One Hit No More, No. 27: John Fred (Harry, Dick & Tom), His Playboy Band, & a Girl Named Judy

Sort of like that, but with a dude.

The Hit
“Judy in Disguise (with Glasses)” a late-60s novelty pop song, if you’ve ever heard one, but it has a better back-story than you’d think. It had two inspirations. First, it’s a nonsense spin on The Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky (with Diamonds),” with lyrics cobbled together from snippets of TV shows (notably The Monkees). Second, during a show in Florida, the songwriter, John Fred Gourrier (who I’ll mostly refer to as “Gourrier”), saw a girl wearing large sunglasses “getting hustled” by a guy, only “She took off these glasses, and she could stop a clock” (that is, the big glasses hid a beautiful face.)

Or, you could just roll with this tidy summary from Way Back Attack:

“The arrangement, all horns and strings and an infectious bass line with some oddly-placed moans and groans, makes it all add up to a peculiar-but-catchy late-'60s hit.”

My only personal memory of the song comes from an old commercial for one of those old rock collections they used to sell over the airwaves. It featured a guy dressed as a nerd (and wearing glasses) bouncing up and down between two girls in a record store, and it just didn't look right. Anyway, that note’s dead-right on the “moans and groans” (what were they going for?)…still, that’s a fair take on that bass line…

The Rest of the Story
When I started this project, I went in expecting to run into an act like John Fred & His Playboy Band (yes, name inspired by Hef’s famous product). It took some digging to find it, but Gourrier feels seems to think of “Judy in Disguise (with a Glasses)” as a turn into a cul-de-sac. As he put it:

“Andrew Bernard, our sax player, did most of the arrangements. We burned. We got some hot cuts put out before ‘Judy’ got us typecast.”

One Hit No More, No. 24: The American Breed, Who Did Bend, and Shape

Fuckers would tangle up if you so much as looked at 'em...

The Hit
During high school, and before developing an operating record store M.O., I picked up the odd impulse-buy cassette tape at local gas stations. If I recognized enough of the artists and had about $5 left after buying gas (and probably junk food), I'd get about a month's worth of "fresh-to-me" music out of the good ones (the Dutch imports, though; jesus christ). The education as to what’s what came from classic rock radio and, at some damn point, the Freedom Rock compilation they sold on late-night TV.

I stumbled into The American Breed’s “Bend Me, Shape Me” on a gas station cassettes, apparently. It’s a good late 60s pop tune (1968), nice (literally) galloping rhythm, nice layering of horns over guitars, etc. – and I swear I’ve heard recordings where they really juiced the rhythm parts (or my speakers just sucked and/or accidentally improved on the original). The American Breed neither wrote the song nor recorded it first: the writing team of Scott English and Larry Weiss wrote it, while a guy named Bill Traut (who has another cameo later) graced it with those horns. An all-female band called The Shape got first crack it at (can't find that, so here are The Models doing it), but it was another act – The Outsiders (of “Time Won’t Let Me” fame) – who had the best shot at knicking it out from under The American Breed.

The Rest of the Story

The kindest and rudest thing I can say about The American Breed is that key members got sidetracked making commercial jingles (and quite a few of them, and in The Bigs – e.g, writing/singing for Coca Cola and American Airlines) during the band’s hey-day. That these guys knew their way around a song well enough to turn that into a day job is the kind side; the rude side comes with a sneer at the commercialism of the overall project (yeah, I like the “artistes”) and they fact they didn’t write their biggest hits. (Don’t worry, the bona fides come later.)