The Crash-Course Project Index

Finding Your Feet, a comedy featuring Dolores Umbridge, apparently...

Welcome to this library of…posts about popular music. Unfortunately, I’ll have to start this with an explanation.

At the time I’m posting this little (for now) index, I’ve written a total of 57 posts for this site. 20 of those were devoted to the One Hit No More Project (and here’s the library for that one, which will grow just like this one), which leaves 37 posts about…other things. I changed both topics and formats between those posts, covering just one band/artist here, and building a post a round a playlist with multiple artists there. Call it a long process of finding my feet – which I think I have going into 2020 (also, I make regular claims to have found my feet, but they keep going missing all the same).

In order to lend both this library and posts I intend to write in the future some thematic coherence, I’ve decided to limit this index to posts in which I focused on one band/artist. (And, in accordance with future plans, I will create a separate index for those playlist posts.) About those posts…

While I cover a decent variety of bands/artists, the majority of them come from “indie ______” genres – e.g., “indie rock,” “indie hip hop,” and “indie pop,” with various sub-genres in between. Those will be the same kinds of artists I look into going forward too. At any rate, links to all the posts of this sort that I’ve written so far are linked to down below. As I write more posts going forward, I’ll add them to this post with semi-regularity to keep this library current.

Finally, you’ll see a bunch of different titles below, as well as a discontinued series or two. Going forward, I’ve decided to continue this under the “Crash Course” series, so the numbers will count up from there (and I dropped the hyphen in “Crash-Course”). That’s all, lots to read below - and listen to. Each post includes a short-ish history of the relevant band/artist, as well as links to a bunch of their music. God bless, Youtube, right?

The One Hit No More Project Library, Vol. 1 - 1958 to 1979

Welcome to the permanent standing, semi-regularly updated index for the One Hit No More Project. To give a little background on it, the project is dedicated to learning a little history about all the bands and artists made famous by one “hit” on the pop music charts – e.g., the Billboard Top 100. The idea is to see what else each of them did with the rest of their lives and/or careers.

For what it’s worth, surprises haven’t been hard to come by because, generally, it takes more than a little ego and eccentricity to become famous.

The first artist in the series had his hit in 1958, and the years and artists will move ever closer to the present the further down the list this goes. Each post includes a short-ish history of the band/artist – and I try to give visitors more than they can get out of a Wikipedia entry – as well as links to a lot of more of each band’s/artist’s music. Speaking of Wikipedia, I used their list of one-hit U.S. wonders for inspiration and as source material, skipping anyone who doesn’t cough up enough information.

I’ll update this index as I write the posts; hopefully the titles will get better as I improve. [Ed. - They did not, so where I didn't include the name of each artist's hit in the title, I added it in a parenthetical at the end.] UPDATE: In the process of rearranging the numbering/order on all these posts, but all the links below are live.

No. 1: The Short Flight of the The Crows, aka, "Gee" (1953)
 

No. 2: The Penguins Dancing with an Earth Angel (1954)

 

No. 3: The Chords (Literally) Go "Sh-Boom" (1954)

 

No. 4: "Be-Bop-a-Lula," aka, Gene Vincent's Happiest Moment (1955)

 

No. 1: Bobby Day, “Rockin’ Robin” & A Dabble in Doo Wop (1958)

No. 2: The Monotones Squeezed All They Could Out of “The Book of Love” (1958)

No. 3: Frankie Ford & His “Sea Cruise” to a Hall of Fame (1959)

No. 4: When Bruce Chanel (and Delbert McClinton) Shouted “Hey! Baby” (1961)

One Hit No More, No. 20: Syndicate of Sound, "Little Girl," and Unconscious Acts of Mild Suffocation

Classic promo photo, MFs.

