Joey Levine: The Would-be King of Jingles

Behind the Bubblegum Curtain: 

Joey Levine and the Kasenetz-Katz Bubblepop Marketing Superscheme

Sometimes you feel like a nut, and sometimes you don’t.  This is something we all know.  Even children too young to know the jingle accept this as a fact, and we have Joey Levine to thank for it.

The Almond Joy jingle is just the start.  Joey Levine has been inside your brain, with “Pepsi- The Joy Of Cola”, “Gentlemen Prefer Hanes”, “Just For the Taste of It- Diet Coke”, “Orange you smart, (for drinking Orange Juice)”, “Come See the Softer Side of Sears”, “Chevy-- The Heartbeat of America”,  "Who's that Kid With the Oreo Cookie," and "This Bud's For You".  A good jingle should not be taken lightly, and these are some mammoths.  There is a strong chance that, somewhere in America right now, there is a man or a woman, aging and Alzheimered, who is struggling to put a name to the face of their own son or daughter, but can only bring to mind a Joey Levine slogan.  Chances are, at least a dozen people, with a can of Diet Coke in sight, will begin think-singing “Just for the taste of iiiiitttt……..Diet Coke!”, an impulse they can’t quite control or understand.  And it turns out Joey Levine was attaching catchy songs to products in America’s consciousness long before he got into the jingle business. 

Joey’s music career began in 1966, at the age of 16, when he met Artie Resnick and started writing and selling songs after school.  Resnick had an in at the Brill Building, having penned The Drifters’ hit “Under the Boardwalk” and “Good Loving” by the Rascals, among others.  Along with Artie’s wife Kris, they formed the group The Third Rail, and had a minor hit in 1967, with “Run Run Run”, the first and perhaps best of many hit songs to feature Joey’s words and voice.

Though Joey would remain songwriting partners with both Artie and Kris, The Third Rail soon split.  By then he had found work writing songs for Special K, the production team of Jerry Kasenetz and Jeffrey Katz, whose roster of acts included The Music Explosion, The Ohio Express, The 1910 Fruitgum Company, Crazy Elephant, Professor Morrison’s Lollipop, The Shadows of Knight, The Rock’N’Roll Double Bubble Trading Card Co. of Philadelphia 1941, and, for one single, Bo Diddley.  Joey had drawn the attention of Special K after his song “Try It” became an underground hit for The Standells.  They told him, “We think you can write some of this teenybopper music”, and they were right.

His biggest success came first, when he recorded a demo of “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy” for The Ohio Express.  The process was, Levine and some studio musicians would record the track with dummy vocals to be recorded over by the band’s singer later.  Kasenetz and Katz liked the demo track so much, they released it as is.  When Neil Bogart, President of Buddha Records, heard his label’s newest hit, he said “have this guy sing on the records”, and so Joey became the voice behind the curtain for most of Ohio’s hits, like “Chewy Chewy”, and sang songs for labelmates The 1910 Fruitgum Company as well.  Meanwhile, the poster members for each group toured around, lip-synching for TV, and sounding nothing like themselves when they had to play live. 

Joey Levine and his fellow songwriters and studio musicians would churn out a new recording every two days—one day to record the basic track and one for overdubs, writing new songs in the time between.  If a song failed, it would be altered slightly and released under a new name.  Not only did he hit big with the Express and the Fruitgum Co, during this period Joey Levine also wrote or co-wrote “Mony Mony”, “Gimme Gimme Good Lovin’”, and “I Enjoy Being a Boy (In Love With You)”, among countless others.  In the late 60’s, If there was an incessantly repetitive, insanely catchy, possibly onomatopoeic chorus stuck in your head, chances are Joey Levine was behind it.  In a 1999 interview with WFMU’s Keith Bearden, Levine said of the time, “It was great. I had Top 10 records, my voice was all over the radio, but nobody knew who I was unless I wanted them to. The best kind of fame. It got me into a lot more parties at school, for sure.”

Life was good for the young prince of bubblegum pop.  Special K Productions and Buddha Records were making their mark.  Then came their masterstroke, The Kasenetz-Katz Singing Orchestral Circus.

