One Hit No More, No. 38, The Spiral Starecase: A Long, Hard, Corruptly-Managed Road

They had one freakin' guy on sax. WTAF?

The Hit
There’s a song called “Pickin’ a Chicken” by Eve Boswell that’s defiantly upbeat enough that it strikes me as a song of intense denial, the strained smile that precedes light serial killing, etc. Of course I don’t really think that, and also assume Boswell never killed anyone (that she didn’t mean to), but it’s just strident enough to keep me from buying the premise.

The Spiral Starecase’s “More Today than Yesterday” prompts a similar version of that physical reaction. Whatever qualities it has musically get lost in the way that all the bright, soaring notes come off as a parody of happiness, especially when paired with Pat Upton’s crisp, ringing vocals. Upton wrote the song and with the encouragement of one of the band’s early managers, a guy from Columbia named Gary Usher, and there’s an anecdote about the writing that I picked out of a post to an entertainment law firm’s website (McLane & Wong), who picked the quotes out of Upton’s book about his time with The Spiral Starecase and it’s predecessor act, The Fydallions (sometimes, the Fedalions, but only in LA, apparently):

“The last time I saw Gary was in Vegas and I had just written 'More'. I played it for him and it only had two verses. He said it needed another verse, so I wrote another.”

I find that priceless on two levels. First, the fact he (and I believe others) refer to The Spiral Starecase’s hit single as, “More,” because the nickname makes it feel like another member of the band. Second, what was the hold up on that third verse? In his defense, however, that third verse does feel a little more polished…

The Rest of the Story
“…with a full horn section to replicate the sound of their biggest hits.”

I lifted that quote from Wikipedia’s“just the facts, ma’am” entry on The Spiral Starecase. It’s a decent history, and it reconciles some inconsistencies between some other sources in a way that feels either satisfying or correct, but it also glosses over how long and hard this band worked for its shot. Their reward: getting screwed over by management and told that they didn’t look right by Columbia Records (but watch the performance for "More Today" above...that's hip?). Not all members had the last laugh in the end, but some of them did. Despite dropping just one album that anyone cared about - this was after “More Today” (see? not so hard) - parts of the band toured until the 1980s. And, for reasons that defy mathematics, they somehow squeezed seven goddamn compilation albums out of that one album. To go back to the beginning…

Two members of the band - Upton and saxophonist, Dick Lopes - got together a band for an Air Force talent show at the station where they were based near Sacramento, CA. They used the Fydallions named even then and set out to build a bigger better band for Sacramento’s civilian scene. Bobby Raymond came into the line-up on bass guitar, Harvey Kaye on keyboards, and Vinnie Parello on drums; Upton played lead guitar and sang while Lopes stuck to the saxophone. Low-hanging documentation on The Fydallions is low, but I did find a contemporary news segment (I love you google as much as I hate you) that shows them playing the scenic California capital’s Old Tropicana Club and, honestly, I would have enjoyed listening to that band a lot more than The Spiral Starecase, but the assignment chooses the bands in this project, not the other way around. Moving on…

This is one of those cases where they phrase “one-hit wonder” gets under my skin a bit, because The Fydallions paid 4-5 years worth of steep dues - working the San Francisco scene, five-hour lounge shows in Vegas, auditioning via random recordings and waiting for the phone call in Los Angeles. They added some new members in 1966 - Gene Austin (more bass), Mark Barret (more drums…srsly?), and Al Sebay on electric guitar, but otherwise bumped around like that for some time when Columbia discovered them, signed them, demanded they change both their name and look (too conservative, they said, which wasn’t wrong in 1969, and yet...). It’s worth talking about management a bit, because that looms large.

An undated post in RebeatMag’s “Story Behind” series gives the fullest tallying of their problems with managers - equipment bought on a stolen credit card then repossessed before a show, skimping on weekly payments for a PA system during their residency at The Flamingo Sky Lounge in Vegas…also, repossessed. And all this happened before “More” (fuck it; going with it) became a hit. The burn-out and bickering among the band was bad enough by then that no one had the endurance to stick it out. Basically, five striving years as The Fydallions ended in 18 stressful months as The Spiral Starecase. If there’s a silver lining to all that, they got to open for bands like Three Dog Night, Sly and the Family Stone and Creedence Clearwater Revival; even if they got only three songs before the proverbial cane yanked them off the stage, five guys from the Air Force wrote a hit and played with the stars. Now, to close on some happier stuff…for the most part…

