One Hit No More, No. 32: Thunderclap Newman, Pete Townshend's Other Wild Vision

This will make sense by the end. Promise.

The Hit
If you weren’t fully sentient in 1969, or didn’t log enough time on a particular kind of “oldies/classic rock” radio programming, it’s likelier than not that you first heard Thunderclap Newman’s “Something in the Air” while watching something – e.g., Almost Famous, Kingpin, or an episode of My Name Is Earl. If I had to guess, I’d say you liked it. Some number of you probably asked the person next to you, “hey, who is that”?

The band was Thunderclap Newman. Yes, Thunderclap Newman.

It’s a pretty song, sounds a little like the Summer of Love, maybe with a bit of a hangover; the tinny (frankly pinched) quality in the vocals pairs with the twanging treble to create a bright sunny melody, so it sounds very late 60s West Coast. The bass and a spidery guitar sound creates a counter-melody that grounds that higher register, and there’s just a lot of fun orchestration going on. It’s just a nice song to listen to. Makes you feel like hugging strangers. Seriously.

The Rest of the Story
“I don’t quite know if that’s a fair description of it but I can tell you, for me, it was a bit sort of traumatic, except for having been a civil servant, and being used to dealing with the public.”

That’s what the actual Thunderclap Newman, aka, Andy Newman, had to say about backing into fame by way of a very famous fan-boy crush. The fan-boy in question: The Who’s Pete Townshend, who had seen Newman play a lunch-time show at Ealing Art School while he was studying graphic design. Newman wasn’t even scheduled to play, but, a mutual friend of Townshend and Newman’s named Rick Seaman suggested the latter to fill in. Unbeknownst to Newman (and for, like, literal years), Townshend left that lunch-time show he’d stumbled into the presence of overlooked genius. Newman had put out some recordings – importantly, recordings he made through multi-track recordings on single-track devices – and Townshend played one of them, Ice & Essence, something like into the ground. (This also files under “unbeknownst to Newman,” because he thought they sounded terrible.) He roped Newman into a couple projects over the years; Thunderclap Newman wound up being the last and largest of them. It’s worth pausing a second to talk about what Newman did at that lunch-time show (quote from Richard Barnes, Maximum R&B):

One Hit No More No. 31, The Clique: An Unstable Social Group

Drugs, yes, sex and rock 'n' roll optional.

The Hit
Actually didn’t know “Sugar on Sunday” until this past week. It’s pretty generic late-60s pop-rock (1969, specifically), but it’s a pretty tune, bright instrumentation (think that mincing electric organ that paces the melody), and laced through with good, ear-wormy hooks (“femme jolie, femme jolie). It’s about lover’s parting…and that’s all I’ve got.

The Rest of the Story
To anyone thinking “Sugar on Sunday” sounds a whole lot like something else, you’re on to something. Tommy James, yes, the frontman to The Shondells, not only wrote the tune, he also performed it. That wouldn’t be the only occasion – and this quote covers a lotta ground:

“Tommy James came through and gave us our third single on White Whale called Sparkle and Shine, but I guess it should have been called Fizzle and Die, as the flame went out somewhere around 100 on the Billboard charts.”

Give “Sparkle and Shine” a listen or three and you’ll see that Oscar Houchins – the band’s…second keyboardist - has a point. The few sources I found on The Clique don’t clarify whether they count as actual proteges to Tommy James, but it does make clear that they looked to James and a guy named Gary Zekley for hit-worthy material.

If there’s a key phrase in this entire post, it’s “second keyboardist.” I can’t identify even one member that I’d call a key or central member to the band. Jerry Cope replaced John Kanesaw on drums; Tom Pena replaced Bruce Tinch on bass; Houchins replaced Sid Templeton, who’d already replaced Larry Lawson on keys; Bill Black replaced Cooper Hawthorne on lead guitar, etc.: and all that churn took place before they recorded Tommy James’ hit. Houchins stayed in music – even worked with Wilco once – and one of the members as yet unnamed, Randy Shaw (vocals and horns) might even have had the bigger career (e.g., “at one time the highest-paid entertainer in Seattle”), but the rest took straight jobs. Call this a comment, call it a punchline, but this sums things up nicely:

One Hit No More, No. 30: The Human Beinz, Youngstown, OH's Fine Mess

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…

One Hit No More, No. 29: I. Ron Butterfly's "In the Garden of Eden"

It piles on quite a bit, actually...

The Hit
To repeat a joke I should have saved for this post, I’ve associated Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” with an episode of The Simpsons since it aired. And that’s not entirely unfair either: whatever reception it received upon its 1968 release – in a word, “rampant,” e.g., In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, the album, was the first record to ever go platinum in-house at Atlantic Records (though there’s some controversy around that involving a falling out between Iron Butterfly and Atlantic’s legendary founder, Ahmet Ertegun) – it has, since then, devolved into something very close to a punchline, 17-minutes of classic rock excess, etc. Going the other way, as Wikipedia credits “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” with “…providing a dramatic sound that led the way towards the development of hard rock and heavy metal music.”

Another part of the song’s history was the somewhat widespread belief that the song’s title was just a mumbled crack at “In the Garden of Eden.” In (one-time*/third?) bassist, Lee Dorman’s take, that’s not so far off:

“From the premise of in the Garden of Eden, what we did with the music was to chronologically go through a bit of history: the birth of Christ and all the tribal things. Some of that first screeching part is supposed to be dinosaurs, and then the next part is a keyboard part, then we get into another guitar part, it’s more rhythmical now, and that goes into the birth of Christ—‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’—you hear that keyboard part, just a couple of bars, and you go ‘I know that!’ and it’s gone.”

