 |
| Early branding issues (& Knox is 3rd from left.) |
One of the more relatable bands in the sample, honestly. They sound like the ones I came up watching.
The Hit
If I’d ever heard Buddy Knox’s “Party Doll” before working on this chapter, it slipped my mind. Despite being something of a groundbreaking tune – which I’ll get to – it doesn't sound so different from everything else you hear from the early rock of the late 1950s. And yet it was a little risque for its time: the King of American Bandstand, Dick Clark, refused to pick up Knox’s single due to the signature line in its chorus: “I want to make love to you.”
That racy line surprises less once you know that Knox fronted the Rhythm Orchids, a band that became all the rage at West Texas State College. Despite getting inspiration to record from two straight-up legends - they hardly get bigger than Roy Orbison or Elvis Presley (Knox recalls Presley telling him after he met him after a show, “Man, if you've got a band and some good songs, get into a recording studio cause something is fixing to happen”) – the Rhythm Orchids didn’t have visions of fame dancing in their heads when they stepped into “the recording studio.” They cut the singles – “Party Doll” b/w “I’m Sticking With You” – to pass on as “souvenirs” for their fans at WTSC and beyond. They were lucky to get that:
“Norman was an electrician who had built his own studio. His echo chamber was in the top of his dad's garage with a speaker at one end and a microphone at the other. Every time a truck passed by, it sounded like it was in the studio with us.”
The “Norman” referred to above was Norman Petty. Anyone who knows that name is a couple steps ahead on one of the Points of Interest (see below).
In any case, Knox and his bandmates paid $60 bucks for three days’ worth of recording time at a studio that had no interest in operating as a professional outfit. The recording sessions ran from midnight to 6:00 a.m. so they wouldn’t have to share the microphones with those trucks. That flyer scored them a No. 1 hit that ultimately 15 million copies and went gold within its first year.
Not bad for a kid from Happy, Texas, who was surely the most famous of his high school graduating class of 26 kids.
The Rest of the Story, Briefly
“I was very green. One minute I was on a farm in Happy, Texas and the next on The Ed Sullivan Show. I'd never seen buildings over three storeys before.”
The West Texas town of Happy didn’t have a lot going on when Buddy Knox was born in 1933. The fact he grew up somewhere that small (just 650 souls at the time) might be most interesting thing about his childhood. He filled his time learning guitar and harmonica – a hell of a feat, given that the family ranch had neither radio nor electricty – and, when he took his first steps into the wider world at WTSC, he hit the ground running. Knox had a particular interest in the...call them expressive arts, joining the campus drama club, the Buffalo Masquers, rushing the drama fraternity, Alpha Psi Omega, and even the campus service organization, the Buffalo Bills.
The Hit
If I’d ever heard Buddy Knox’s “Party Doll” before working on this chapter, it slipped my mind. Despite being something of a groundbreaking tune – which I’ll get to – it doesn't sound so different from everything else you hear from the early rock of the late 1950s. And yet it was a little risque for its time: the King of American Bandstand, Dick Clark, refused to pick up Knox’s single due to the signature line in its chorus: “I want to make love to you.”
That racy line surprises less once you know that Knox fronted the Rhythm Orchids, a band that became all the rage at West Texas State College. Despite getting inspiration to record from two straight-up legends - they hardly get bigger than Roy Orbison or Elvis Presley (Knox recalls Presley telling him after he met him after a show, “Man, if you've got a band and some good songs, get into a recording studio cause something is fixing to happen”) – the Rhythm Orchids didn’t have visions of fame dancing in their heads when they stepped into “the recording studio.” They cut the singles – “Party Doll” b/w “I’m Sticking With You” – to pass on as “souvenirs” for their fans at WTSC and beyond. They were lucky to get that:
“Norman was an electrician who had built his own studio. His echo chamber was in the top of his dad's garage with a speaker at one end and a microphone at the other. Every time a truck passed by, it sounded like it was in the studio with us.”
The “Norman” referred to above was Norman Petty. Anyone who knows that name is a couple steps ahead on one of the Points of Interest (see below).
In any case, Knox and his bandmates paid $60 bucks for three days’ worth of recording time at a studio that had no interest in operating as a professional outfit. The recording sessions ran from midnight to 6:00 a.m. so they wouldn’t have to share the microphones with those trucks. That flyer scored them a No. 1 hit that ultimately 15 million copies and went gold within its first year.
Not bad for a kid from Happy, Texas, who was surely the most famous of his high school graduating class of 26 kids.
The Rest of the Story, Briefly
“I was very green. One minute I was on a farm in Happy, Texas and the next on The Ed Sullivan Show. I'd never seen buildings over three storeys before.”
