One Hit No More, No. 3: Frankie Ford & His "Sea Cruise" to a Hall of Fame

Fascinating dude, honestly.

“He was playing this schmaltz stuff in a bar. We requested 'Alimony,' which is one of his songs he hadn't played in years. He was overjoyed. He stopped playing and came and talked to us. And we were thrilled.”
- Robert Plant, yes that one

I'd put real money on a bet that the majority of the people who know Frankie Ford's, “Sea Cruise,” only know it as a jingle for a Red Lobster commercial. It could have been a Skipper's commercial for all that it matters, but more people would come up with that before they could dredge up Frankie Ford. Again, that's my bet. Alternately, a rock legend like Plant “thrilled” (his word) on meeting Ford and taht tells another story. I always get a kick out of stories like that. It’s not just the bond between artists, it’s also how they go to deeply unexpected places.

The two obituaries I read for Ford note the same thing, only without saying it outright: Ford never stopped working. To extrapolate a little from a line in the obituary in the New Orleans Times-Picuyane, his world shrank a bit after “Sea Cruise” plopped him on the national stage. (“[Ford] held down regular gigs at the Ivanhoe, the Backstage 500 Club, the Gateway, his own club at Toulouse and Bourbon, and finally Lucky Pierre's, presiding over a lounge-style act peppered by risque one-liners.”) Still, the man played American Bandstand, sure as that’s Dick Clark pitching a pack of gum in the introduction, and no one can take that away from him.

All that said, there’s a wart in this story and there’s no point talking around it. To preface it, I lifted this out of The New York Times’ obituary:

“In the late 1950s, [Ford] came to the attention of New Orleans record producers and label owners who were keen to craft “teen idols” - white singers who might tap into a larger market than what was available to black rhythm & blues singers.”

While I wouldn't state outright that Frankie Ford climbed to his big break up another man’s ladder - and I can't, really, not on this little research - the history of rock ‘n’ roll in general (see above) makes a pretty good case that I should be talking about Huey “Piano” Smith right now. According to Smith's Wikipedia page (scroll down), he recorded the first version of "Sea Cruise," only to have the label strip his vocals and replace them with Ford's. There could be more to the story, sure - during his induction into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame at Baton Rouge (“LMHOF BTR”), Ford explained this as a touring issue (i.e., Smith didn’t travel, whereas Ford did) - and Smith’s Wikipedia page doesn’t make any references to him leaving Louisiana. It also doesn’t mention any hang-ups about traveling, but it does note that Smith had two more gold records than Ford, so draw whatever conclusions from that that most brighten your day.

One Hit No More Chapter 5: The Monotones Squeezed All They Could Out of "The Book of Love"

Bottom row, to the left. Like a damn eye chart.

When I started this series with Bobby Day, it felt like I was really onto something. That Day enjoyed a long career, if a quiet one, supported the theory that these artists are more than their one, lonely moon-shot to fame. Day's career continued for years after "Rockin' Robin," plus a later act calld Bob & Earl, an earlier/later one with The Hollywood Flames, shows at the Apollo Theater, and tours across the country from his Los Angeles base of ops. He didn't stop for years, basically.

It’s the opposite with The Monotones. The one hit they had - 1958's “The Book of Love” - was massive. Possessed with the cultural stickiness of, say, Soft Cell's “Tainted Love,” The Monotones’ takes people back to their youth, almost physically with the way they tell it. It sounds all kinds of 50s, of course, with its clean, clipped back-beat, the interplay between the kick and the snare, the nice, polite doo-wop vocals. It also has something a little different: the word “novelty” kept coming up in sources on the band, something that happens when your song is a long-form pun. Riffing on a conceit about books - i.e., they assigned a chapter to each couplet in the verses - “The Book of Love” had the tidiness of a Tin Pan Alley tune, something that gets stuck in the ear by design. Is it a hokey tune? Sure, but have I ever shit on Elvis Costello’s “Every Day I Write the Book”?

The earth moved under no one’s feet, and not a single mind got blown by The Monotones 2:18 minutes of pop confetti. It’s a fun tune, though, an easy sing-along (that’s four parts, minimum), and with good, clean lyrics that absolutely no one but a moral maniac could object to.

And that’s where the (mild) tragedy kicks in. All the half-dozen sites I found on The Monotones hit the same anecdotes: the story of how Charles Patrick came up with the song (toothpaste commercial), the brick coming through the window at the recording session, called back forever more with the bass-drum kick before they sing the “who wrote the book of love” of the opening. Those stories get less interesting every time you read it, and that’s the kicker: the “happy” for this band ends, more or less, with “The Book of Love.”