The Hit
It took all of six seconds for me to recognize the riff on Syndicate of Sound’s 1966 single, “Little Girl.” The Divinyls, where I first heard it, played it rawer and flipped the object’s gender, but it’s a fairly simple string of notes and, in the Syndicate of Sound’s original take, it has a playful tingle to it that pairs nicely with lyrical phrasing that skips past even a hint of heartbreak. Don’t let that fool you, though, because it’s definitely a victory dance; in other words, the narrator does care. For what it’s worth, Syndicate of Sound heard and liked most of the covers they’ve heard of it:

“Yes, we have heard them all — even a live bootleg of The Knack doing ‘Little Girl.’ I like them all, especially when an artist puts their stamp on the song like the Divinyls.”

And, no, I can’t find that live bootleg…

The Rest of the Story
Syndicate of Sound formed in San Jose, circa 1964, when Don Baskin (vox/guitar) and Bob Gonzalez (bass) ditched Lenny Lee and the Nightmen and joined up with members of a band called The Pharaohs, John Sharkey (keys), Larry Ray (lead guitar) and John Duckworth (drums). Like a lot of bands of their day, they drew inspiration from the British invasion, but also, to "a fast-driving sound that was beginning in LA." Their big break came when they won (again) a local battle of the bands and a recording deal with Del-Fi Records. That didn’t take them any further than a single no one cared about called “Prepare for Love,” unfortunately, but the band kept plugging and playing until they came up with “Little Girl.” That said, by the recollection of Don Baskin (who, per the search algorithms, did a lot of the talking for the band before his very recent death):

“We couldn't get ‘Little Girl’ played anywhere. No one wanted it. Everyone turned down ‘Little Girl.’ So, we decided with our producer's label, Hush, which was a rhythm and blues label out of Richmond, California, the Oakland-Richmond area. Our producer's parents had owned that label. He decided, ‘let's put it out locally and see how it does,’ and we sold 5,000 copies in the first week.”

And, when Syndicate of Sound took off, they launched. Also, from here the story turns to tales of the best and worst in music business management. On the good side, their producer at Hush Records, Garrie (sp?) Thompson, understood that he didn’t have the resources to manage promotion of “Little Girl,” never mind what Syndicate of Sound became once it got loose in the world. To stick with that glorious, contemporary present, having a major single in their collective back pockets (#8 on the Billboard Hot 100, #5 on the Cashbox 100) punched Syndicate of Sound’s ticket to play with some of the biggest bands of the era. The honor roll:

One Hit No More, No. 19: The Capitols, "Cool Jerk," and Some Blunt Realities

The inevitable end-result of dance moves as a concept.

The Hit

A naked bass line gets “Cool Jerk” started, and the instruments come in one by one as if designed to get the next part of your body moving. It’s a good tune with a better groove – it comes from Motown - the perfect one-off summer single in some ways. Like, uh, more than one song from that era, The Capitols wrote their hit in 1966 hoping to grab the coat-tails of a popular dance of the day, “The Jerk” (which (probably) looked like so). Where does the “cool” come in? A Detroit-area spin on the move inspired the name, but everyone involved didn’t want to risk getting the single pinned under a censor’s stamp by naming it “Pimp Jerk.” Because I’ve got space to fill, enjoy some potential apocrypha on where the “pimp jerk” came from:

“The story goes that there were neighborhood pimps who were too cool to dance the jerk like everybody else at the clubs, so the joke was that they did a pimp jerk.”

The Rest of the Story

The only people the Internet forgets are the ones that too many people forgot before the Internet existed. To rephrase the issue, you can’t get interviewed in the Internet age if you died before the Internet. Unfortunately, two-thirds of The Capitols died before even dial-up: Richard Mitchell (back-up vocals/keyboards; born Richard McDougall) died of “unknown causes” back in ’84, and Samuel George (vox/drums) died in 1981 from getting stabbed in a “domestic dispute” The band’s third member, Don Storball (back up vocals/guitar; born Don Norman), is alive (at least the last time a Wikipedia editor checked in), well(?), and working for the Highland Park, MI police department. He seems the likeliest subject for an interview, too, given that he wrote not just “Cool Jerk,” but also the band’s first swing at fame three years earlier with “Dog and Cat” (which didn’t take because something about “juvenile lyrics,” about which...not inaccurate).

