The Hit
The Buoys' 1971 hit, “Timothy,” was a new song for me, so I came into the whole thing fresh. Musically, it has that post-60s rock sound, polished and busy (see the instrumental flourishes), “lushly orchestrated” they used to call it. It plays at a high tempo, like the beat’s driving toward something, a resolution perhaps…
…or cannibalism. Pot-ay-to, pot-ah-to, right? The subject matter to “Timothy” was subtle, maybe the lush orchestration swallows a telling phrase here or there if you don’t listen carefully (“and Joe said he’d sell his soul/for just a piece of meat”); as Wikipedia’s entry notes, executives at Specter Records only caught on after the song got a ways up the charts. On the other hand, the songwriter, Rupert Holmes, refused to change either the lyrics of the song or its premise; he’d made a conscious choice to offend when he wrote it…
…but with assurances that he’d never even heard of the Sheppton mine cave-in of 1963 when he wrote it. (For the record, this doesn’t seem horribly far-fetched; Holmes hails from England, which surely had its share of collapsed mines.)
The Rest of the Story
The story of the band called The Buoys doesn’t go much further than that. Based in the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton area of Pennsylvania, the original band included Fran Brozena, Carl Siracuse, Chris Hanlon, Bob Gryziec on bass, if only at the time they recorded “Timothy,” and Jerry Hludzek on guitar and Billy Kelly on vocals. Holmes does not appear to have been part of the actual band - though he did record the single with them (and maybe others?) - but he did write the song. Another fun fact: The Buoys were Holmes' second choice to record “Timothy,” behind another act named The Glass Prism, an act both time and Wikipedia forgot.
According to a Classic Bands interview with Hludek, they lived the life for a while - including a festival in Oregon where they played Crosby, Stills and Nash covers after they ran through their thin material; Rolling Stone called it “a near flawless imitation” so there’s that - but only Kelly and Hludzek cared for it. The rest declared the life “bullshit” and (presumably) settled into day jobs. Anyone who takes the time to read that Hludek interview will learn a lot more about Kelly and Hludek’s second band, Dakota (who sound like this, or this; not for me, fwiw, in fact, the sound of my most hated era) than they’ll learn about The Buoys.
Bigger and better stories surround Holmes, who not only wrote “Timothy,” but also “Prince of Thieves,” “Bloodknot,” “Tomorrow,” and, with a guy the Wiki-editor lists as D. Jordan, The Buoys’ second biggest hit, “Give Up Your Guns.” Just to note it, nearly all those songs feature outlaws and/or men on the run. For those sensing a theme…
Holmes’ had a short career as a session musician (helpfully defined as “producing sessions, writing and arranging songs, singing and playing a few instruments”) prior to his time as a Buoy - he even pissed off The Archies once (if only professionally) - and continued to develop as a songwriter/solo artist after leaving. For instance, his first album, 1974’s Widescreen, caught enough of Barbara Streisand’s ear (luckily; it never sold well) that Holmes wrote some songs for her - including one from A Star Is Born, “Queen Bee,” plus a couple on her 1975 album, Lazy Afternoon.
Despite never really hitting it big - not unless critical acclaim counts (Rolling Stone “[compared] him with Bob Dylan in the sense of being an artist of unprecedented originality that commanded attention”) - Holmes lived the grind through four solo albums…and then straight-up fucking exploded when he slipped a song he titled “Escape” onto his fifth album, 1979’s Partners in Crime (the album also featured another hit, “Him”). Everyone else knows it as “The Pina Colada Song,” of course, and, as recorded in a Groovy Historybiography of Holmes, he had mixed feelings at the whole experience:
“I have a feeling that if I saved an entire orphanage from a fire and carried the last child out on my shoulders, as I stood there charred and smoking, they'd say, 'Aren't you the guy who wrote the Piña Colada song?’”
The ironic bitterness makes sense between all the time Holmes had put in before “Escape” and all of his later accomplishments - e.g., two Tony Awards, plus having enough left in the tank to write hits when Britney Spears came around. Holmes had a really massive career, if a quiet one. If you asked 1,000 people who wrote “The Pina Colada Song,” I’d wager that no more than 20 of them could name of the guy who wrote it…and I’m not sure that would bother Rupert Holmes.
