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| Closer to this. Please. |
The Hit
You know “Dancing in the Moonlight.” Everybody knows “Dancing in the Moonlight.” Then again, I always thought another band made it, even if I could never say who exactly. (I keep flashing to Lovin’ Spoonful, but I’ve listened to enough of them to know better.)
From those first fat, sparkling treble keys, it’s a happy little song. The keyboards keep pulsing warmth throughout the track, the bass seems like it’s only there to keep time and add a bubbly counter-melody; per the song, the vocals “keep things loose” and have the happy easy-going mood of someone inviting you to a party. And that party definitely takes place at the height of summer - or some place that’s always warm - where you’ll never get caught out by a sudden drop in temperature. The guy who wrote it, Sherman Kelly, calls the song exactly what it sounds like: a celebration.
Kelly wrote that song on his own and passed through a couple of bands - e.g., Boffalongo and, more obscure, High Broom - but it ultimately landed with a band made up of American ex-patriates studying, playing and slumming in Paris, France in the early 1970s. Kelly’s brother, Wells Kelly, was the guy who brought it to a couple members of King Harvest. Well, sort of…
Per a 2020 remembrance in Vinyl Dialogues, both of the Kelly brothers briefly played in Boffalongo with two other guys, one named Dave “Doc” Robinson and another named Larry Hoppen (who later formed Orleans with Wells Kelly). Boffalongo actually recorded “Dancing in the Moonlight” first, and with Sherman Kelly on vocals - who, incidentally, tells a funny story about someone feeding him one snort of cocaine after another to get him through the vocals, only that didn’t help, but rather did the opposite (“And the producers would give me more cocaine to keep me doing takes until my voice was so distorted and so weird”; Sherman Kelly had the guts to quote a clever something a critic once said about his voice: “As a singer, Sherman Kelly is not too bad of a songwriter.”) The Vinyl Dialogues piece gets to that, but only after re-telling the horror story that inspired the song.
Back in the late-60s, Sherman Kelly, his girlfriend and a bunch of friends had settled in the U.S. Virgin Islands, running a bar or some such. One day, they decided to sail to St. Croix, only Kelly and his girlfriend (Adrienne, I believe) got horribly seasick at the crossing. They decided against spending another night on the boat and tried to check into a hotel…only Kelly forgot his wallet on the boat. They begged the hotelier to let them stay and settle up in the morning, but he asked a vile price - i.e., he’d do it if Adrienne would have sex with him - so they decided to sleep on the beach. Where things went so horribly fucking worse.
A local street gang attacked them, bashing Kelly unconscious and otherwise broken with baseball bats. With Kelly down, the gang’s leader raped Adrienne and the other five gang members lined up to do the same. Somewhere in all that, Kelly gained enough consciousness and adrenaline to scare them off and spare Adrienne from even greater horror. They limped off to a hospital, but he never fully recovered. They had to re-break and re-set the bones in his face, he suffered from pain and headaches for a good while thereafter.
When Sherman Kelly sat down to write “Dancing in the Moonlight,” it was to re-imagine it as the night it should have been. He wrote it to replace the memory of a horrible night. In his own words:
“I envisioned an alternate reality, the dream of a peaceful and joyous celebration of life. It was just me imagining a better world than the one I had just experienced in St. Croix.”
The Rest of the Story
I can’t do more justice to the King Harvest experience than their saxophonist, Rod Novak, does in a long interview with Classic Bands. He covers, literally, everything: from the band’s time as one of scores playing Cornell University’s robust, Greek system/bar scene (and his knowledge of obscure bands in upstate and mid-state New York is surely unparalleled; plus Huey Lewis makes a cameo!) to their time relocating to France when another member of King Harvest, Ron Altbach, relocated there for classical training under the (apparently) legendary, Nadia Boulanger, who trained Gerswhin and loved/trained Arthur Rubenstein. It’s a messy, complicated and…rather long recounting of those times and, frankly, too granular for a post like this, but, it’s also a very good, interesting read for anyone who’s interested. As much as anything, it reminds me of living in Seattle in the early 1990s, when it seemed like everyone but me was in a band or starting one.