The band had actually broken up the time Storball wrote “Cool Jerk,” but they decided they had something after they worked it up. The American music market agreed, the single took off, and industry people rushed to cash in by recording not one, but two albums in ’66 alone: Dance the Cool Jerk and We Got a Thing That's in The Groove. I can fill in the “what happened next” with in a phrase, and one that’s worth isolating:

“...both [albums] featuring mostly covers of popular Motown and soul songs.”

One Hit No More, No. 18: The Music Machine's Short, Dramatic Spin with "Talk Talk"

Suits. Always the problem, amirite?

The Hit
1966’s “Talk Talk,” a hard-rock, garage-buzz tune, or, as Rolling Stone put it, “hog-snort guitar distortion, machine-gun drumming and growling paranoid despair, shaved and hardened with geometric precision.” Built around a good driving beat and lyrics of self-and-others loathing, it picked up the “proto-punk” label once punk became a thing.

For what it’s worth, that proved kind of a buzz-kill for me. Because I’ve heard both sounds so many times, it registers less as “punk” than it does mid-60s garage-bleeding-to-psychedelic – i.e., exactly what it is. I also know that the first “garage” tunes came even earlier, and even the band’s founder/Svengali, Sean Bonniwelll, seemed luke-warm on the punk association:

“Although Bonniwell did not regard himself as ‘the grandfather of punk,’ he recognized that others did.”

To knock the clutter off all the above, if you like mid-60s garage, you will like this song. And you will probably get the case for “proto-punk.” Insofar as that word has any meaning. Hold that thought.

The Rest of the Story
I’ve spent a week listening to The Music Machine, and I’ve only understood the whys and hows of their sound since last Saturday, and the “punk” thing doesn’t really come through in their sound. Fortunately, it took more diving than stretching to find a phrasing that makes the punk label work. This sums up the spirit of the project nicely:

“This wouldn't allow me to express myself in terms of arrangements and approaches, although some of the music, you can hear in the latter part of the third album for RCA, you can hear some of my radical influence in the arrangements, especially in the last album.”

Bonniwell strove to find new possibilities in rock and/or popular music (and was the mid-60s the peak blurring of those genres?), whether with the arrangements or on the production side (“The Raggamuffins purchased hardware for a homemade fuzz-tone switch. From the onset Bonniwell ensured the group resonated like no other by instructing his bandmates to lower their instruments from the standard E note to D-flat.”). He was also a relentless perfectionist, (by his own account) driving willing and talented musicians to keep hold of hard rock in a world turning toward softer sounds. (That’s right, Bonniwell thought The Beatles were soft (but also talented, but also soft).) He really wanted to create a new sound – and, to a very real extent he did. His beginnings, however, were in folk.

Crash Course, No. 16: Ween, Triumph, Breakdown, and a Tenuous Aftermath

Weird, sure, but so much more. Goddamn heroes.

“I can only speak for myself, but as far as I’m concerned, as long as Aaron and I are both alive on this planet, Ween is still together. We’ve never broken up. The idea of quitting is just laughable. This isn’t something you can quit. This is a life sentence.”
- Dean Ween, aka, Mickey Melchiondo

“The Caesar demo release was the straw that broke the camels back. Nobody asked Gener before releasing...Deaner broke the golden rule. the Boognish wept that day.”
- Gene Ween, aka, Aaron Freeman

Whatever meaningful conscious knowledge I’ve ever had of Ween started when I looked into FREEMAN, Aaron Freeman’s post-Ween, post-sobriety solo project for an earlier, now-deleted site, so that’s where I started. (And, for the record, “the Caesar demo” was a collection of unreleased demos recorded while they were working on Quebec, circa 2001-2003.) While I’d had Chocolate & Cheese and Paintin’ the Town Brown for a decade or so, I knew only the tiniest part of dick about Ween – which, also for the record, was inspired by a combination of the words “wuss” and “penis.” [Ed. – per new editorial policy, all sources for this post will be linked to at the end. Just…feels better that way.]