The album is billed as an Original Cast Recording of a live Carnegie Hall performance, eight of Special K’s hottest acts joining together to form a 46-member supergroup for one special, sold-out performance.  The cover art is spectacular—it is a wide angle assemblage of characters either posed or pasted in a car graveyard.  Then there is the inside cover, each group in their own pop art block, the 1989 Musical Marching Zoo’s animal costumes outdone only by the absent space of the St. Louis Invisible Marching Band.  The album also included a sheet of stamps with everyone’s picture, name, and band listed, like a periodic table.  In the liner notes, Buddha President Neil Bogart describes the concert—“…colossal!  Stupendous!  mind-blowing!... exploded into an unreal, riotous extravaganza of sight and sound.”

For their part Kasenetz and Katz offer this bit of wicked irony—

“eight groups joined together for the first time in musical history, blending together as if they’d never been apart.” 

Turns out the show never really happened, and the album itself is largely awful.  It begins promisingly enough, with a cavalcade of trumpets, a crowd gone wild, and an emcee introducing the cast, Kasenetz and Katz in top billing, but this is followed immediately by a piss poor cover of “We Can Work It Out” and the album mostly continues to disappoint from there.  Recorded in the studio with all the usual players, The Kasenetz-Katz Singing Orchestral Circus consists mainly of covers, including hacks at “A Place in the Sun”, “You Lost That Loving Feeling”, and “Yesterday”, plus middling songs by Levine and other Special K songwriters, and a few of the most bizarre intros or segues ever put to tape.  The most remarkable of these little fillers is titled “Count Dracula”.  It features a roll call of monster movie and comic book characters, delivered in a maniacal psychedelic voice with an implacably bad accent, on a bed of echoed Halloween sound effects, offering a jarring threat of peace and love:

 “Lenny Frankenstein is here!  Quasimodo is alive and well among us… You see, ladies and gentlemen, my friends and I are going to capture your mind, and are going to take you to our world, land of peace, equality, and brotherhood of man!  I suggest no one make a sound or yell for help!  Batman and Robin have been captured!  Bat Lady and Superman are with us!  The Walrus is about to be captured and overrun!  Tonight, Ladies and Gentlemen, the world will be CONSUMED!!!”

The bizarre can only flavor the insufferable for so long, but gold awaits at the end of Side 1, with Levine’s “Down In Tennessee”, which sounds more like Brian Wilson’s California than any part of Old Dixie, but is an undeniably infectious confection nonetheless.

Side 2 begins with The Music Explosion’s “Little Bit O Soul” and the Fruitgum staple “Simon Says”, both of which, as far as I can tell, take the original recordings and overdub enough reverbed singlalong vocals, clapping, and crowd noise to nearly drown out the song.  Both are labeled as “In Concert”.  Though not labeled “In Concert”, Levine’s “Latin Shake” continues with the crowd noise, which renders the song unlistenably muddled, a crowd which stops abruptly for the Kasenetz/Katz original, “Mrs. Green”.  Patience is again rewarded near the end of Side 2, with a cover of “Hey Joe” that stands among the best, with its buzzing guitar and tribal garage rhythm.  A second drum comes in and the song starts to sound like Can, or even The Beta Band, and I’m starting to think I’ve stumbled upon a forgotten miracle, until the song ends and the Kasenetz-Katz Singing Orchestral Circus slaughters “Yesterday” as a finale.

The album was largely a flop, but Super K tried again shortly after, cutting the fiction to 5 bands and renaming the supergoup the Kasenetz-Katz Super Circus, scoring two more hits with Joey front and center, the punk blueprint “Quick Joey Small” and “Shake”, which was the Shadows of Knight’s minor hit with a new vocal track slapped on.  Levine added another band name to the list with the 1974 Reunion hit “Life Is a Rock (But the Radio Rolled Me)”, which REM and Billy Joel each aped with great success.  Throughout, Joey Levine remained the secret king of Bubblegum, and the voice behind the curtain of fresh faces and dazzling costumery.  And this was all before the jingles, when it was him, not Chevy, who was the heartbeat of America.