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| The pleasure is just as fleeting... |
The Hit
A 1967 number titled “Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye” that did a little drop pass to doo-wop. (If it goes less than 10 years back, can it rate as a “throw-back”?) It’s cute, in all honesty, and built around this conceit:
“Kiss me each morning for a million years/
Hold me each evening by your side/
Tell me you’ll love me for a million years/
Then if it don’t work out/
Then if it don’t work out/
Then you can tell me goodbye”
It’s still doo-wop, which is fine, but it’s “echo doo-wop,” a revival of a freshly deceased genre. (Don & Juan had charted with “What’s Your Name” just five years prior.) With all the free-floating ambition in the rock world that same year (e.g., The Beach Boys, Pet Sounds, The Beatles, Sgt. Peppers), you wonder whether some kind of sleeper demographic (e.g., older adults pining for their youth) didn’t carry “Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye” to that lofty No. 6 in the Billboard Hot 100 all on its own.
The Rest of the Story
“Wrong song, yes, but possibly worse–the Casinos didn’t look the part. With nary a short hair out of place and no jeans and peace signs, Gene and his Casinos were deviates. The look was of a Sunday morn choir, a gathering of Young Republicans.”
That quote comes from a site called One Hit Wonders: A Musical Revue (link below; how is this the first time I've seen that site researching this project?), and it points to just one of the ways The Casinos were a bad bet to every get a second hit. For one thing, doo-wop had to be at least four genres passe by 1967, a relic of a square past the youth revolution rejected. Add the fact(s) that, 1) they started performing in 1958 and failed to break through when doo-wop was big, and 2) they chased fame from Cincinnati, Ohio, it would have been a miracle if they hit No. 60 with a song like “Then You Call Tell Me Goodbye.” And yet they did, by paying their dues one dollar at a time.
A 1967 number titled “Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye” that did a little drop pass to doo-wop. (If it goes less than 10 years back, can it rate as a “throw-back”?) It’s cute, in all honesty, and built around this conceit:
“Kiss me each morning for a million years/
Hold me each evening by your side/
Tell me you’ll love me for a million years/
Then if it don’t work out/
Then if it don’t work out/
Then you can tell me goodbye”
It’s still doo-wop, which is fine, but it’s “echo doo-wop,” a revival of a freshly deceased genre. (Don & Juan had charted with “What’s Your Name” just five years prior.) With all the free-floating ambition in the rock world that same year (e.g., The Beach Boys, Pet Sounds, The Beatles, Sgt. Peppers), you wonder whether some kind of sleeper demographic (e.g., older adults pining for their youth) didn’t carry “Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye” to that lofty No. 6 in the Billboard Hot 100 all on its own.
The Rest of the Story
“Wrong song, yes, but possibly worse–the Casinos didn’t look the part. With nary a short hair out of place and no jeans and peace signs, Gene and his Casinos were deviates. The look was of a Sunday morn choir, a gathering of Young Republicans.”
That quote comes from a site called One Hit Wonders: A Musical Revue (link below; how is this the first time I've seen that site researching this project?), and it points to just one of the ways The Casinos were a bad bet to every get a second hit. For one thing, doo-wop had to be at least four genres passe by 1967, a relic of a square past the youth revolution rejected. Add the fact(s) that, 1) they started performing in 1958 and failed to break through when doo-wop was big, and 2) they chased fame from Cincinnati, Ohio, it would have been a miracle if they hit No. 60 with a song like “Then You Call Tell Me Goodbye.” And yet they did, by paying their dues one dollar at a time.
The Casinos followed the standard doo-wop path to fame – i.e., sing on a street corner and hope the right people notice – and they started all vocals with Gene Hughes (the band’s guiding light), his brothers Glen (Norman would join later), Ray White, and a guy named J. T. Sears, whose first name Gene Hughes never learned (see below). Different singers came in and out of the line-up with the years – Gene Hughes left for a while, and was replaced by Ken Brady (who later went solo), a guy named Jerry Baker replaced another guy named Pete Bolton, etc. – but they added actual musicians just ahead of their glory days, with Bob Armstrong on organ, Bob Smith on bass, Mickey Denton on guitar, and White picking up the drums. Wikipedia calls The Casinos a nine-man band, but it takes info from other sites to round out (most of) the membership. This is Gene Hughes:
“Eventually, changes came on us and there was just me, Armstrong, Mickey, Ray, and Smith; the ones who actually recorded ‘Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye.’ When the hit came, all the guys came back and went on the road with us; that’s nine pieces, and that’s all but J. T., who had died in this car crash in ’63.”