King Harvest actually wound up forming in France, when Altbach invited Novak and Ed Tuleja (who played guitar) to join him. With the experience they’d all gained playing the college circuit, they wound up staying in France taking odd jobs - e.g., doing the music for a film by a French director/producer, and playing places like ski resorts and the Whiskey A Go Go in Cannes. Robinson came on board when the band officially became King Harvest (and I think they played all the gigs mentioned above with that group). They also recorded a couple albums while in France, including their first stab at making “Dancing in the Moonlight” work, which they backed with “Lady, Come on Home” on a 45. Wells Kelly, who was quite a character, apparently, played with them for a while during this period and the whole thing sounds like one hell of an adventure…only it didn’t really go anywhere…
The story turns with a friend they made in France, a guy named Jack Robinson, who ran a company called Criterion Music. King Harvest had been working on different versions of their soon-to-be hit single for some time and Robinson thought he could put the finishing touches on it. That finished version was the same one that died in France, but, when Robinson returned States-side and shopped it, he found a small New York label called Perception, who agreed to lease the master and promote the single. They did good work - for once (wait for it) - and broke “Dancing” through in the Seattle market. After many years and several attempts, the single broke through, spiking at No. 13 on the U.S. charts and hitting No. 5 in Canada. When the four main members of King Harvest eventually returned to the States (when, finally, Wikipedia gives the simplest timeline), they had a hit on their hands.
This fairly charming story (post straight-up fucking horror, at least) just keeps getting more charming from here. Perception, as it turns out, had some issues. As Novak recalls (this is on Classic Bands), “they owed just about everybody in New York money,” and so, when they finally struck gold with “Dancing” “everybody kind of sued ‘em at the same time for the money they were owed." King Harvest, meanwhile, had their hit and plenty of suitors looking to sign them. Novak tells what happened next better than I can:
“So, they were offering us a lot of money. We thought about it. Had meetings. We decided that Perception had made the hit and we didn't want to screw 'em over. They were the little guy. They were the underdog. Why should we screw 'em over and go with one of the majors when they made this song a hit? So, we stayed with Perception.”
King Harvest had a follow-up album, A Little Bit of Magic, but the lawsuits and subsequent bankruptcy filing left Perception with no budget for anything, never mind promotion, so the album languished. They broke up for the second time after that (forgot to mention the first), but there’s a pretty solid happy ending for the permanent and rotating members of King Harvest. Several members had done work with The Beach Boys, so, when they expanded their act from a nine-piece to a seventeen piece, Novak, Tuleja, Altbach and a drummer named Bobby Figueroa (who’d played with both The Beach Boys and King Harvest before) joined up and toured around the whole damn world with them. And they played some big shows, as Novak recalls:
“We played Central Park. They still don't know how many people were in Central Park. I see estimates everywhere from 500,000 to a million. That was a real experience, looking out there. Just people forever. You couldn't see the end of the crowd in Central Park. We were doing shows in Pontiac Stadium, 60,000, Day On The Green in Oakland.”
Few of the One Hit Wonder posts I’ve written can match King Harvest when it comes to a romantic youth. Living abroad, following jobs to glamorous locales, spending a night sipping scotch and talking art and music with Ringo (fucking) Starr and Maurice (Curse-word) Gibb, then coming back home with a hit, trying to do something decent, then closing it all out touring with one of the biggest bands in American popular music: that shit is bananas, and you don’t need Gwen Stefani to tell you how to spell it. (Sorry, low-hanging.) Four guys caught fire amid all that, and they did it on the back of a song written to erase a totally different guy’s horror. How’s that for convoluted?
About the Sampler
There’s the hit, naturally, but the song that backed it on that 45 was good enough (if totally different) to make the sampler. The rest of it comes (mainly*) from just two collections on Spotify: the Dancing in the Moonlight album, presumably thrown together to cash in on the single, and 2007’s Lost Tapes, which sounds like exactly what it is. Because King Harvest has a decent amount of range for a band playing to their specific era, I think it’s best to just list the songs on the sampler by album/collection (with descriptors where applicable):
From Dancing in the Moonlight (besides the two above): a strong instrumental called “Motor Job,” a twanging rock-star tale from the road in “She Keeps Me High,” plus a couple of aching, heartful ballads (and personal favorites), “Think I Better Wait Till Tomorrow” and the beautiful, “Smile on Her Face.”
From (the less sturdy) Lost Tapes (from best to worst, why not?): the lovely “Clouded Over August Day” (also, the sound's wrong on that), the white-funk gold of “Flying Home Tonight,” the gentle, sly “Elmore Bacon,” the long (frankly, repetitive) jam “Take It Easy,” what I want to believe is King Harvest’s “Idaho” to Arlo Guthrie’s “Massachusetts,” and, finally, the frankly annoying (and therefore necessary to include) “The Damadha Song.”
* Novak and Tuleja spent some time performing as a country western outfit in…Scandinavia, which songs were pulled together in something called the The Prairie Dogs - Country Classics. It’s pretty middling stuff, for what it’s worth, so I added their spin on a couple standards to the sampler: “She Thinks I Still Care” and “You Win Again.”
Once again, this was a good, quick dive into an interesting band who did the kind of music I like. This cannot go on forever, but I’m going to enjoy it for as long as it does.
