The Hit
The Buoys' 1971 hit, “Timothy,” was a new song for me, so I came into the whole thing fresh. Musically, it has that post-60s rock sound, polished and busy (see the instrumental flourishes), “lushly orchestrated” they used to call it. It plays at a high tempo, like the beat’s driving toward something, a resolution perhaps…
…or cannibalism. Pot-ay-to, pot-ah-to, right? The subject matter to “Timothy” was subtle, maybe the lush orchestration swallows a telling phrase here or there if you don’t listen carefully (“and Joe said he’d sell his soul/for just a piece of meat”); as Wikipedia’s entry notes, executives at Specter Records only caught on after the song got a ways up the charts. On the other hand, the songwriter, Rupert Holmes, refused to change either the lyrics of the song or its premise; he’d made a conscious choice to offend when he wrote it…
…but with assurances that he’d never even heard of the Sheppton mine cave-in of 1963 when he wrote it. (For the record, this doesn’t seem horribly far-fetched; Holmes hails from England, which surely had its share of collapsed mines.)
The Rest of the Story
The story of the band called The Buoys doesn’t go much further than that. Based in the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton area of Pennsylvania, the original band included Fran Brozena, Carl Siracuse, Chris Hanlon, Bob Gryziec on bass, if only at the time they recorded “Timothy,” and Jerry Hludzek on guitar and Billy Kelly on vocals. Holmes does not appear to have been part of the actual band - though he did record the single with them (and maybe others?) - but he did write the song. Another fun fact: The Buoys were Holmes' second choice to record “Timothy,” behind another act named The Glass Prism, an act both time and Wikipedia forgot.
According to a Classic Bands interview with Hludek, they lived the life for a while - including a festival in Oregon where they played Crosby, Stills and Nash covers after they ran through their thin material; Rolling Stone called it “a near flawless imitation” so there’s that - but only Kelly and Hludzek cared for it. The rest declared the life “bullshit” and (presumably) settled into day jobs. Anyone who takes the time to read that Hludek interview will learn a lot more about Kelly and Hludek’s second band, Dakota (who sound like this, or this; not for me, fwiw, in fact, the sound of my most hated era) than they’ll learn about The Buoys.
The Buoys' 1971 hit, “Timothy,” was a new song for me, so I came into the whole thing fresh. Musically, it has that post-60s rock sound, polished and busy (see the instrumental flourishes), “lushly orchestrated” they used to call it. It plays at a high tempo, like the beat’s driving toward something, a resolution perhaps…
…or cannibalism. Pot-ay-to, pot-ah-to, right? The subject matter to “Timothy” was subtle, maybe the lush orchestration swallows a telling phrase here or there if you don’t listen carefully (“and Joe said he’d sell his soul/for just a piece of meat”); as Wikipedia’s entry notes, executives at Specter Records only caught on after the song got a ways up the charts. On the other hand, the songwriter, Rupert Holmes, refused to change either the lyrics of the song or its premise; he’d made a conscious choice to offend when he wrote it…
…but with assurances that he’d never even heard of the Sheppton mine cave-in of 1963 when he wrote it. (For the record, this doesn’t seem horribly far-fetched; Holmes hails from England, which surely had its share of collapsed mines.)
The Rest of the Story
The story of the band called The Buoys doesn’t go much further than that. Based in the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton area of Pennsylvania, the original band included Fran Brozena, Carl Siracuse, Chris Hanlon, Bob Gryziec on bass, if only at the time they recorded “Timothy,” and Jerry Hludzek on guitar and Billy Kelly on vocals. Holmes does not appear to have been part of the actual band - though he did record the single with them (and maybe others?) - but he did write the song. Another fun fact: The Buoys were Holmes' second choice to record “Timothy,” behind another act named The Glass Prism, an act both time and Wikipedia forgot.
According to a Classic Bands interview with Hludek, they lived the life for a while - including a festival in Oregon where they played Crosby, Stills and Nash covers after they ran through their thin material; Rolling Stone called it “a near flawless imitation” so there’s that - but only Kelly and Hludzek cared for it. The rest declared the life “bullshit” and (presumably) settled into day jobs. Anyone who takes the time to read that Hludek interview will learn a lot more about Kelly and Hludek’s second band, Dakota (who sound like this, or this; not for me, fwiw, in fact, the sound of my most hated era) than they’ll learn about The Buoys.
