One Hit No More, No. 12: Len Barry, Nowhere Near as Linear as "1-2-3"

What the hell? His life, man.

Raise your hand if you know the song, “1-2-3,” the 1965 break-out hit for Len Barry, aka, Leonard Borisoff. Unlike a lot of the one-hit artists I've reviewed, the West Philadelphia raised Barry didn’t grow up with stars in his eyes; his voice impressed his Coast Guard buddies enough for them to talk him into trying. The fame-bug took and, for good or ill, it hasn’t let go.

Len Barry makes for a complicated case. For one, I can’t (easily) find interviews, a fan page, or any worthwhile biography, never mind a useful one. The richest source I found was a classicbands.com interview with his bandmate from The Dovells, Mark Stevens. Unfortunately, Stevens is a better talker than storyteller, so, when it comes to The Dovells and Barry, he passes on list of names he/they have performed with (I have more on the Dovells below) and has an understandable, but still odd fixation on name-dropping certain venues. On the plus side, Stevens gets you through the reasons Barry and The Dovells went their separate ways in less than two tweets’ worth of characters (way less, actually):

“Len Barry left in 1963. When he left, it was really because he wanted to be a Rhythm and Blues singer. I had even left for a couple of years because I wasn't happy anymore. I came back in the mid-60s, forever. Jerry and I decided if we're going to be in this business for the rest of our lives, we gotta go to Reno and Tahoe. We have to be the comedic rock 'n roll act that we knew we were years ago, when we were kids.”

That interview doesn’t unlock any big secrets – the salacious stuff tops out with Stevens slagging off on Barry’s management team (“small time stuff”) – but The Dovells did keep living a version of the life, performing 180 days of the year in their prime, and doing what they (except Barry) liked doing. Stevens does, however, deliver one vivid line on Barry:

“He was a real character and the character I'm talking about, I'm saying from a personal standpoint. He was a real Damon Runyan character. Truly, one of the true Damon Runyan characters of the world. But, as a business person? Forget about it!”

(Raise your hand if you know who Damon Runyan is.)

Barry did switch genres, almost immediately (see “Lip Sync,” a deeply-silly transitional tune), but he also got involved in the writing. Most or all of The Dovells’ songs – as well as songs for this string of artists: “Bobby Rydell, Chubby Checker, The Orlons, The Tymes, Dee Dee Sharp” – came from Kal Mann and Dave Appell, in-house songwriters at their label, Cameo-Parkway. On going solo, Barry called in fresh ringers – John Madara and David White – but he at least assisted in writing his biggest hits, “1-2-3” and “Like A Baby.” Both sounded like big departures from “Bristol Stomp,” the single that gave The Dovells a gold record (so Barry is off the one-hit wonders list already, and yet he is not), and, if you think those sound a lot like Motown…you’re not the only one who heard an echo.

The spiciest thing I found while researching Barry came in a blog post on a site named SoulfulDetroit, one mostly devoted to recording that one time, when Berry Gordy sued Barry (and, as Madara explained, many others) for stealing Motown’s sounds (also, this time, read the comments; pretty interesting). Madara contends “that’s the sound of an era,” something so ambient that it’s in the head of anyone writing music at that time, but Barry, et. al. wound up settling on paying Gordy/Motown 15% of the writers’/publishers’ share, so call that a crime or call it justice as you see it. Stevens, meanwhile, had no trouble with candor in his comments on where Cameo-Parkway, and probably Barry’s crew, found its sound:

“Make no mistake about it, they were stealing melodies and ideas. "Bristol Stomp" was the same four chords you find in a lot of songs.”

In context, that's not so odd: the Hit Factory concept is old as Tin Pan Alley and recorded sound. I want to linger on that thought for a minute, because Barry’s career serves up a decent answer to how fast popular taste can flip. The Dovells had some other, minor hits, including “Hully Gully Baby.” If you click on any links in this post, make it that one and a link to anyone of Barry’s hits, because, between them, you’ll hear that Barry caught the right wave, at least in the short-term. Motown would go on to a long, productive life of its own, and even get a revival when The Big Chill soundtrack came out. The stiff, anti-swingin’ sound you hear on “Hully Gully Baby” would become the stuff of parody in a movie like Animal House, the soundtrack for the squares.

Barry continued with this sound for a while (e.g., “Soul Concerto” and “It’s a Crying Shame”), but tracking the evolution of his career gets tricky after that. Spotify’s library on the otherwise-invisible Barry is a shockingly large, equally incomplete, posthumous treasure map to the heart of Barry’s artistic life; the dates of the albums don’t help (most dated post-2000) and most of what I heard included mash-ups from different times in Barry’s career. Spotify has eleven Barry-based albums on file and, with the exception of The Lost LP, all the ones I tried were grab-bags. And he did get around musically/thematically, especially as he chased any kind of relevance. A literally stray line in Barry’s Wikipedia post spots that subterranean vein in his career:

“Barry's respect of the Native American culture led him to write and produce the instrumental ‘Keem-O-Sabe’. The song went to number 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1969 for The Electric Indian.”

I don’t doubt the sincerity, but there’s some weight on the taste/quality side that will forever hold back that single/tribute(?). The long tail of his career follows the same pattern. His last contribution to the arts came in 2008, when Barry wrote a book titled Black-Like-Me. – which may or may not be a call-back to John Howard Griffin’s more serious book, Black Like Me (as in, without the hyphens). Now that I’ve read the goodreads synopsis on Barry's book, I finally have some…vague idea as to what it’s about – something I didn’t even sort of get out of Barry’s Youtube plug/low-key hostage-situation for his novel. (There, I’m flagging the part where he calls the book the rest of his life, and suggests he doesn’t know what he’ll do if it doesn’t sell.) Being a musical artist, it’s no surprise that Barry recorded an album(/soundtrack pitch) to launch with his novel, including a song with the same title as the book. Loathe as I am to crap on anyone who creates…that’s a rough listen.

I came across a number of other songs by Barry that sound like they came from around the same time – e.g., “Color Blind” (which fits the theme of Black-Like-Me, at least on a surface level) and the cringe-worthy “Dirty Old Man,” which is predictably, depressingly exactly what you'd expect: a creepy oddity, a kind of dotard’s “Strokin’.”

I don’t have a grand judgment on Len Barry. Near as I can tell, he just wanted to entertain people. In his prime, he climbed higher than The Dovells. After reading the Stevens interview, it’s hard to tell who had the better life under the spotlight. Barry has continued to perform, though, or at least I can find footage of him from as recently as 2017, and he's still got an impressive amount of it, even at that age. I guess my final thought is, good for him. Get on with yourself, Len Barry.