One Hit No More, No. 27: John Fred (Harry, Dick & Tom), His Playboy Band, & a Girl Named Judy

Sort of like that, but with a dude.

The Hit
“Judy in Disguise (with Glasses)” a late-60s novelty pop song, if you’ve ever heard one, but it has a better back-story than you’d think. It had two inspirations. First, it’s a nonsense spin on The Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky (with Diamonds),” with lyrics cobbled together from snippets of TV shows (notably The Monkees). Second, during a show in Florida, the songwriter, John Fred Gourrier (who I’ll mostly refer to as “Gourrier”), saw a girl wearing large sunglasses “getting hustled” by a guy, only “She took off these glasses, and she could stop a clock” (that is, the big glasses hid a beautiful face.)

Or, you could just roll with this tidy summary from Way Back Attack:

“The arrangement, all horns and strings and an infectious bass line with some oddly-placed moans and groans, makes it all add up to a peculiar-but-catchy late-'60s hit.”

My only personal memory of the song comes from an old commercial for one of those old rock collections they used to sell over the airwaves. It featured a guy dressed as a nerd (and wearing glasses) bouncing up and down between two girls in a record store, and it just didn't look right. Anyway, that note’s dead-right on the “moans and groans” (what were they going for?)…still, that’s a fair take on that bass line…

The Rest of the Story
When I started this project, I went in expecting to run into an act like John Fred & His Playboy Band (yes, name inspired by Hef’s famous product). It took some digging to find it, but Gourrier feels seems to think of “Judy in Disguise (with a Glasses)” as a turn into a cul-de-sac. As he put it:

“Andrew Bernard, our sax player, did most of the arrangements. We burned. We got some hot cuts put out before ‘Judy’ got us typecast.”

One Hit No More, No. 26: Johnny Maestro & The Career That Cannot Die

I'll throw in The Crests, gratis.

The Hit
“The Worst That Could Happen,” which I hadn’t heard till this week. Released in 1968 (seriously?), it’s a smart, (over-)polished rendition of heartbreak, and also rather dignified. Having listened to all kinds of “you know you want it” rock, it’s nice to hear a guy sing about being very happy for the woman he loves, despite the fact the feeling isn’t mutual and his heart just turned inside out.

It hit No. 3 in the Billboard Hot 100 in 1968 (and it was an oddball for the era), and that was the high point for both song and band. That said, it was handed to them - The 5th Dimension recorded the same song in 1967 (a better version, for me) – so the whole Johnny Maestro didn’t run on its own legs. He never had, though, not even during his first act.

The Rest of the Story
Johnny Maestro & the Brooklyn Bridge was something of a salvage job, a group of musicians and performers looking to keep a streak going. Johnny Mastrangelo, aka, Johnny Maestro, started in the late-1950s in a doo-wop group called The Crests, the first multi-racial doo wop group to hit the bigs; Maestro was a lone Italian American in a mix with one Puerto Rican (Harold “Chico” Torres) and three African Americans (notably Patricia Van Dross, Luther’s older sister, though, young as she was (15) she never toured with them). They churned out one big hit with “16 Candles” and kept rolling with “A Year Ago Tonight,” “Angels Listened In,” and “Trouble in Paradise.” After two years (1958-60) of maniacal touring and hitting the Dick Clark circuit, other doo wop acts lapped The Crests and, a couple years after that, doo wop’s popularity crapped out. Maestro, however, wasn’t ready to give up.

Anyone interested in tracing the path from The Crests to Johnny Maestro & the Brooklyn Bridge can hit the link on The Crests below, but, honestly, it’s just a bunch of names you’ve never heard falling in and out of projects that lasted only a year or two (including, yes, “Johnny Maestro & The Crests”). He did finally land in a project that recreated the magic. The first step came with recruiting a group called The Del-Satins, a doo-wop group in New York that Maestro started signing with in 1967. The next step came when The Del-Satins entered a Battle of the Bands and a talent agent named Alan White tapped a horn section called The Rhythm Method to back them. Maestro’s manager, Betty Sperber, liked what she heard and talked the now-11 member act into becoming a going concern. They named the expanded act Johnny Maestro & the Brooklyn Bridge as a spin on the old cliché about the Brooklyn Bridge – i.e., if you can book at 11-piece act, there’s this bridge I can sell you…