You know “Dancing in the Moonlight.” Everybody knows “Dancing in the Moonlight.” Then again, I always thought another band made it, even if I could never say who exactly. (I keep flashing to Lovin’ Spoonful, but I’ve listened to enough of them to know better.)
From those first fat, sparkling treble keys, it’s a happy little song. The keyboards keep pulsing warmth throughout the track, the bass seems like it’s only there to keep time and add a bubbly counter-melody; per the song, the vocals “keep things loose” and have the happy easy-going mood of someone inviting you to a party. And that party definitely takes place at the height of summer - or some place that’s always warm - where you’ll never get caught out by a sudden drop in temperature. The guy who wrote it, Sherman Kelly, calls the song exactly what it sounds like: a celebration.
Kelly wrote that song on his own and passed through a couple of bands - e.g., Boffalongo and, more obscure, High Broom - but it ultimately landed with a band made up of American ex-patriates studying, playing and slumming in Paris, France in the early 1970s. Kelly’s brother, Wells Kelly, was the guy who brought it to a couple members of King Harvest. Well, sort of…
Per a 2020 remembrance in Vinyl Dialogues, both of the Kelly brothers briefly played in Boffalongo with two other guys, one named Dave “Doc” Robinson and another named Larry Hoppen (who later formed Orleans with Wells Kelly). Boffalongo actually recorded “Dancing in the Moonlight” first, and with Sherman Kelly on vocals - who, incidentally, tells a funny story about someone feeding him one snort of cocaine after another to get him through the vocals, only that didn’t help, but rather did the opposite (“And the producers would give me more cocaine to keep me doing takes until my voice was so distorted and so weird”; Sherman Kelly had the guts to quote a clever something a critic once said about his voice: “As a singer, Sherman Kelly is not too bad of a songwriter.”) The Vinyl Dialogues piece gets to that, but only after re-telling the horror story that inspired the song.
Back in the late-60s, Sherman Kelly, his girlfriend and a bunch of friends had settled in the U.S. Virgin Islands, running a bar or some such. One day, they decided to sail to St. Croix, only Kelly and his girlfriend (Adrienne, I believe) got horribly seasick at the crossing. They decided against spending another night on the boat and tried to check into a hotel…only Kelly forgot his wallet on the boat. They begged the hotelier to let them stay and settle up in the morning, but he asked a vile price - i.e., he’d do it if Adrienne would have sex with him - so they decided to sleep on the beach. Where things went so horribly fucking worse.
A local street gang attacked them, bashing Kelly unconscious and otherwise broken with baseball bats. With Kelly down, the gang’s leader raped Adrienne and the other five gang members lined up to do the same. Somewhere in all that, Kelly gained enough consciousness and adrenaline to scare them off and spare Adrienne from even greater horror. They limped off to a hospital, but he never fully recovered. They had to re-break and re-set the bones in his face, he suffered from pain and headaches for a good while thereafter.
When Sherman Kelly sat down to write “Dancing in the Moonlight,” it was to re-imagine it as the night it should have been. He wrote it to replace the memory of a horrible night. In his own words:
“I envisioned an alternate reality, the dream of a peaceful and joyous celebration of life. It was just me imagining a better world than the one I had just experienced in St. Croix.”
The Rest of the Story
I can’t do more justice to the King Harvest experience than their saxophonist, Rod Novak, does in a long interview with Classic Bands. He covers, literally, everything: from the band’s time as one of scores playing Cornell University’s robust, Greek system/bar scene (and his knowledge of obscure bands in upstate and mid-state New York is surely unparalleled; plus Huey Lewis makes a cameo!) to their time relocating to France when another member of King Harvest, Ron Altbach, relocated there for classical training under the (apparently) legendary, Nadia Boulanger, who trained Gerswhin and loved/trained Arthur Rubenstein. It’s a messy, complicated and…rather long recounting of those times and, frankly, too granular for a post like this, but, it’s also a very good, interesting read for anyone who’s interested. As much as anything, it reminds me of living in Seattle in the early 1990s, when it seemed like everyone but me was in a band or starting one.
King Harvest actually wound up forming in France, when Altbach invited Novak and Ed Tuleja (who played guitar) to join him. With the experience they’d all gained playing the college circuit, they wound up staying in France taking odd jobs - e.g., doing the music for a film by a French director/producer, and playing places like ski resorts and the Whiskey A Go Go in Cannes. Robinson came on board when the band officially became King Harvest (and I think they played all the gigs mentioned above with that group). They also recorded a couple albums while in France, including their first stab at making “Dancing in the Moonlight” work, which they backed with “Lady, Come on Home” on a 45. Wells Kelly, who was quite a character, apparently, played with them for a while during this period and the whole thing sounds like one hell of an adventure…only it didn’t really go anywhere…
The story turns with a friend they made in France, a guy named Jack Robinson, who ran a company called Criterion Music. King Harvest had been working on different versions of their soon-to-be hit single for some time and Robinson thought he could put the finishing touches on it. That finished version was the same one that died in France, but, when Robinson returned States-side and shopped it, he found a small New York label called Perception, who agreed to lease the master and promote the single. They did good work - for once (wait for it) - and broke “Dancing” through in the Seattle market. After many years and several attempts, the single broke through, spiking at No. 13 on the U.S. charts and hitting No. 5 in Canada. When the four main members of King Harvest eventually returned to the States (when, finally, Wikipedia gives the simplest timeline), they had a hit on their hands.
