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| Another Human Being. |
The Hit
To give them their due, The Human Beinz’ put a definitive spin on their hit cover of The Isley Brothers, “Nobody But Me.” No one can call that a simple copy/paste job. Moreover, it gets them in a record book:
“The recording's two 31-fold repetitions of the word ‘no’ fulfill Casey Kasem's ‘Book of Records’ category of most repetitive word or phrase in a Hot 100 top 10 hit.”
All the same, it sounds like what it is: an early-60s pop/R&B tune (originally released in 1962) with a mid-60s pop-rock beat with a light overlay of late-60s psychedelic guitar. It’s fun and fluffy, neither genre-bending nor genre-defining; it’s just a song that got big (No. 8 on the Billboard Top 100 by February 1968) more the simplest reason of all: a lot of people liked it. For one glorious year, they were the biggest band to come out of the Youngstown, Ohio scene.
The Rest of the Story
It’s appropriate that The Human Beinz hit it big with someone else’s song, because that was the formula they followed to find fame – e.g., they also shopped around a cover of Them’s “Gloria,” but a Chicago band called Shadows of Knight beat them to it. In one telling (see pt. 4 of the Summit Radio interviews below), it didn’t occur to them to record their own material until a producer noted that they could put any damn thing they liked on the b-side of “Nobody But Me” (“Sueno” came out of that).
To hear any good stories about The Human Beinz requires the patience to sit through an 8-part Summit Radio video interview with Joe “Ting” Markulin. They lasted long enough to get “Beatles-big” in Japan (see pt. 8), but only just. And the end, when it came, turned on one extraordinarily blunt change of heart. But, to start at the beginning…
To give them their due, The Human Beinz’ put a definitive spin on their hit cover of The Isley Brothers, “Nobody But Me.” No one can call that a simple copy/paste job. Moreover, it gets them in a record book:
“The recording's two 31-fold repetitions of the word ‘no’ fulfill Casey Kasem's ‘Book of Records’ category of most repetitive word or phrase in a Hot 100 top 10 hit.”
All the same, it sounds like what it is: an early-60s pop/R&B tune (originally released in 1962) with a mid-60s pop-rock beat with a light overlay of late-60s psychedelic guitar. It’s fun and fluffy, neither genre-bending nor genre-defining; it’s just a song that got big (No. 8 on the Billboard Top 100 by February 1968) more the simplest reason of all: a lot of people liked it. For one glorious year, they were the biggest band to come out of the Youngstown, Ohio scene.
The Rest of the Story
It’s appropriate that The Human Beinz hit it big with someone else’s song, because that was the formula they followed to find fame – e.g., they also shopped around a cover of Them’s “Gloria,” but a Chicago band called Shadows of Knight beat them to it. In one telling (see pt. 4 of the Summit Radio interviews below), it didn’t occur to them to record their own material until a producer noted that they could put any damn thing they liked on the b-side of “Nobody But Me” (“Sueno” came out of that).
To hear any good stories about The Human Beinz requires the patience to sit through an 8-part Summit Radio video interview with Joe “Ting” Markulin. They lasted long enough to get “Beatles-big” in Japan (see pt. 8), but only just. And the end, when it came, turned on one extraordinarily blunt change of heart. But, to start at the beginning…
