One Hit No More, No. 5: Don & Juan, & "What Your Name" & Other People with Better Stories

It's the people around them...

This one’s pretty simple: one guy performed as “Don” (Roland Trone), another as “Juan” (Claude “Sonny” Johnson), and they recorded a gently pining doo wop hit titled, “What’s Your Name.” Apart from Trone’s early death (1982, age 45) and acknowledgement of a later “lesser” hit, “Magic Wand,” there’s not much available about Don & Juan, even on the internet, and there’s even less on the song itself. Johnson would go on to write a few dozen more songs, but the specific story begins and ends with: two guys recorded a good song and it became a big enough “monster hit” for them to achieve icon status in the doo-wop genre.

I poked first around people who worked with Johnson, and then did a little digging into the doo wop genre. I can already turn the page on Trone, sadly, with his untimely death and his partnership with Johnson.

Johnson, on the other hand, started in another doo wop act from New York’s Long Island called The Genies. That group formed in 1956, with Alexander Faison, Fred Jones, Bill Gains, and Roy Hammond (you’ll hear more about that last name) as founding members. They got discovered on a beach instead a street corner - the more typical doo wop origin story - but not much else separated them from the competition. The Genies did record an album, one that included their minor hit, “Who’s That Knockin,’” (cute tune about juggling lovers), but that didn’t happen until Johnson came over from Brooklyn and helped with the songs. Their ride to stardom crested at that, and the best story they left to history happened that one time, when Gains “ran off to Canada with a woman and has never been seen or heard from since.” He made that infamous break the night of The Genies one and only (I believe) show at the famous Apollo Theater.

Roughly three years passed between the end of The Genies run in 1959 and the release of “What’s Your Name?” in 1962. With doo wop big as it was - this coincided with that genre’s last, loud gasp - Don & Juan had to break through a lot of noise in order to be heard. The song, a masterful pairing of sound and content, a sort of musical onomatopoeia for love’s dumbstruck awe, gets credit for that. It doesn’t necessarily stand out beyond that, and that’s true of most of Don & Juan’s work. Like “Magic Wand” - and, for me, most of doo wop. As with The Monotones’ “Book of Love,” Don & Juan’s particular spin on doo wop got them in the spotlight, but it couldn’t keep them there. Pop culture couldn’t eat doo wop forever for one; not even the inventive guitar hooks and atmospheric production on songs like “Pot Luck” and “All That’s Missing Is You” couldn’t buy them more time (those are the best songs Don & Juan put out for me). On the other hand, songs like that prefigured Johnson’s future as a songwriter. The man could adapt.

While hoping to avoid an eternal detour, it’s worth taking a quick spin through Wikipedia’s history of the genre. Don & Juan showed up in its hey-day, but its structural roots go back as far as the 1930s, when it started as kind of a mash-up between barbershop, the African-American spiritual tradition, and Tin Pan Alley pop. If you listen to some of the earliest groups like The Mills Brothers (“Paper Doll”), The Inkspots (“Java Jive”), and The Delta Rhythm Boys (“Bugle Woogie”), you’ll immediately hear the difference between what they’re doing and the doo wop songs most people know. Rock ‘n’ roll’s influence bled into the sound of the more famous acts - e.g., Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers (“Why Do Fools Fall in Love?”), The Chords’ “Sh-Boom,” and, the first song to use the specific words “doo” and “wop” in a chorus, The Turbans’ “When You Dance” - and to stretch an opinion, that probably bought doo wop a couple years. Most of that came out in the first wave of doo wop, circa the mid-1950, a little time before Don & Juan and the rest. The genre didn’t get a name till 1961, when some anonymous ink-stained wretch slipped it into the pages of The Chicago Defender.

The lines between what got big and what we remember don’t always run straight, or even above ground, and that brings all this back to one of Johnson’s collaborators in The Genies, Roy Hammond. One of the biography pages I read dropped hints about his solo career after that group broke up, and, upon digging deeper, I learned that Hammond might have had both the biggest and the quietest impact on pop culture. After a couple transmutations, he wound up recording as Roy C, and that’s the name under which he recorded “Shotgun Wedding,” his one actual hit as a solo artist. Hammond had plenty of ambition, and would set up one record label after another to sell his stuff and the work of other artists. And he produced prolifically, putting out over 125 records on which he (reportedly) “wrote most of the songs.”

I stumbled across a few of those on Spotify, later work, stuff that came out in the late 1990s (maybe?). That’s late in his career, obviously, and songs like “Saved by the Bell (Infidelity Georgia)” and (more so), “Peepin’ Through the Window” blur the line between music and a kind of spoken-word comedic performance art. The latter song, especially, sets up jokes and scenarios in the vein of dream-logic, abounding non-sequiturs, and so on (see the parts about the song’s narrator and the police officer). Given how much Hammond put out, I have no worthwhile sense of how representative those tracks are, but, judging by his history, the man liked pushing buttons enough that that could have been his normal.

And that’s where the story comes back to Hammond’s out-sized impact on pop culture. In 1973, the early height of the Watergate meltdown, he collaborated with some high school kids from Queens named The Honey Drippers to put out a song titled “Impeach the President.” That song opens with a strong, simple, and, before the funk guitar kicks in, bare rhythm break, just drums and a hi-hat - one that happens to be perfect for hip hop. It looks like MC Shan has the most famous sample on “The Bridge,” but a succession of artists has used Hammond’s beat, most of them without credit (how big? Janet Jackson and LL Cool J). That’s how you influence culture without anyone knowing - i.e., start as scenery for a one-hit wonder act, then go on to become a small-time, independent, one-man project who never stops thinking about music.

Because this started with Don & Juan, it feels fitting to end with them. At the same time, they’re a by-gone act who worked a by-gone genre, even if it’s one that has enjoyed its share of revivals. Sometimes you get that one hit because that style/genre is the only space in which you can operate. Late as they came to the movement, that definitely applies to Don & Juan - and that’s regardless of what Johnson went on to do later. Hammond, meanwhile, suggests a different type, something of an innovator, but as part of a hive-mind that drives music forward without anyone necessarily seeing them, never mind giving them credit and royalties for it.

I don’t want to over-sell Hammond, or anyone else named above. If nothing else, think of all the artists you do know that inspired both new art and pale imitations through the highest of public profiles. That said, Don & Juan, and all the guys who came into contact with them, put more than one song out into the world.