One Hit No More, No. 47: The Five Stairsteps, A Happy Place, and Several Surprises

It's fine. But their dad was a cop. I'm still...

The Hit
The Five Stairsteps, “O-o-h Child” recalls such a vivid memory for me that it’s pretty much all I think of when I hear the song. A friend of mine went to Evergreen State College and, on one of the many visits, we went on a road-trip with a bunch of friends - think this was to the Oregon Coast, actually. Because we piled God knows how many people into too few cars, I had no seat, so I lounged across the back. That was first time I’d heard “O-o-h Child,” and when it came on, my head was resting in a woman’s lap, someone I’d just met. She was singing along, like everyone else, but watching her sing is the only thing I remember.

There’s no story after that; she never became a friend or a girlfriend (though I did meet her once later and that weekend came up, and there was a definite, "oh, shit, why didn't we?!" conversation); it was just that moment, watching a young woman sing a beautiful, heartwarming, hopeful song flush with the optimism of youth. She sang it like she believed it, and that felt very true in the moment…

…what was I talking about again? In all seriousness, I love this one. Great instrumentation, great open spaces for the vocals, a killer chorus, and an outro that sends you to the moon. And yet there's more...

The Rest of the Story
I almost covered The Five Stairsteps in a train-wreck I cobbled together about Super K Productions/Buddah Records, but I held back when I spotted them on the list of one-hit wonders I’m mining for all this. That’s probably for the best because The Five Stairsteps make for an odd fit in the Buddah Records extended universe (e.g., a lot of white garage bands from Ohio).

The Five Stairsteps came out of Chicago as a family act under the guidance of their parents, Betty and Clarence Burke Sr. Clarence Sr. was a detective with the Chicago P.D., but he also played a couple instruments (he backed The Five Stairsteps on guitar and bass, apart from managing them) and he knew some helpful people - notably, Fred Cash of The Impressions (theseguys). Their kids formed the band - in age order, Clarence Jr., Alohe, Dennis, James, Kenneth “Keni,” and, much later, Hubie - with Clarence Sr. and Clarence Jr. writing their material with help from a guy named Gregory Fowler. The name for the act came to Betty Burke when she saw her kids standing lined up by age; they looked like five stairsteps, you see…

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. 28: The Lemon Pipers & Hiding "Green Tambourine"

"...well, worse for the wear." (WEWS-TV, Cleveland)

The Hit
I was just reminded by a Stereogum article on The Lemon Pipers and their swing in “bubblegum pop” that Billy Bob Thornton played their 1968 hit, “Green Tambourine,” at a party in Season One of Fargo. That’s the TV show, obviously, not the movie. (And, at this point, I can’t tell whether I’m remembering that scene, or just picturing it.)

The song fits a scene like that, with its stumbling beat and those bright, sitar-soaked melodies slurring over it; call it a happy surface but with something out-of-tilt under it. It might have taken over No. 1 for just a week, but it had to claw over some now-classics to get there – e.g., Aretha Franklin’s “Chain of Fools” and The Beatles’ “Hello, Goodbye.” (And, hell yes, that’s who inspired the sitar; more later). It hit big enough to drag five kids out of college and onto the road. The Lemon Pipers played with some massive names – B. B. King and The James Gang (who beat them in an Ohio-state level battle of the bands in 1967) – and rubbed shoulders with Jimi Hendrix, Howlin’ Wolf and Paul McCartney in Manhattan night clubs.

Bassist Steve Walmsley recalled his “rock and roll moment.” Playing “Through With You” at San Francisco's Fillmore West, and on the same bill with Moby Grape, Traffic and Spirit, he looked off-stage to see Moby Grape’s Bob Mosley give him a thumbs up. Cincinnati Magazine’s excellent retrospective contains that anecdote, and many more. In all seriousness, it wouldn’t offend me in the least if you stopped reading this post right now, clicked over to that (link below) and read that instead. You will absolutely learn more. They did solid work.

The Rest of the Story
“Banging out simple block chords, the record producer sang the tunes that Buddah execs had in mind for their newest band. And as he did, the boys looked at one another and silently passed around the same thought: What is this shit?”

The “record producer” in that quote was Paul Leka, the guy Buddah Records assigned to take The Lemon Pipers where Buddah wanted them to go. He partnered with his Brill Building colleague, Shelley Pinz, to write “Green Tambourine.” (Tin Pan Alley never died.) Her conversation with a busker inspired the song – hence the clear busking influence – and, after the band recorded it, Leka whisked them back to Buddah’s Manhattan office, larded on the production (e.g., “soaring strings, Chinese bells, and a reverb echo to Browne’s distinct vibrato tenor”), and set it out into the world.