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| Bottom row, to the left. Like a damn eye chart. |
When I started this series with Bobby Day, it felt like I was really onto something. That Day enjoyed a long career, if a quiet one, supported the theory that these artists are more than their one, lonely moon-shot to fame. Day's career continued for years after "Rockin' Robin," plus a later act calld Bob & Earl, an earlier/later one with The Hollywood Flames, shows at the Apollo Theater, and tours across the country from his Los Angeles base of ops. He didn't stop for years, basically.
It’s the opposite with The Monotones. The one hit they had - 1958's “The Book of Love” - was massive. Possessed with the cultural stickiness of, say, Soft Cell's “Tainted Love,” The Monotones’ takes people back to their youth, almost physically with the way they tell it. It sounds all kinds of 50s, of course, with its clean, clipped back-beat, the interplay between the kick and the snare, the nice, polite doo-wop vocals. It also has something a little different: the word “novelty” kept coming up in sources on the band, something that happens when your song is a long-form pun. Riffing on a conceit about books - i.e., they assigned a chapter to each couplet in the verses - “The Book of Love” had the tidiness of a Tin Pan Alley tune, something that gets stuck in the ear by design. Is it a hokey tune? Sure, but have I ever shit on Elvis Costello’s “Every Day I Write the Book”?
The earth moved under no one’s feet, and not a single mind got blown by The Monotones 2:18 minutes of pop confetti. It’s a fun tune, though, an easy sing-along (that’s four parts, minimum), and with good, clean lyrics that absolutely no one but a moral maniac could object to.
And that’s where the (mild) tragedy kicks in. All the half-dozen sites I found on The Monotones hit the same anecdotes: the story of how Charles Patrick came up with the song (toothpaste commercial), the brick coming through the window at the recording session, called back forever more with the bass-drum kick before they sing the “who wrote the book of love” of the opening. Those stories get less interesting every time you read it, and that’s the kicker: the “happy” for this band ends, more or less, with “The Book of Love.”