The West Texas town of Happy didn’t have a lot going on when Buddy Knox was born in 1933. The fact he grew up somewhere that small (just 650 souls at the time) might be most interesting thing about his childhood. He filled his time learning guitar and harmonica – a hell of a feat, given that the family ranch had neither radio nor electricty – and, when he took his first steps into the wider world at WTSC, he hit the ground running. Knox had a particular interest in the...call them expressive arts, joining the campus drama club, the Buffalo Masquers, rushing the drama fraternity, Alpha Psi Omega, and even the campus service organization, the Buffalo Bills.
 |
| B.M.c.C. Ob. V. |
All that socializing connected him to his future bandmates in the Rhythm Orchids, Jimmy Bowen (stand-up bass) and don Lanier (lead guitar; Knox played rhythm guitar and sang lead vocals). Taking their name from the signature orchid-colored shirts they wore on stage, they played campus parties and local bars – at least until they threw them out for being under age. All those activities and all that live music aside, the Rhythm Orchids had a fairly regular college experience. Knox had even managed to major in business administration through all that and seemed primed for the old nine-to-five...at least until Roy Orbison pointed them to Norman Petty’s studio.
“Party Doll” just sort of slipped loose once the kids started passing it around. Chester Oliver, the head of a local label called Blue Moon Records, caught wind of it and offered to put a little marketing muscle behind it. In conjunction with Bowen’s employers at KDDD radio in Dumas, Texas, Oliver stood up the Triple-D label and borrowed the master to press 1,500 copies for sale. The band’s singles got an even bigger boost when Knox’s sister, then working as a model in New York City, heard that Simon Levy was looking to release some rock ‘n’ roll on his Roulette Records label. Things took off from there and kept flying for at least one year. On the back of an short, yet impressive run of singles, the band became one of the early pioneers of “Tex Mex,” a sub-genre of early rock that “blended country, and rhythm and blues with Mexican overtones.”
That "run of singles" thing undercuts the thesis of this series: 1957 was very good to Buddy Knox and his Rhythm Orchids. “I’m Sticking With You” (which he co-wrote with Bowen; hence Bowen's rare turn on lead vocals) broke into the Top 40, while the follow-up singles they released that same year climbed into the top 20 (“Rock Your Little Baby to Sleep”) and the top 10 (“Hula Love”). So, again, Knox was hardly a one-hit wonder. Moreover, he enjoyed a crazy long, hyperactive career in the industry. Staring in the early 1960s, he moved to Liberty Records who either allowed him or guided him to writing and performing in a poppier vein, complete with backing vocals and even strings – something you’ll hear on later, minor hits like (the mildly dubious) “Ling-Ting-Tong” and especially on "Lovey Dovey.” Later in that decade and into the 1970s, and with “southern rock” acts like Delaney & Bonnie (who worked with a then-wayward Eric Clapton), the Allman Brothers and Black Oak Arkansas for inspiration, Knox tried even more new sounds as demonstrated on singles like “God Knows I Love You” (written by Delaney Bramlett), “Salt Lake City,” and his cover (which I can't find) of the Fleetwoods’ “Come Softly to Me.” “Tex Mex” and beyond, in other words.
Somewhere in the late 1960s, Knox stood up his own publishing company in Nashville – a decision you’d have to think followed from the fact that Chester Oliver never returned the masters to those first singles and scooped up the publishing rights in the same motion. He detoured into the newer country sounds by then, with his biggest suggest coming with a tune written by Sonny Curtis called “Gypsy Man” (released on an album with the same name). More than anything else, Knox toured, and relentlessly, traveling up to 250 days a year for 35 years – and wrecking three marriages along the way. A move to Canada (Dominion City, Manitoba) happened somewhere in there, as did appearances in a number of movies (some pretty big, even if his roles weren’t), but the story ends in Port Orchard, Washington, of all fucking places. During the medical screenings occasioned by a fall in 1997, doctors informed Knox that his lifelong smoking habit had paid him back with lung cancer. He died a couple years later, scheduled and played a farewell show on February 14, 1999 weeks before his passing. Ever the road-hound...
And now....
3 Points of Interest
1) Fun, or Its Opposite, with Names
When the time came to release their singles, either the band or the label (Triple-D, presumably?) couldn’t settle on what they should be called. Thanks to that moment of indecision, some recordings of “Party Doll” show Buddy Knox and the Rhythm Orchids, while some releases of “I’m Sticking With You” came out as “Jimmy Bowen and the Rhythm Orchids.
To note something else that might have derailed his career, Knox got drafted almost immediately “Party Doll” dropped. The band had to cancel a run of European dates as a result. Knox drank away his frustration – for the first time in his life, according to one source – so it may have been a little galling when his label (probably Roulette by then) released “Rock Your Little Baby to Sleep” under the name “Lieutenant Buddy Knox.”