One Hit No More, No. 25: Buffalo Springfield & Some Poor Bastard Named Dewey Martin

#Inspiration

The Hit
Not many songs express their era – even a generic version of it – but Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” still stands as a singular example. If you’ve watch five movies or documentaries about the 1960s, or the Vietnam War, you’ve heard it; hell, if you’ve seen a commercial that references the 60s, you’ve heard it. It had nothing to do with Vietnam, as it happens: Stephen Stills wrote the song after seeing the protest of a curfew on Sunset Boulevard turn into a riot outside a club called Pandora’s Box.

It’s one hell of a song, still and anxious; it puts you in the calm before the storm and holds you there for as long as it plays. The instrumentation is minimal, but brilliantly used to create that tension. Burdened as it is with standing in for an era and old daydreams about making the world beautiful, it takes listening to it with fresh ears to drown out the clichés and just hear it as a piece of music…

…with that in mind, the angst the main players in Buffalo Springfield feel about their music cracks me up a bit. Especially in context.

The Rest of the Story
“But getting back to Buffalo Springfield, I’m glad the music is getting out. Flawed as it is, it’s really genuine. There’s no posing.”
- Stephen Stills

It is impossible, maybe even ridiculous, to talk about Buffalo Springfield as a one-hit wonder – and that goes well beyond legends like Stills and Neil Young fronting the band. That said, they did not last long as a project – just two years and two albums, with a third Last Time Around coming out after the band broke up. After a short honeymoon period, permanent chaos reigned, as Wikipedia succinctly puts it, “After various drug-related arrests and line-up changes, the group broke up in 1968.”

Crash Course, No. 18: A Rush of Rush (and Other Things)

They deserve to be happy, dammit.

If you tied me to a chair and compelled me to listen to the Rush album of my choice, it would be their first album. So, on the grounds that my favorite Rush album basically is not a Rush album, I am deeply unqualified to comment on them. I wanted to start there.

That said, someone asked and I was thankful for the opportunity on a couple levels. First, and most obviously, Neil Peart, Rush’s legendary drummer, and a rock icon if there ever was one, died quietly and gracefully earlier this month. The second level cuts deeper: a friend of mine from high school and a decade after, now long passed, loved Rush with the heat of a thousand suns. He loved everything like that, not quite uncritically – he had a rotating hierarchy as to which was his favorite album – but his overall enthusiasm for Rush (and The Rolling Stones’ harmonics) was sincere and unwavering. I can still hear him singing "the Keith parts" as we walked around school...

Rush was a large part of the background music for my high school years because of that relationship, but he wasn’t the only vector: I liked (and thought I) related to “Tom Sawyer” as much as your average lightly-alienated teenage male, but “Limelight” was always my special jam (and, for what it’s worth, I couldn’t make heads or tails of “Red Barchetta”); Moving Pictures dropped for all of us, basically, but, turned on as I was by (first) classic rock, then college/punk rock, I wouldn’t have heard anywhere near as much Rush as I did because of that friendship (as well as several others, which, happily, continue to this day).

I had my favorites – e.g., “Spirit of Radio,” “Closer to the Heart,” “The Trees” (why? you got me.) – but I effectively checked out after Moving Pictures. I have dim memories of “Subdivisions,” and I have a loose/possibly concocted memories of my departed friend’s bafflement at Roll the Bones, but my memory isn’t reliable and I have no means of confirmation, so I’d say my personal book on Rush started and ended with Moving Pictures and their most radio-friendly material…which, as I’ve learned over the past couple weeks, probably wasn’t their artistic focus.

Moving on to the music, I look at Rush the same way I look at classical music. I understand its appeal and respect the holy hell out of the technical side…but, even after a couple weeks’ listening, it doesn’t do anything for me. The biggest barrier is simple: the things that interest them don’t interest me; moreover, even when they touch on something that does interest me (e.g., feeling like an outsider), I don’t connect or even relate to the how they think about it. To speak ill of the dead, I’d rate Peart as one of the more tin-eared lyricists I’ve ever heard: they stick to a rhyme scheme, but the lyrics sound like someone reading a book (and a dense one) over the music, instead of playing with it, against it or off of it.