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| 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.
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.
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