only song to find play in the States. The psychedelic
politi-funk of “Black Skinned Blue Eyed Boys” was their last song to chart in
the UK, reaching #9 in 1970. Shortly after, Grant suffered a heart attack (at
the age of 23) that led to the demise of the band.
A bold anti-war song for its directness, lyrics like “They ain’t
got no country / They ain’t got no creed / People won’t be black or white / The
world will be half-breed / You see the black skinned blue eyed boys ain’t gonna
fight in no doggone wars” must have been terrifying at a time when miscegenation
was still a popular conversation topic. The Top of the Pops folks were
able to match the unrelenting rhythm of the original, while the singer may even
put a little more into the performance than Equals singer Lincoln Derv. Maybe
if the song were a hit stateside our mixed race president would have us in no
wars rather than two.
- “Running
Away” from Plexium Nonstop Top 20 Volume 7
A classy number for Plexium to pull off, and one they don’t
shortchange, the song “Runnin’ Away” was the final hit for Sly & the Family
Stone, off the largely dark and claustrophobic There’s A Riot Going On.
Though the song itself is warm and refined, a sort of Bacharach knockoff, or
twee funk, with a female vocalist almost entirely drowning out Sly’s vocals,
who otherwise was rumored to have recorded most of the album in isolation.
Cocaine addiction and the clamp of fame had been eating away at Sly for some
time, and the song’s lyrics are of a place far more dark and cynical than the
melody:
Running
away to get away
Ha!
Ha! Ha! Ha!
You’re
wearing out your shoes
Look
at you fooling you!
Another
day you’re farther away
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
A longer trip back home
Rather than a return home, Sly followed Riot with further
self-alienation, a recluse for decades, struggling with addiction and mental
health issues, until he recently returned to the public’s view, playing old
favorites at shows he at times abandons after only a few songs. In 2009 Sly
signed a deal with Cleopatra Records, who in the past have stuck to goth and
industrial, including “tribute” cover albums of songs by The Cure, New Order, and Smashing Pumpkins. In 2010, Sly released an album of new
versions of his old songs, with celebrity guests, always a sign of artistic
bottoming out, worse than a covers album.
He gave a well-documented, disastrous performance at Coachella
that same year, and in 2011 was living in a van Los Angeles, parked in front of
the home of a retired couple, who feed him daily and let him use their shower
and toilet. The couple’s son will
occasionally serve as Sly’s driver and assistant. Stone is described as being disheveled and
paranoid, fearful of the FBI, and desperate to make music his living again. Enthusiastic, he works on new material on a
laptop in the back of his camper van. He
has hundreds of songs ready, waiting. In
the NY Post article that broke the story, Sly told the reporter “Let these guys know, like Lady Gaga, let
me come in, just let me come in and pay me if you like it.”
In an interview, Cynthia Robinson, a former
member of the Family Stone, said of what has happened "With or without Sly, his music is well received… we
try to stick to the original music and writings as close as possible."--Chad McGaw, 2011
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