Well, off you go. You’ve got 17:04 worth of song to deconstruct. Chop chop.

The Rest of the Story
* First, I have never seen a band with such an unstable line-up. To give an example, this little note is from Iron Butterfly’s earliest days:

One Hit No More, No. 28: The Lemon Pipers & Hiding "Green Tambourine"

"...well, worse for the wear." (WEWS-TV, Cleveland)

The Hit
I was just reminded by a Stereogum article on The Lemon Pipers and their swing in “bubblegum pop” that Billy Bob Thornton played their 1968 hit, “Green Tambourine,” at a party in Season One of Fargo. That’s the TV show, obviously, not the movie. (And, at this point, I can’t tell whether I’m remembering that scene, or just picturing it.)

The song fits a scene like that, with its stumbling beat and those bright, sitar-soaked melodies slurring over it; call it a happy surface but with something out-of-tilt under it. It might have taken over No. 1 for just a week, but it had to claw over some now-classics to get there – e.g., Aretha Franklin’s “Chain of Fools” and The Beatles’ “Hello, Goodbye.” (And, hell yes, that’s who inspired the sitar; more later). It hit big enough to drag five kids out of college and onto the road. The Lemon Pipers played with some massive names – B. B. King and The James Gang (who beat them in an Ohio-state level battle of the bands in 1967) – and rubbed shoulders with Jimi Hendrix, Howlin’ Wolf and Paul McCartney in Manhattan night clubs.

Bassist Steve Walmsley recalled his “rock and roll moment.” Playing “Through With You” at San Francisco's Fillmore West, and on the same bill with Moby Grape, Traffic and Spirit, he looked off-stage to see Moby Grape’s Bob Mosley give him a thumbs up. Cincinnati Magazine’s excellent retrospective contains that anecdote, and many more. In all seriousness, it wouldn’t offend me in the least if you stopped reading this post right now, clicked over to that (link below) and read that instead. You will absolutely learn more. They did solid work.

The Rest of the Story
“Banging out simple block chords, the record producer sang the tunes that Buddah execs had in mind for their newest band. And as he did, the boys looked at one another and silently passed around the same thought: What is this shit?”

The “record producer” in that quote was Paul Leka, the guy Buddah Records assigned to take The Lemon Pipers where Buddah wanted them to go. He partnered with his Brill Building colleague, Shelley Pinz, to write “Green Tambourine.” (Tin Pan Alley never died.) Her conversation with a busker inspired the song – hence the clear busking influence – and, after the band recorded it, Leka whisked them back to Buddah’s Manhattan office, larded on the production (e.g., “soaring strings, Chinese bells, and a reverb echo to Browne’s distinct vibrato tenor”), and set it out into the world.

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. 26: Johnny Maestro & The Career That Cannot Die

I'll throw in The Crests, gratis.

The Hit
“The Worst That Could Happen,” which I hadn’t heard till this week. Released in 1968 (seriously?), it’s a smart, (over-)polished rendition of heartbreak, and also rather dignified. Having listened to all kinds of “you know you want it” rock, it’s nice to hear a guy sing about being very happy for the woman he loves, despite the fact the feeling isn’t mutual and his heart just turned inside out.

It hit No. 3 in the Billboard Hot 100 in 1968 (and it was an oddball for the era), and that was the high point for both song and band. That said, it was handed to them - The 5th Dimension recorded the same song in 1967 (a better version, for me) – so the whole Johnny Maestro didn’t run on its own legs. He never had, though, not even during his first act.

The Rest of the Story
Johnny Maestro & the Brooklyn Bridge was something of a salvage job, a group of musicians and performers looking to keep a streak going. Johnny Mastrangelo, aka, Johnny Maestro, started in the late-1950s in a doo-wop group called The Crests, the first multi-racial doo wop group to hit the bigs; Maestro was a lone Italian American in a mix with one Puerto Rican (Harold “Chico” Torres) and three African Americans (notably Patricia Van Dross, Luther’s older sister, though, young as she was (15) she never toured with them). They churned out one big hit with “16 Candles” and kept rolling with “A Year Ago Tonight,” “Angels Listened In,” and “Trouble in Paradise.” After two years (1958-60) of maniacal touring and hitting the Dick Clark circuit, other doo wop acts lapped The Crests and, a couple years after that, doo wop’s popularity crapped out. Maestro, however, wasn’t ready to give up.

Anyone interested in tracing the path from The Crests to Johnny Maestro & the Brooklyn Bridge can hit the link on The Crests below, but, honestly, it’s just a bunch of names you’ve never heard falling in and out of projects that lasted only a year or two (including, yes, “Johnny Maestro & The Crests”). He did finally land in a project that recreated the magic. The first step came with recruiting a group called The Del-Satins, a doo-wop group in New York that Maestro started signing with in 1967. The next step came when The Del-Satins entered a Battle of the Bands and a talent agent named Alan White tapped a horn section called The Rhythm Method to back them. Maestro’s manager, Betty Sperber, liked what she heard and talked the now-11 member act into becoming a going concern. They named the expanded act Johnny Maestro & the Brooklyn Bridge as a spin on the old cliché about the Brooklyn Bridge – i.e., if you can book at 11-piece act, there’s this bridge I can sell you…