2) The Fourth Rhythm Orchid
Being without a drummer, Knox, Lanier and Bowen had to borrow Norman Petty’s in-house session drummer, David Alldred, for those first recordings. Alldred would later join Knox’s band full-time (though gods know for how long), but the most charming anecdote talks about the “drums” he played for the sessions – and just the sessions themselves:
“I can remember looking at him and all he had was two drumsticks and a box with cotton pushed up in it. I still think that makes a heck of a drum sound. Then we discovered that Jimmy couldn’t play bass well enough for Petty to record him, so we found this other guy hanging around the studio to do the honors. We had a girl from the Clovis High School to play the cymbals and my sister and two of her friends sang background vocals.”
Again, this sounds like the bands I grew up watching up close. Fun...
3) The Other Guy Norman Petty (Grudgingly?) Made Famous
Buddy Knox will always own the fairly specific title as being “the first West Texas artists to write and record his own million-selling record from Petty’s studio,” but Buddy Holly has to be the biggest. To his very real credit, Knox was the guy who steered Holly to Petty’s studio. And not only did he cheer him when he made history, Knox acknowledged Holly’s “That’ll Be the Day” as the better song. The bond ran deep enough for Holly’s death to hit Knox hard – and to honor his memory with the 1976 single, “I Named My Little Girl Holly.”
Sources
Wikipedia – Buddy Knox (best wide-angle source – as it should be)
Buddy Knox official website (which doubles as a tribute from his kids; very sweet)
Rockabilly Legends bio (best details on his early career)
Obituary, The Independent (best source for the truly random anecdotes)
The Sampler
Spotify didn’t have a fair number of Knox’s later numbers (linked to above), which gives readers of this post the blessings of bonus tracks. Still, that means most of what made the sampler come from either his Roulette or his Liberty days. The challenge comes with where to place them among the collections.
Rather than ruin your fun, I thought I’d list the remaining songs from the sampler that I haven’t already linked to above by their collections on Spotify:
Don’t Make Me Cry: “The Girl with the Golden Hair,” “Somebody Touched Me,” and the song that has FUCKING HAUNTED ME since I started working on this chapter, “I Think I’m Going to Kill Myself.” Not to worry: it’s haunting me because I have a song where someone else sampled it and I can’t remember what it was. Goddammit.
Party Doll: Best of: “Teasable, Pleasable You,” “Swingin’ Daddy,” and “That’s Why I Cry.”
Presenting Buddy Knox: “Livin’ in a House Full of Love,” “Three Eyed Man,” “I Ain’t Sharin’ Sharon,” and a swinging ballad called “Open (Your Lovin’ Arms).”
That’s it for this one. To the surprise of no one who follows what I do, I like Buddy Knox’s early, rawer stuff better. But, divorces aside, everything I read tells me he was a stand-up guy.
“Party Doll” just sort of slipped loose once the kids started passing it around. Chester Oliver, the head of a local label called Blue Moon Records, caught wind of it and offered to put a little marketing muscle behind it. In conjunction with Bowen’s employers at KDDD radio in Dumas, Texas, Oliver stood up the Triple-D label and borrowed the master to press 1,500 copies for sale. The band’s singles got an even bigger boost when Knox’s sister, then working as a model in New York City, heard that Simon Levy was looking to release some rock ‘n’ roll on his Roulette Records label. Things took off from there and kept flying for at least one year. On the back of an short, yet impressive run of singles, the band became one of the early pioneers of “Tex Mex,” a sub-genre of early rock that “blended country, and rhythm and blues with Mexican overtones.”
That "run of singles" thing undercuts the thesis of this series: 1957 was very good to Buddy Knox and his Rhythm Orchids. “I’m Sticking With You” (which he co-wrote with Bowen; hence Bowen's rare turn on lead vocals) broke into the Top 40, while the follow-up singles they released that same year climbed into the top 20 (“Rock Your Little Baby to Sleep”) and the top 10 (“Hula Love”). So, again, Knox was hardly a one-hit wonder. Moreover, he enjoyed a crazy long, hyperactive career in the industry. Staring in the early 1960s, he moved to Liberty Records who either allowed him or guided him to writing and performing in a poppier vein, complete with backing vocals and even strings – something you’ll hear on later, minor hits like (the mildly dubious) “Ling-Ting-Tong” and especially on "Lovey Dovey.” Later in that decade and into the 1970s, and with “southern rock” acts like Delaney & Bonnie (who worked with a then-wayward Eric Clapton), the Allman Brothers and Black Oak Arkansas for inspiration, Knox tried even more new sounds as demonstrated on singles like “God Knows I Love You” (written by Delaney Bramlett), “Salt Lake City,” and his cover (which I can't find) of the Fleetwoods’ “Come Softly to Me.” “Tex Mex” and beyond, in other words.
