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| 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.”
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:
“We appeared with Golliwogs/CCR, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Jefferson Airplane, Paul Revere and the Raiders, Lovin’ Spoonful, Count V, People, ? and the Mysterians, Mitch Ryder, Yardbirds, James Brown, Young Rascals, Cyrkle, Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, the Association, Tommy James and the Shondells, Left Banke, the Mindbenders, Bobby “Blue” Bland, the Wailers, Neil Diamond, Wilson Pickett and others.”
(To backtrack a little, here are some of the bands they beat in that first battle: "There was The
Golliwogs, which was Creedence Clearwater. There was Sly and The Family Stone,
which was Joe And The Continentals. There's probably more than that. William
Penn and his Pals was part of Santana.”)
After that, sadly, the worst in music business management comes to the fore. The label Thompson kicked them to was an East Coast outfit called Bell Records. While they helped Syndicate of Sound go national, and Gonzalez gives them their due, Baskin casts them as being more interested in telling them what to do, as opposed to listening to what they were doing:
“Bell Records kept turning down songs we recorded — ‘Games,’ ‘Get Outta My Life,’ etc. — that reflected the band and what was happening on the West Coast. To this day, they are considered some of our best work.”
Another pivotal decision in Syndicate of Sound’s short history – they lasted only from 1966-1970 – was one of their managers, a guy named Chuck Patty, opting to not return a phone call from Brian Epstein. (Yes, that Brian Epstein.) According to Gonzalez, Patty didn’t so much as mention Epstein’s call to the band, thereby denying them the chance to for that enthusiastic “say what?! yes!!” While Gonzalez offered one take on Patty’s decision (“he was obviously threatened and did not want to lose us”), Baskin let him off the hook, at least a little, while still (clearly) questioning the call and/or failure to in a separate, undated interview (because classicbands.com):
“He (Chuck) turned it (the Beatles tour) down 'cause the money wasn't there. He didn't get the concept that would've seen so many more people. That was one of the things you don't want to think about too much.”
Syndicate of Sound kept at over the entirety of their short run – and it’s hardly fair to call a band that had at least three songs defensibly chart a “one-hit wonder.” “Rumors” hit #55 on the Hot 100 the same year as “Little Girl,” but the story behind “Brown Paper Bag,” which scrapped its way to #73 in October 1970, is a little more complicated (and arguably shows what Wikipedia misses sometimes). For one, the band had seen some turnover by then – for instance, Gonzalez was gone by then, Duckworth had already fallen out and come back in, and a guy named Ned Tourney took over keys from Sharkey starting from 1967 – but, more importantly, a new lead guitarist, a guy named Steve Jenkins, actually wrote “Brown Paper Bag.” There’s a ton of weirdness around that (up to and including a song titled “Little Green Bag” competing for radio play (which you might have heard)), but that was more or less the end for the band’s original run.
“We thought, if you don't write your own songs, you're not real or something like that. (laughs)”
I want to end on that quote from Baskin (#RIP), because it’s one of my favorite stories about Syndicate of Sound. By all accounts, they formed a pretty deep bond with Paul Revere and the Raiders, all the way down to “they taught us how to tour.” It’s a lesson they didn't pick up from Paul Revere that killed them in the end: he contracted out songwriting to other writers, while Syndicate of Sound never did. Burnout ensued, end of story. Or maybe just a failure to keep up cut them down...
By way of this project, I’m learning the knock-on publicity value of getting labeled “proto-punk” or even “garage rock.” While the currency of that posthumous (for the band) label doesn’t pay the same returns every time, it’s usually enough to get someone interested in the roots of what they do, to listen to what you did and tell your story. And I will say this: Syndicate of Sound approached their music like any indie rock band from, oh, the early-to-mid-80s forward. Here’s Gonzalez in 2013:
“When bands put the feel and message of their music in front of the presentation and polish, they are garage influenced. It is hard form (sic) me to single out any. I like most of the present indie bands.”
To float a loose theory, a lot of what I read about Syndicate of Sound makes me grateful for the independent labels that cropped up in the punk/college-rock/DIY era, and the later radical democratization of the production side…now, if only we could figure out a way for the artists who make the music to get paid first, instead of last, we’d collectively be on to something. It’s hard to find a market for music that isn’t pre-programmed to cater to the broadest demographic, but that market exists all the same, and always has. It pokes its head from the depths and into the mainstream now and then, but it mostly bubbles underground and tries to not drown.
About the Sampler
I did compile a sampler this time, a slightly unwieldy 11 songs because I couldn’t bring myself to ditch the maudlin, weepy “You” from the one and only full album by Syndicate of Sound in Spotify’s library. The real inspiration, though, was finding “Games” and “Get Outta My Life” on a compilation called The Hush Records Story, which also included latter-day near-misses like “Mary (Marrie)” and “Saturday Night.” The rest of the sampler comes from the one album titled Little Girl. Apart from the songs already listed above, those include “Almost Grown” (my current favorite of the originals), what feels like a tongue-in-cheek novelty in “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby,” which is probably a cover, plus two definite covers in “The Witch” (original by The Sonics) and “Dream Baby” (written by Cindy Walker, but made famous by Roy Orbison).
Sources
Classicbands.com interview (undated, as always)
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