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.”

 

Before dragging through the dirt, let's detour into how they arrived. A famous church choir (wait for it) and a housing project threw together the six members of The Monotones: Patrick, Warren Davis, George Malone, Frankie Smith, John Ryanes, and Warren Ryanes. The housing project (Baxter Terrace) only matters because all the members lived in or near it, but the famous choir was run by Cissy Houston (yes, mother to Whitney Houston, aunt to Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick), the New Hope Baptist Choir, i.e., the stuff of music legend. Tens of millions grew up on those names, and it’s possible I could have hummed “The Book of Love” by the time I reached 30, but attaching that song to The Monotones and naming even one member? There’s no way in Hell. And that’s the rest of the story…

The band's life after “The Book of Love” changes with the telling. The most exonerating version says the band went on tour with big-shit names like Bobby Darin and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, but didn’t have time to drop a follow-up “until June” of 1959. And what followed makes sense of that.

The Monotones never followed up “The Book of Love,” because they didn’t have that many songs in them. They hit big with that single, but their limitations showed up in the aftermath. One site I found does the best work of walking you through the flame-outs (nearly all of them on the greatest hits album I’ll post with this), starting with their first crack, “Tomfoolery” (listen to the post-chorus tag, and cringe), and continuing through weird, true novelties like “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “The Ride of Paul Revere,” which are about exactly what you think they are about.

All that ended with a song “Reading the Book of Love,” an Emperor’s Clothing follow-up to their one hit. Before and after that, they slowly bled out on pieces of generica like “What Would You Do If There Wasn’t Any Rock ‘n’ Roll?” a phrase that fits into a song about as well as one would expect, and just as lifeless. If I had to pick a favorite, I’d go with “The Zombie,” the B-side to….well, the frankly disastrous “Tomfoolery” (again, the “retard” voice is exercable).

By way of wrapping this up, there’s something chilling to the concept of a one-hit wonder. They can write just one song that hooks everyone’s ear. Imagine doing that once - by that I mean putting a song into the world that opens all kinds of doors, even the ones you don’t know about – and then never doing it again after that. Maybe that’s devastating, maybe that isn’t. They got a good three, four year run based on that one hit regardless.