Ween’s 2012 break was both rough and a long-time coming, according to Freeman, and both he and Melchiondo processed it differently – the former as a matter of survival, the latter as a blow. Melchiondo kept going and in a similar vein: he revived his existing side project, Moistboyz, and keeps plugging away with the Dean Ween Group. The latter (and maybe the former) still played regularly at the same venue that hosted Ween’s earliest shows – John & Peter’s in their hometown, New Hope, PA (right on the Jersey border!) – as of 2018. Melchiondo does not appear to be sober, and he still plays with a lot of guys from the Ween days: e.g., Claude Colman, Jr. (drummer, third member of Ween), Dave Dreiwitz (bass) and Glenn McClellan (keys, both from Ween’s second iteration). He built his own studio and he still makes himself available to all kinds of media (including one interview with Noisey’s Guitar Moves series that I decided to drag out of the Sources because, on it, Melchiondo talked about Ween’s (and his) signature sound and/or hooks).

One Hit No More, No. 17: The Knickerbockers, "Lies," and Some Basic Honesty

My fantasy of the Red Velvet....

The Hit
1966’s “Lies,” which sounds a lot like The Beatles precisely because The Knickerbockers lifted the guitar, chord progressions and all, on one of their songs and dropped the word “Lies” after it. They are not remotely shy about copping to it either.

The Rest of the Story
The band’s core came together in the early-1960s around two brothers, Beau and John Charles (born Robert and John Carlos Cecchino), in Bergenfield, New Jersey, a town north and west of Manhattan. Buddy Randall (born William Crandall) added a third member and a saxophone to Beau’s guitar and John’s bass when he came over from another band, The Royal Teens (famous for “Short Shorts"). Their drummer, Jimmy Walker, found them performing at an outdoor Memorial Day event (for a fire department, maybe, or they just hijacked a parking lot), and he decided he’d make a good fit as their drummer. When the rest of the band auditioned him, his drumming impressed them less (or Beau Charles’ mom) than his singing voice (“Hire that guy,” she said, “he does sound good.”). Even though Walker came over from another band called The Castle Kings – who had done recordings with Ahmet Ertegun and (holy shit) Phil Spector that went nowhere – he wasn’t the polished product. In interviews, he recalls taking pointers from Randall and others on the art of drumming.

The Knickerbocker’s big break came when the newly-minted East-coast rep for Challenge/Four Star Records, Jerry Fuller, spotted them at the University Swing Palace in Albany, New York. While they’d started with early rock ‘n’ roll – e.g., Elvis, Sam Perkins, and so on – The Knickerbockers learned Meet The Beatles start to finish during that residency and developed that into a repertoire. They knew their way around their instruments well enough to learn just about any song, and they built their success around mimicking. According to Walker (the living member with the greatest ongoing media availability), Fuller bought in when they played a song he suggested, but wasn't even sure they knew (Johnny Mathis’ “Misty”) with musicians’ flair. Fuller signed the band, produced “Lies,” a song the band had written during that upstate residency, as well as a couple near-misses (e.g., “One Track Mind” instead of their preferred “Just One Girl”) and moved The Knickerbockers to Los Angeles. Their story picks up here.

With a hit single under their belts, The Knickerbockers picked up steady gigs at a venue called the Red Velvet, an off-the-radar spot where actors and musicians gathered after time on the set of Shindig, and they spent just shy of a year as regulars on Dick Clark’s Where the Action Is. (A place called The Pancake House is involved as well, but mostly as another celebrity and semi-celebrity hang-out.) They also went on a couple of the Dick Clark package tours that typified the early(-ish) rock era, something they loved and hated in equal parts. But the meat of the stories about The Knickerbockers happened in LA, where they spent years mimicking popular bands, sometimes with members of those bands in the audience, much like they’d done with The Beatles. They impressed some of your harder to impress artists too: