One Hit No More, No. 34: Zager & Evans & the Year 2525

Gives a man time to think...

The Hit
Rick Evans wrote the lyrics for “In the Year 2525” in 1964 (using the old film, Metropolis, for a backdrop), sometime after he met Denny Zager at Nebraska Wesleyan University and sometime before they parted ways for a while - Vietnam, life, etc. When they reconnected again in 1968 and Evans played his pass at the song for Zager, who found a lot in the lyrics, but less in the music. In Zager’s words:

“Rick (Evans) said he wrote the lyrics in 10 minutes in the back of a Volkswagen van after a night of partying and a lot of Mary Jane. He tried the song with a few bands he was playing with at the time, but the music wasn't right and it wasn't working. I thought the lyrics were intriguing, so I rewrote the music so it blended better with the lyrics.”

The reworked version became such a hit around the Nebraska /concert college circuit that an owner at one of the venues fronted the money to record it - with another Evans-penned tune (“Little Kids”) as a b-side, and the single blew up from the regional market to holding the top spot in the Billboard Top 100 for six weeks near or around the moon landing (so, July 1969). Inspired by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, it’s a heavy tune that reports from a future dystopia over a burned-out riff on hippie-rock. To flag two takes on “In the Year 2525’s” meaning:

“…a Randian dystopia where, in one instance, people's actions, words and thoughts are preprogrammed into a daily pill.”

Or, more specifically:

One Hit No More, No. 33: Eddie Holman, The Lonely Boy

A vinyl collector would scream...

The Hit
Eddie Holman hit it big in 1969 (or 1970; I hate when sources don’t agree) crooning “Hey There Lonely Girl” in a shy, pleading falsetto. In this classic, tender soul slow-jam featuring bedroom horns and an intimate swing, Holman plays the lonely boy making warm promises to a lonely girl. A newly-lonely girl, actually. One he’s been pining about for a while. We’ve all been there, right, guys? And we probably handled it just as badly…

The song’s actually a cover - Ruby sang it to a lonely boy with the Romantics backing her up about seven years earlier - but Holman’s rendition went higher and thus became the standard. (Holy...Ruby and the Romantic's version just went straight to the next playlist...that bossa nova swing...)

The Rest of the Story
Holman grew up in New York with a great voice and a mother who strongly encouraged his love of signing. Holman speaks of her in glowing terms and the path she put him on, one that started when he won an amateur night at the Apollo Theater. He got plugged in pretty well after that - Jackie Wilson mentored him through a couple tours - and Holman liked where things were headed enough to earn a bachelor’s in music. When it comes to pop bands, college typically only comes up as the place where the members meet, but his career looked like must working musician’s does from there: writing songs, working to get them in people’s ears.

He came up in Philadelphia after college, putting out a string of singles - one of them, “This Can’t Be True,” hitting No. 17 on the Billboard (again…help…that’s two hits…what does “one-hit wonder” even mean? Also, good tune...). It took “Lonely Girl” for Eddie Holman to go international. The single peaked way up at No. 2 on the 1970 Billboard. Also, and this is very important, the song hit No. 4 on the UK charts four three-four years later.

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.