The Casinos built their success by working a regional circuit and, near as I can tell, playing something like residencies at some Cincinnati venues. From a tribute to Bob Armstrong:
“’We had a bona fide show. We were not just a group that recorded and played hops. Locally, we played at the [premier] Lookout House and the Beverly Hills Supper Club. We hired groups to open for us. We'd set up for six months straight.’ In this respect, the Casinos were unlike other one-hit rock bands that went on tour in America's small clubs. With their short hair and ballads, the group seemed the antithesis of hippies and psychedelic sounds.”
The road work gave them enough juice to record a few singles that became regional hits – e.g., “Do You Recall,” “That’s the Way, (who's "Terry"?)” and “Too Good to Be True” (all of which I like better than their hit, for what it’s worth) – but The Casinos still went from 1958 to 1967 working “America’s small clubs.” It took putting themselves out there almost a decade for an opportunity to find them, and it was a little weird when it did. Tom Dooley, a DJ for local station WSAI, frequented a venue where he saw The Casinos play. After hearing them, he pitched them a single to record. Based on the feedback they got on it from their live shows, The Casinos countered by asking him to make “Then You Can Say Goodbye” the B-side. It happened, The Casinos song took off, and no one remembers the Dooley's A-side single. That said, their hit wasn't their own, and it didn’t come out of the blue either. According to Gene Hughes:
“The John J. Loudermilk tune was a musical throw-back, a beautiful slowpaced crawler, but it also sounded collegiate and choral, like something *the Association* would do, and ergo hip.”
Seeing The Association's name helps make a little more sense of The Casinos; if they could hit it big in the late 60s, why wouldn't there be space for what The Casinos did? Going the other way, who remembers The Casinos today? They did try to push another (person’s) song into the mass-market – a Don Everly song called “It’s All Over Now” – and Armstrong and White formed a “party band” called Canon (srsly?) after The Casinos broke up, but, bluntly, they pretty much spent their time at the top riding a meteor that shot in the opposite direction of the culture at large (I didn’t read a lot about them, but "young Republican" and "with their short hair and ballads" seems like a relevant, recurring comment about them). The Casinos still performed until (fairly) recently, and, if you’ve ever driven over the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge or the Memphis & Arkansas Bridge, you’ve connected with Armstrong’s…more enduring legacy.
About the Sampler
I don’t like crapping on any who’s trying, but I barely listened to The Casinos and, therefore, didn’t build a sampler. On a deeper level, all it takes to find better doo-wop acts is google. To back up that point, The Casinos started as The Capris, but they gave up the name after another band with the same name recorded “There’s a Moon Out Tonight.” I like that more than anything I heard by The Casinos, and that’s kind of everything.
Source(s)
Wikipedia
One Hit Wonders the Book
Home of the Hits blog, Tribute to Bob Armstrong
The road work gave them enough juice to record a few singles that became regional hits – e.g., “Do You Recall,” “That’s the Way, (who's "Terry"?)” and “Too Good to Be True” (all of which I like better than their hit, for what it’s worth) – but The Casinos still went from 1958 to 1967 working “America’s small clubs.” It took putting themselves out there almost a decade for an opportunity to find them, and it was a little weird when it did. Tom Dooley, a DJ for local station WSAI, frequented a venue where he saw The Casinos play. After hearing them, he pitched them a single to record. Based on the feedback they got on it from their live shows, The Casinos countered by asking him to make “Then You Can Say Goodbye” the B-side. It happened, The Casinos song took off, and no one remembers the Dooley's A-side single. That said, their hit wasn't their own, and it didn’t come out of the blue either. According to Gene Hughes:
“The John J. Loudermilk tune was a musical throw-back, a beautiful slowpaced crawler, but it also sounded collegiate and choral, like something *the Association* would do, and ergo hip.”
Seeing The Association's name helps make a little more sense of The Casinos; if they could hit it big in the late 60s, why wouldn't there be space for what The Casinos did? Going the other way, who remembers The Casinos today? They did try to push another (person’s) song into the mass-market – a Don Everly song called “It’s All Over Now” – and Armstrong and White formed a “party band” called Canon (srsly?) after The Casinos broke up, but, bluntly, they pretty much spent their time at the top riding a meteor that shot in the opposite direction of the culture at large (I didn’t read a lot about them, but "young Republican" and "with their short hair and ballads" seems like a relevant, recurring comment about them). The Casinos still performed until (fairly) recently, and, if you’ve ever driven over the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge or the Memphis & Arkansas Bridge, you’ve connected with Armstrong’s…more enduring legacy.
About the Sampler
I don’t like crapping on any who’s trying, but I barely listened to The Casinos and, therefore, didn’t build a sampler. On a deeper level, all it takes to find better doo-wop acts is google. To back up that point, The Casinos started as The Capris, but they gave up the name after another band with the same name recorded “There’s a Moon Out Tonight.” I like that more than anything I heard by The Casinos, and that’s kind of everything.
Source(s)
Wikipedia
One Hit Wonders the Book
Home of the Hits blog, Tribute to Bob Armstrong
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