Somewhere in the late 1960s, Knox stood up his own publishing company in Nashville – a decision you’d have to think followed from the fact that Chester Oliver never returned the masters to those first singles and scooped up the publishing rights in the same motion. He detoured into the newer country sounds by then, with his biggest suggest coming with a tune written by Sonny Curtis called “Gypsy Man” (released on an album with the same name). More than anything else, Knox toured, and relentlessly, traveling up to 250 days a year for 35 years – and wrecking three marriages along the way. A move to Canada (Dominion City, Manitoba) happened somewhere in there, as did appearances in a number of movies (some pretty big, even if his roles weren’t), but the story ends in Port Orchard, Washington, of all fucking places. During the medical screenings occasioned by a fall in 1997, doctors informed Knox that his lifelong smoking habit had paid him back with lung cancer. He died a couple years later, scheduled and played a farewell show on February 14, 1999 weeks before his passing. Ever the road-hound...
And now....
3 Points of Interest
1) Fun, or Its Opposite, with Names
When the time came to release their singles, either the band or the label (Triple-D, presumably?) couldn’t settle on what they should be called. Thanks to that moment of indecision, some recordings of “Party Doll” show Buddy Knox and the Rhythm Orchids, while some releases of “I’m Sticking With You” came out as “Jimmy Bowen and the Rhythm Orchids.
To note something else that might have derailed his career, Knox got drafted almost immediately “Party Doll” dropped. The band had to cancel a run of European dates as a result. Knox drank away his frustration – for the first time in his life, according to one source – so it may have been a little galling when his label (probably Roulette by then) released “Rock Your Little Baby to Sleep” under the name “Lieutenant Buddy Knox.”
2) The Fourth Rhythm Orchid
Being without a drummer, Knox, Lanier and Bowen had to borrow Norman Petty’s in-house session drummer, David Alldred, for those first recordings. Alldred would later join Knox’s band full-time (though gods know for how long), but the most charming anecdote talks about the “drums” he played for the sessions – and just the sessions themselves:
“I can remember looking at him and all he had was two drumsticks and a box with cotton pushed up in it. I still think that makes a heck of a drum sound. Then we discovered that Jimmy couldn’t play bass well enough for Petty to record him, so we found this other guy hanging around the studio to do the honors. We had a girl from the Clovis High School to play the cymbals and my sister and two of her friends sang background vocals.”
Again, this sounds like the bands I grew up watching up close. Fun...
3) The Other Guy Norman Petty (Grudgingly?) Made Famous
Buddy Knox will always own the fairly specific title as being “the first West Texas artists to write and record his own million-selling record from Petty’s studio,” but Buddy Holly has to be the biggest. To his very real credit, Knox was the guy who steered Holly to Petty’s studio. And not only did he cheer him when he made history, Knox acknowledged Holly’s “That’ll Be the Day” as the better song. The bond ran deep enough for Holly’s death to hit Knox hard – and to honor his memory with the 1976 single, “I Named My Little Girl Holly.”
Sources
Wikipedia – Buddy Knox (best wide-angle source – as it should be)
Buddy Knox official website (which doubles as a tribute from his kids; very sweet)
Rockabilly Legends bio (best details on his early career)
Obituary, The Independent (best source for the truly random anecdotes)
The Sampler
Spotify didn’t have a fair number of Knox’s later numbers (linked to above), which gives readers of this post the blessings of bonus tracks. Still, that means most of what made the sampler come from either his Roulette or his Liberty days. The challenge comes with where to place them among the collections.
Rather than ruin your fun, I thought I’d list the remaining songs from the sampler that I haven’t already linked to above by their collections on Spotify:
Don’t Make Me Cry: “The Girl with the Golden Hair,” “Somebody Touched Me,” and the song that has FUCKING HAUNTED ME since I started working on this chapter, “I Think I’m Going to Kill Myself.” Not to worry: it’s haunting me because I have a song where someone else sampled it and I can’t remember what it was. Goddammit.
Party Doll: Best of: “Teasable, Pleasable You,” “Swingin’ Daddy,” and “That’s Why I Cry.”
Presenting Buddy Knox: “Livin’ in a House Full of Love,” “Three Eyed Man,” “I Ain’t Sharin’ Sharon,” and a swinging ballad called “Open (Your Lovin’ Arms).”
That’s it for this one. To the surprise of no one who follows what I do, I like Buddy Knox’s early, rawer stuff better. But, divorces aside, everything I read tells me he was a stand-up guy.
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