About the Sampler
I actually covered a lot of them up above - including Holmes’ later solo hits (oh, yes, there will be pina coladas), the Streisand song from A Star Is Born - but I only linked to the two Dakota songs, which are “Runaway” and “Angry Men,” respectively (again, listen at your own risk, or according to your preference; if you dig the 80s rock sound, they could be all the way up your alley). I also touched on every song Holmes wrote for The Buoys, except “Tomorrow.” Including the “bonus” Holmes material felt right because, by the loose math, he has a 50% creative stake in The Buoys (about 18 songs total, minus the songs Holmes didn’t write, divided by their most successful songs.)
I don’t know where the rest of The Buoys catalog came from, but, from that batch, I pulled a pair of “rockers” to the sampler - the almost jam-sytle, “Tell Me Heaven Is Here” and “Pittsburgh Steel,” which, for turning on workers boiling their foreman in boiling steel, continues a Buoys tradition - plus a trio of genuinely delicate numbers: the almost fragrant “Sunny Days, Memories,” the lush, acoustic ballad “Absent Friend,” and the borderline Tin Pan Alley throwback, “These Days.”
If anything up above reads as dismissive of The Buoys, that’s not my intent. Based on Don’t Give Up Your Guns (or Timothy; there’s this trick they do with the awning and the graffiti behind it), everyone in the band had solid range and talent, even the guys who checked out. And even if Dakota never became a Kansas, it sounds like Kelly and Hludek made it as career musicians - something that clearly delights the hell out of Hludek, according to that Classic Bands interview.
The Buoys’ story counts as fairly unique in the One Hit No More schema, at least so far. Calling Murdoch the spine doesn’t seem unfair, but I’m not sure either Kelly and Hludek would call The Buoys the best part of their career. Unlike most, and damn-near all the bands I reviewed so far, I don’t think they’ve ever done time on the oldies circuit, at least not around “Timothy.”
The Buoys' 1971 hit, “Timothy,” was a new song for me, so I came into the whole thing fresh. Musically, it has that post-60s rock sound, polished and busy (see the instrumental flourishes), “lushly orchestrated” they used to call it. It plays at a high tempo, like the beat’s driving toward something, a resolution perhaps…
…or cannibalism. Pot-ay-to, pot-ah-to, right? The subject matter to “Timothy” was subtle, maybe the lush orchestration swallows a telling phrase here or there if you don’t listen carefully (“and Joe said he’d sell his soul/for just a piece of meat”); as Wikipedia’s entry notes, executives at Specter Records only caught on after the song got a ways up the charts. On the other hand, the songwriter, Rupert Holmes, refused to change either the lyrics of the song or its premise; he’d made a conscious choice to offend when he wrote it…
…but with assurances that he’d never even heard of the Sheppton mine cave-in of 1963 when he wrote it. (For the record, this doesn’t seem horribly far-fetched; Holmes hails from England, which surely had its share of collapsed mines.)
The Rest of the Story
The story of the band called The Buoys doesn’t go much further than that. Based in the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton area of Pennsylvania, the original band included Fran Brozena, Carl Siracuse, Chris Hanlon, Bob Gryziec on bass, if only at the time they recorded “Timothy,” and Jerry Hludzek on guitar and Billy Kelly on vocals. Holmes does not appear to have been part of the actual band - though he did record the single with them (and maybe others?) - but he did write the song. Another fun fact: The Buoys were Holmes' second choice to record “Timothy,” behind another act named The Glass Prism, an act both time and Wikipedia forgot.
According to a Classic Bands interview with Hludek, they lived the life for a while - including a festival in Oregon where they played Crosby, Stills and Nash covers after they ran through their thin material; Rolling Stone called it “a near flawless imitation” so there’s that - but only Kelly and Hludzek cared for it. The rest declared the life “bullshit” and (presumably) settled into day jobs. Anyone who takes the time to read that Hludek interview will learn a lot more about Kelly and Hludek’s second band, Dakota (who sound like this, or this; not for me, fwiw, in fact, the sound of my most hated era) than they’ll learn about The Buoys.
