One Hit No More, Chapter 8: "Party Doll" Was the Life of the Party for Buddy Knox

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.

One Hit No More, Chapter 7: Mickey, Sylvia and Their Strange Love

Mickey & Sylvia

Thanks to research done during an earlier (*and yet later) chapter in this series, I knew how one story ended going in. [*Ed. - I've pushed the first iteration of this series to the early 1980s, but I'm rebooting to fill in some gaps.] You may too, depending on your own travels....

The Hit
It neither lasted all that long nor rose all that high – just two weeks atop Billboard’s R&B charts, and only to No. 11 on the Pop charts – Mickey & Sylvia’s “Love Is Strange” has enjoyed a long, lingering run in pop culture. Movies that want to hearken to a certain time, place and/or mood in the length of an snippet of a song – the short-list includes Badlands, Casino and, most famously, Dirty Dancing – have used it, but it also lives on in reinterpretations by Paul McCartney, the Everly Brothers (gave ‘em a UK hit), and Peaches & Herb...and I recommend sticking with the original, for what it's worth.

The plucked, twanging, yet rich and variegated guitar stands out, along with the shuffling Latin beat and undertones and the vocals, which pine almost theatrically. They go back and forth in a playful call-and-response in the single’s bridge, but it’s mostly a dreamy duet with the two of them singing like two lovestruck kids holding hands...as they explore the pain and ecstasy of love in song. Despite being released in 1957 and has rock-guitar tones all over it, “Love Is Strange” listens more like a spin rock-influenced pop tune than rock-‘n’ roll. And what’s that than another way of saying Mickey & Sylvia’s most famous single grew from different roots. To borrow a quote from 2014 retrospective on Sylvia in Dazed Digital:

“Mickey and I were working at the Howard Theatre in Washington. Bo Diddley was on the same bill and he would play this chant where Jerome Green, his maraca player would say to him, 'Bo? How do you call your woman?' And Bo would say, 'C'mere woman!' And it went on like that until Bo finally says, 'Baby, my sweet baby'. I told Bo that he should record that tune, but when he took it to Leonard Chess, he told him it was nothin'.” Undeterred, and with Bo's approval, Sylvia rearranged the song to fit into the Mickey and Sylvia mode and then took the track to RCA subsidiary, Groove. That label too was unimpressed and it was only when Sylvia threatened to leave them all together, that they let her record ‘Love Is Strange.’ The result was a sensual, latin-flavoured call and response groove that became an overnight jukebox and radio sensation. All of a sudden they were the number one pop band in America.”

Another source, She Shreds, tightened the back-story into this thesis:

One Hit No More, Chapter 6: Dale Hawkins, Swamp Boogie, and "Susie Q"

I see you.

If you thought Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Susie Q” was an original, but never felt 100% sure about that, raise your hand.

The Hit
There’s definitely something sexy about it. The trance-like groove of the guitar figure, the blues-inspired lyric that borders on romantic mantra, the steady (unflagging) rhythm: put it all together and you get something damn close to a metaphor in musical form.

To stick with a persistent theme in this series’ early chapters, Dale Hawkins’ label (Checker Records) totally slept on his “Susie Q,” sitting on it for months before they released. Somewhere in the middle of stewing in his frustrations, Hawkins complained about it to a friendly DJ from Shreveport, Louisiana. The DJ rose to the occasion with a passive-aggressive masterpiece:

“Hawkins credits Shreveport disc-jockey Chuck Dunaway with helping Chess see the light. ‘I had sat there for three months waiting for 'em to put it out and [Dunaway] said, “Dale, let's just send it up to [Jerry] Wexler.” We sent a copy up to Atlantic and a few days later Jerry called and said, “I love it. I'll take it.” Then I explained to him, “Mr Wexler, Mr. Chess has got the thing and he hasn't released it. I had signed the papers with him.” He said, “What? You call him and tell him that he should either sh** or get off the pot.” “You want me to say it just like that?” He said, “That's all you got to say.” I called Mr. Chess and told him that. There was a little pause--and to hear Leonard pause during a conversation was something to talk about--and he said, “I'll call you back tomorrow.” Three days later, it was on the street. That's how fast it worked.’”

To their credit, Chess kept Hawkins’ single aloft once it took off by way of a “rolling marketing” strategy that involved pushing it in one market, and then moving on to the next one before that first market dried all the way up. While that stroke of genius didn’t come all the way off (Philistines), “Susie-Q” never became a monster hit. It topped the R&B charts – something that’s relevant to the larger story – but never went higher than No. 11 on the Pop charts and it didn’t stay long. And yet, it lingered in the musical culture for a couple decades...not unlike Dale Hawkins.

One Hit No More, Chapter 3: The Chords (Literally) Go "Sh-Boom"!

A little who's who for ya.

My all-time favorite doo wop song. Hands down.

The Hit
“’Sh-Boom’ is supposed to have been titled after the threat of an atom bomb explosion which, in the midst of Cold War posturing in 1954, was a very real topic on the public's mind. However, this demented ditty also included the surreally optimistic message that everything was ultimately fine and as the rest of the lyrics suggested, ‘life could be a dream.’”
- Allmusic.com

I wish this was true with all my heart. But...

“It had nothing to do with the A-Bomb particularly. It was just a thing that happened to happen.... Jimmy was a great one for telling stories and he may have embellished it in that direction.”
- Buddy McRae (the once last-living Chord, New York Daily News)

Choose your universe, people...

Much like what happened with The Penguins and “Earth Angel,” the Chords came to their label with an original song called “Sh-Boom” and the label couldn’t give less of a shit about it. What excited them? A cover of the Patti Page tune, “Cross Over the Bridge.” The similarities don’t stop with the label guessing wrong – e.g., the same DJ (LA’s Dick “Huggy Boy” Hugg) flipped over the 45 and found the hit, the crossover from R&B to the Pop charts, the goddamn Crew Cuts cashing in on another act’s single – and they kept going in the big picture (e.g., singing second banana to another group their manager liked/valued more). The doo wop craze had a real gold-rush quality to it, at least in the first (mostly Black) wave.

The single itself is all energy, bright and irrepressible – and the return to the regular vocals after a bass-led bridge, in particular, really stands up that line in Allmusic.com’s history about a “demented ditty [that] also included the surreally optimistic message hat everything was ultimately fine.” Which isn’t bad for a single written by a bunch of kids in a ’54 Buick convertible. The public ate it up after its July 3, 1954 release, lifting it to No. 2 on the R&B charts (The Drifters’ “Honey Love” kept it out) and keeping it up there for 15 weeks. It climbed as high as No. 5 on the Pop charts, the first Top 10 hit by an R&B act since Louis Jordan’s (profiled here) long-time domination of over the 1940s.