About the Sampler
Once again, there is no sampler, because only the one album. While it looks like The Spiral Starecase put out two albums under the Columbia label - one with Usher and one, post “More” with his replacement, the perfectly-named Sonny Knight (screams "producer"), Spotify only had the latter - named More Today Than Yesterday - which is mostly previously released 45s cobbled together into an LP. To its credit, the entertainment law site (link above) does the best job of mapping the tangled path. For the first pitch, Usher tried “Baby What I Mean” backed with “Makin’ Up My Mind” - both songs, significantly, not written by the band. [Ed. - Fun Note: of all the members of The Spiral Starecase, only Upton and Kaye play a role in the studio version of "More Today."] Next, they tried “Broken-Hearted Man” (which Dick Clark himself declared “the second single”) with “More Today.” While I can’t say for sure which 45 ultimately broke them into the Billboard (and Cashbox and Canadian charts), one source or the other (trust me, it’s not important) named “No One for Me to Turn To” as they b-side for “More Today.”

As much as I respect The Spiral Starecase for their time-in, I’d only recommend them to someone who likes post-political, horn-heavy late-60s/early70s pop music. The more I look the past of American popular music, the more convinced I become that some version of Tin Pan Alley continues to this day, coopting and polishing the sounds that come up from the original stuff that bubbles up and turning them into Marketable Commodities. I can’t argue that The Spiral Starecase offered anything truly novel to the American music scene - and that goes back to their days as The Fydallions - but they did write at least one song that, whatever I think of it, still lingers in the zeitgeist. I used to care about how all that worked, but who really gives a shit? A random guy serving time in the Air Force wrote a song that made people happy then and it keeps making them happy now.

Crap. I forgot the post-script, which matters because it has two reasonably happy endings. It was Kaye (the keyboardist) that reformed the band in Vegas and that played all those gigs (and, again, somehow conjured seven compilation albums out of one actual album; then again, do pay attention to the dates they were released and look for the pop culture brands they associated with; money, baby!) all the way to the 1980s. We’d all do well to remember that what passes for “good taste” isn’t universal. Upton caught a break of his own when he became a session player with Ricky Nelson. Moreover, in Upton’s own words he gets “more today than yesterday” in royalties from his song.

One Hit No More, No. 37: The Youngbloods, A Song, A Band, a Soap Opera

This good, but different...

The Hit
You know this one - “Get Together,” an anthem of a generation - but it’s got a better story than you’d expect (more later) and, if you haven’t really looked at the lyrics lately, they are a big pile of good and rare things: stirring, beautiful, hopeful. Spending 20 years or so in a jaded funk meant missing all that, but, in my defense, there was always something about the way so much of the peace-‘n’-love crowd aged into grasping Reaganite boomers that made the whole thing come off as a con.

I’ve always liked the patient, steady timing on that lead guitar part, though, for its subtle sense of forward momentum, the idea of walking toward the ideal of the lyrics. A melodic loping bass line and sustained electric piano notes percolate underneath while a succession of guitar flourishes dance around the lead. And that famous chorus makes you want to pass a Coke and a smile to everyone until we all arrive at the big, calm Kumbaya that just about all of us would kill for right now...

As much as they loved it, The Youngbloods waited two years for anyone to care about that song and, when they finally did - only after the members of the National Council of Christians and Jews heard the song as a WABC-AM promo and decided to use it, appropriately, in radio and television ads - they had new material to promote, better material too, only to walk off Johnny Carson's Tonight Show when he wouldn't let them promote it. And the song’s story goes back even further, all the way to Bob Dylan descending on Greenwich Village...but somewhat indirectly.

The Rest of the Story
I’m going to start with The Youngbloods as a band. One of them, Jesse Colin Young, started as a solo artist in Greenwich Village’s folk scene. With two albums under his belt (of which I’ve only heard one song), he found he was playing more around Cambridge and Boston, MA, than in his adopted New York City; the former had more venues, for one. Another guitarist, Jerry Corbitt, saw him play once and kept showing up at enough shows after that they started playing together whenever Young came up to Boston. After hitting it off, they made it official and Corbitt called in musicians he’d met around his neighborhood, starting with (I think) drummer Joe Bauer and, later, Lowell “Banana” Levinger (electric piano/guitar), who they talked into leaving another band that wasn’t going anywhere.