Bigger and better stories surround Holmes, who not only wrote “Timothy,” but also “Prince of Thieves,” “Bloodknot,” “Tomorrow,” and, with a guy the Wiki-editor lists as D. Jordan, The Buoys’ second biggest hit, “Give Up Your Guns.” Just to note it, nearly all those songs feature outlaws and/or men on the run. For those sensing a theme…
Holmes’ had a short career as a session musician (helpfully defined as “producing sessions, writing and arranging songs, singing and playing a few instruments”) prior to his time as a Buoy - he even pissed off The Archies once (if only professionally) - and continued to develop as a songwriter/solo artist after leaving. For instance, his first album, 1974’s Widescreen, caught enough of Barbara Streisand’s ear (luckily; it never sold well) that Holmes wrote some songs for her - including one from A Star Is Born, “Queen Bee,” plus a couple on her 1975 album, Lazy Afternoon.
Despite never really hitting it big - not unless critical acclaim counts (Rolling Stone “[compared] him with Bob Dylan in the sense of being an artist of unprecedented originality that commanded attention”) - Holmes lived the grind through four solo albums…and then straight-up fucking exploded when he slipped a song he titled “Escape” onto his fifth album, 1979’s Partners in Crime (the album also featured another hit, “Him”). Everyone else knows it as “The Pina Colada Song,” of course, and, as recorded in a Groovy Historybiography of Holmes, he had mixed feelings at the whole experience:
“I have a feeling that if I saved an entire orphanage from a fire and carried the last child out on my shoulders, as I stood there charred and smoking, they'd say, 'Aren't you the guy who wrote the Piña Colada song?’”
The ironic bitterness makes sense between all the time Holmes had put in before “Escape” and all of his later accomplishments - e.g., two Tony Awards, plus having enough left in the tank to write hits when Britney Spears came around. Holmes had a really massive career, if a quiet one. If you asked 1,000 people who wrote “The Pina Colada Song,” I’d wager that no more than 20 of them could name of the guy who wrote it…and I’m not sure that would bother Rupert Holmes.
About the Sampler
I actually covered a lot of them up above - including Holmes’ later solo hits (oh, yes, there will be pina coladas), the Streisand song from A Star Is Born - but I only linked to the two Dakota songs, which are “Runaway” and “Angry Men,” respectively (again, listen at your own risk, or according to your preference; if you dig the 80s rock sound, they could be all the way up your alley). I also touched on every song Holmes wrote for The Buoys, except “Tomorrow.” Including the “bonus” Holmes material felt right because, by the loose math, he has a 50% creative stake in The Buoys (about 18 songs total, minus the songs Holmes didn’t write, divided by their most successful songs.)
I don’t know where the rest of The Buoys catalog came from, but, from that batch, I pulled a pair of “rockers” to the sampler - the almost jam-sytle, “Tell Me Heaven Is Here” and “Pittsburgh Steel,” which, for turning on workers boiling their foreman in boiling steel, continues a Buoys tradition - plus a trio of genuinely delicate numbers: the almost fragrant “Sunny Days, Memories,” the lush, acoustic ballad “Absent Friend,” and the borderline Tin Pan Alley throwback, “These Days.”
If anything up above reads as dismissive of The Buoys, that’s not my intent. Based on Don’t Give Up Your Guns (or Timothy; there’s this trick they do with the awning and the graffiti behind it), everyone in the band had solid range and talent, even the guys who checked out. And even if Dakota never became a Kansas, it sounds like Kelly and Hludek made it as career musicians - something that clearly delights the hell out of Hludek, according to that Classic Bands interview.
The Buoys’ story counts as fairly unique in the One Hit No More schema, at least so far. Calling Murdoch the spine doesn’t seem unfair, but I’m not sure either Kelly and Hludek would call The Buoys the best part of their career. Unlike most, and damn-near all the bands I reviewed so far, I don’t think they’ve ever done time on the oldies circuit, at least not around “Timothy.”
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