This fairly charming story (post straight-up fucking horror, at least) just keeps getting more charming from here. Perception, as it turns out, had some issues. As Novak recalls (this is on Classic Bands), “they owed just about everybody in New York money,” and so, when they finally struck gold with “Dancing” “everybody kind of sued ‘em at the same time for the money they were owed." King Harvest, meanwhile, had their hit and plenty of suitors looking to sign them. Novak tells what happened next better than I can:
“So, they were offering us a lot of money. We thought about it. Had meetings. We decided that Perception had made the hit and we didn't want to screw 'em over. They were the little guy. They were the underdog. Why should we screw 'em over and go with one of the majors when they made this song a hit? So, we stayed with Perception.”
King Harvest had a follow-up album, A Little Bit of Magic, but the lawsuits and subsequent bankruptcy filing left Perception with no budget for anything, never mind promotion, so the album languished. They broke up for the second time after that (forgot to mention the first), but there’s a pretty solid happy ending for the permanent and rotating members of King Harvest. Several members had done work with The Beach Boys, so, when they expanded their act from a nine-piece to a seventeen piece, Novak, Tuleja, Altbach and a drummer named Bobby Figueroa (who’d played with both The Beach Boys and King Harvest before) joined up and toured around the whole damn world with them. And they played some big shows, as Novak recalls:
“We played Central Park. They still don't know how many people were in Central Park. I see estimates everywhere from 500,000 to a million. That was a real experience, looking out there. Just people forever. You couldn't see the end of the crowd in Central Park. We were doing shows in Pontiac Stadium, 60,000, Day On The Green in Oakland.”
Few of the One Hit Wonder posts I’ve written can match King Harvest when it comes to a romantic youth. Living abroad, following jobs to glamorous locales, spending a night sipping scotch and talking art and music with Ringo (fucking) Starr and Maurice (Curse-word) Gibb, then coming back home with a hit, trying to do something decent, then closing it all out touring with one of the biggest bands in American popular music: that shit is bananas, and you don’t need Gwen Stefani to tell you how to spell it. (Sorry, low-hanging.) Four guys caught fire amid all that, and they did it on the back of a song written to erase a totally different guy’s horror. How’s that for convoluted?
About the Sampler
There’s the hit, naturally, but the song that backed it on that 45 was good enough (if totally different) to make the sampler. The rest of it comes (mainly*) from just two collections on Spotify: the Dancing in the Moonlight album, presumably thrown together to cash in on the single, and 2007’s Lost Tapes, which sounds like exactly what it is. Because King Harvest has a decent amount of range for a band playing to their specific era, I think it’s best to just list the songs on the sampler by album/collection (with descriptors where applicable):
From Dancing in the Moonlight (besides the two above): a strong instrumental called “Motor Job,” a twanging rock-star tale from the road in “She Keeps Me High,” plus a couple of aching, heartful ballads (and personal favorites), “Think I Better Wait Till Tomorrow” and the beautiful, “Smile on Her Face.”
From (the less sturdy) Lost Tapes (from best to worst, why not?): the lovely “Clouded Over August Day” (also, the sound's wrong on that), the white-funk gold of “Flying Home Tonight,” the gentle, sly “Elmore Bacon,” the long (frankly, repetitive) jam “Take It Easy,” what I want to believe is King Harvest’s “Idaho” to Arlo Guthrie’s “Massachusetts,” and, finally, the frankly annoying (and therefore necessary to include) “The Damadha Song.”
* Novak and Tuleja spent some time performing as a country western outfit in…Scandinavia, which songs were pulled together in something called the The Prairie Dogs - Country Classics. It’s pretty middling stuff, for what it’s worth, so I added their spin on a couple standards to the sampler: “She Thinks I Still Care” and “You Win Again.”
Once again, this was a good, quick dive into an interesting band who did the kind of music I like. This cannot go on forever, but I’m going to enjoy it for as long as it does.
Jeff,
ReplyDeleteThanks for a remarkably accurate recounting of King Harvest's musical endeavors of the 1970s. Best, KH
WOW, love love this.
ReplyDelete