One Hit No More, Chapter 10: Bobby Day, Rockin' Robin & A Dabble in Doo Wop

What? So they didn't get billing...

For the record, the concept beyond this series is the thought that inspired A Project of Self Indulgence.

The simple existence of the One-Hit Wonder just doesn’t sit right with me. If a band/artist got famous enough to make that one massive hit, surely, they did something before that and kept trying until they got there, right? This series looks beyond that one slim (massive) hit to check in on the hopes/dreams of the people who made them. I drew the list of candidates come from (where else?) a Wikipedia page devoted to these artists and I’ll be using Spotify for the research. (Love it or hate it, Spotify definitely made me a little crazy. But I digress…)

Bobby Day, born Robert James Byrd, 1930, came up in the greater Fort Worth, Texas metropolitan area. Wikipedia lists 1958’s “Rockin’ Robin” as his signature hit, but Day wrote three famous songs. The other versions eclipsed his originals in each case, but he garnered enough attention to play major, miles-out-of-market gigs and with a handful of artists whose names stuck to their famous songs for the long haul - e.g., The Penguins, with “Earth Angel.” Even if his name didn’t follow all of the songs he wrote, Day enjoyed a decade-plus career in the Los Angeles music scene bouncing between this act and that, typically as the starring member.

Day left Texas for Los Angeles fame at the young age of 15 (which, for context, puts his move at 1945). Day came in and out of an act called The Hollywood Flames for most of his career, but he had a complicated relationship with that anchor act. The group chased fame in a remarkably “throw-it-at-the-wall” spirit, including a number of name changes* and creative alliances that shifted as other performers came in and flew out of The Hollywood Flames’ orbit. (* Some treated the backing band as so many inter-changeable parts - The Turks became The Jets became The Sounds - while others treated the front-man as an after-thought. For instance, when Day led the group, they went with Bobby Day & the Satellites, but that switched to Earl Nelson & The Pelicans when his future collaborator in Bob & Earl, Earl Nelson, took lead vocals.) Day managed to stay on top of that shifting pile long enough to record a couple dozen songs as a solo artist. That same period also happened to be his most fruitful as a songwriter.

The fact Day borrowed “Rockin’ Robin” from a man named Leon Rene (writing, perhaps unsurprisingly, as Jimmie Thomas) makes his career into something like a karmic cycle. Day wrote songs that made other bands famous several times over his career, e.g., The Dave Clark Five for “Over and Over” and Thurston Harris for “Little Bitty Pretty One.” A fun footnote about the latter: “Little Bitty Pretty One” was a loving nickname for Day's wife, Jackie.

About Me & The Thing That Had to Die So That This One Could Live

Starting over. With a fresh appreciation of the dangers.

[Ed. - This is a successor blog to another one titled, A Project of Self Indulgence. The story of its demise will follow the formal introduction of this new project, but the short version is that its ambitions outgrew the original premise.]

Welcome to MAME, aka, Middle Age Music Express (and if you’re NME, it’s a tribute, please don’t sue), a site devoted to popular music in its abundance of forms. I’ve concocted several running features, most of them built around brief histories of musical artists, and a hell of a lot of links to Youtube’s (apparently) infinite collection of music. That said, as this site’s one and only author and curator of content, my taste in music will drive a lot of content, for good or ill.

I use the phrase “popular music” to encompass just about any musical form that follows the “verse/chorus” structure that goes back to at least the Tin Pan Alley era (i.e., late 19th century through about the 1930s). A heavy majority of what I listen to starts with the early-1960s and continues to music that’s coming out right now; in other words, I do try to keep up (and enjoy it). To further narrow down what this business of “my taste in music” means, I generally like the indie stuff, and don't like Top 40, or most things you can hear on the radio. [Ed. - Related: I have a visceral hatred of radio as a conceptual failure.] To give a brief history of favorite genres: I started with classic rock until the middle of high school, which is when I found punk/alternative/”college” rock; from there, garage rock lead to a broader appreciation of independently-produced music generally and, I had my first encounters with rap/hip hop starting with the late 1980s, but my interest/education on that only really took off around 2010.

A lot of back-and-forth comes in and out of the above timeline – e.g., after starting with them, then kicking them to the curb in a fit of snobbery, I reconnected with The Who in my early 30s – and that’s a fair warning on how this site will operate. My general preferences don’t mean I won’t one day spend two weeks trying to figure out all the fuss around, say, Beyonce.

Moving on now to nuts-‘n’-bolts, at the risk of crawling back into the tiger pit to jump up and down on the jagged bamboo sticks (see the past/below), I plan on producing the following features.