They’d recorded two full LPs before too long - the expected eponymous debut in 1967 - which featured “Get Together” and an essentially similar second album in the same year, which they named Earth Music. It’s all polished material, very polished even, because they knew how to put together the same kind of tangled melodies that makes “Get Together” play so warm in the ears. They stretched in a couple directions away from that center for Earth Music - toward the 50s/blues guitar on “Monkey Business,” the funk organ-fronted jam vibes of “Long & Tall,” and the dirtier-blues stylings on “I Can Tell” - and it worked. And showed some ambition. OK, time to talk about that song.

One Hit No More, No. 36: Crazy Elephant, Just Some Welsh Mining and Music Enthusiasts

The first image in google's search. Fer reals, 08 09 2020

The Hit
Crazy Elephant came, literally, out of nowhere in 1969 with a hit that reached No. 12 on both sides of the English-speaking Atlantic Ocean, “Gimme Gimme Good Lovin’.” It opens on a bass line thrumming over a marching rhythm; an electric organ comes in next, almost like horns, and the “soulful” vocals carry forward the tune with American geography for a motif. Conceptually, it borrows from The Beach Boys’ “California Girls” up to the line of owing royalties, but it’s clearly a different song…

…still pure pop confection, circa 1969, but a different song all the same.

The Rest of the Story
“Despite the single's success, however, Crazy Elephant failed to reach the charts again, instead becoming yet another interchangeable cog in the Kasenetz-Katz hit machine.”

AllMusic rarely dives all that deep into anyone, but they had to stretch Crazy Elephant’s story just to get a paragraph out of it. There isn’t a lot to add about this band, specifically, beyond a handful of names and about 15 songs.

They “Kasenatz-Katz hit machine” refers to Jerry Kasenatz and Jeffry Katz and their Super K Productions outfit that operated under the Buddah Records label - a name regular followers of this series (also, are there any?) might recognize from The Lemon Pipers’ frustration with the same label and some of the seem people. Kasenatz and Katz first met as undergrads at the University of Arizona where, reading between the lines of the sources I read, they did not major in music. When they decided to go into business as producers, the music didn’t motivate them as much as the money. Crazy Elephant came out of the “bubblegum pop” mini-genre - and I found a straight-up awesome post that interested parties can lose themselves in for, oh, a solid half-hour minimum - but they were nothing more or less than the next attempt to sell sugary pop music to a public burning out on songs about war, politics, and the Summer of Love. For anyone unfamiliar with the term “bubblegum pop,” it’s a form you’ve heard countless times over your life, only with a different name. As for its ethos:

“Power pop aims for your heart and your feet. Bubblegum aims for any part of your body it can get, as long as you buy the damn record.”

One Hit No More, No. 35: Roy Clark, Yesterday When He Was Young, aka, Before Hee Haw

Natural habitat...

The Hit
Quite a few things came on either side of it - most of them meaning more to Roy Clark’s overall arc of considerable fame - but he charted biggest with 1969’s, “Yesterday When I Was Young.” A nostalgic tune about the fleeting promise of youth, even the music sounds borrowed from an earlier (and stodgier) time; think a Lawrence Welk take on country. The music actually works against the theme, because it tells the familiar tale of youth misspent, living fast, dying young, and so on. It packs all the verve of looking back from one’s mid-70s…which is suitable…

It was a favorite of the infamously hard-living baseball legend, Mickey Mantle, who loved it enough to ask Clark to request it his funeral.

The Rest of the Story
With Clark, the rest of the story is the story. Even when he talks about his more famous songs during a 2015 interview with the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority for its A Conversation with…[Roy Clark] series, “Yesterday When I Was Young” doesn’t sound any more or less meaningful than, say, “The Tip of My Fingers” or “Malaguena.” In fact, his comments on the latter give a clearer impression on Clark’s career: he used to talk over the song when he played it, pausing here and there to kid with the audience, until the day a stranger from the audience walked up, told him that he plays it beautifully and that his chatter took away from that. The Mantle connection clearly affected him, though, and Clark later recalled how nice it felt to receive a note from the original artist, Charles Aznavour (French; here’s the original), letting him know that he nailed his translated cover.

The greater portion of anyone who finds this post surely knows Clark from the same place I do: Hee Haw, the long-running, (later) Nashville-based variety show that was originally pitched as a summertime replacement program as Laff-In for the country crowd. The original episode and all the subsequent “replacement programs” rated high enough for CBS to pick up the show for, oh, 18 seasons, and that gets to something else about Clark: thanks to his work on The Beverly Hillbillies and a couple other daytime shows, he was hired to pair with Buck Owens on the grounds that Owens “came from music” while Clark “came from TV,” of which, yes and no.