Various Artists – ‘Pour a Little Sugar On It
The Chewy Chewy Sounds Of American Bubblegum 1966-1971′
On the face of it, the bubblegum pop sounds of the late 60s are everything the name promises – easily accessible throwaway pop with a day-glo sheen and enough gooey cloying sweetness to make your teeth crackle. But, as this new 3-disc 91-track anthology of late ’60s tracks demonstrates, the appeal is also from the strange malevolence and darkness that lurks behind the perma-grins. An obsession for very young girls; barely disguised double-entendres and metaphors; stalking; sex, drugs and pop and roll. The melodies lure you in before you’re spat out – the minor key changes your only warning. Bubblegum pop was as dangerous as punk but hid behind exuberant joy and an offer of a bag of sweets and a look at some puppies.
Producers Jerry Kasenetz and Jeffry Katz loom large over this set and over the commercial hoopla of the music industry overall. You were given two and a half minutes to please the kids and by your second track, you were expected to have them addicted to the three chords and dancing like mice on a hotplate. 1910 Fruitgum Company started life as Jeckell and the Hydes, playing tracks to kids as they swam in the local pool, a practice which you don’t hear much of nowadays. They kick off disc one ‘Simon Says’, a ferociously catchy ball of fluff which sold millions on both sides of the Atlantic the same year The Beatles went psychedelic.
Filth merchants Ohio Express were experts in the genre and a band – that is to say singer Joey Levine and whoever in the session musician phone directory was free – that had riffs and melodies that put many of their contemporaries to shame and lyrics which didn’t shy away from the very essence of rock ‘n’ roll – “I want love in my tummy’. How else can you possibly interpret ‘Yummy Yummy Yummy’? They produced only 3 albums and a handful of singles, but their spectre looms large across the bubblegum landscape. Monstrous pied pipers who positively stalked young people and lured them in with impossible-to-resist melodies and a mix of promises and threats. What a time to be alive.
In comparison, The Monkees and Neil Diamond (an odd but welcome choice) sound somewhat fay and all at sea, seemingly unsure which way they’re being dragged by their pop puppet masters. “Cherry Cherry” is a great song, let’s hope football fans don’t find a reason to latch onto it. If The Monkees are regularly accused of bringing music into disrepute by being manufactured, then what hope for The Archies? The Archies feature heavily on this set (all great tracks but it would have been nice to have even more variety) and in a way act as the balance to the snotty disregard of Ohio Express. The irony is, of course, that the well-behaved little child is not just manufactured but represented by a cartoon, a way of suggesting that innocence and laughter can only exist on the page of a comic, whilst real life is all sex and dark corners.
I’ve never quite been able to decide where Paul Revere & The Raiders fit on the music shelves. Decked out in preposterous garb, I tend to think of them as a rather meh US version of The Dave Clark Five but if you cherry-pick their tracks, they make a formidable bubblegum act. ‘Mr Sun, Mr Moon’ absolutely shines here.
There’s no mistaking Joey Levine’s backing vocals on Crazy Elephant‘s ‘Gimme Gimme Good Lovin’, and therefore the song takes on a rather shadier tone. Equally disarming is Andy Kim‘s funereal yet at the same time frenetic reading of ‘Baby I Love You’, which is surely due for use in a horror film sooner or later. Kim – born Androwis Youakim – is peak bubblegum. A thick-browed “Ooh Gary Davies”/wolfman hybrid, coming to steal your children eat them and send a thank you letter home to you for your generosity. He has no business being in the business of pop, yet leapt from this to co-writing ‘Sugar Sugar’ and singing background vocals for The Archies. He then started calling himself Baron Longfellow. Baron Longfellow!
The Four Fuller Brothers took hiding in plain sight to new levels with ‘Groupie’, a horrific song sung in a strange voice not too far removed from the old pervert in Family Guy.
“Let her by
Officer, it’s OK
Can’t you see the tear in her eye?
She’s come such a long way”
This is very much bubblegum pop wearing its tight trousers outside the school gates – ignored by the dads, eyed up by the odd mum and there to give the kids a ride home – though possibly not their home. It wasn’t so many years ago that rock ‘n’ roll was universally agreed to be dangerous – this was the sort of thing music did – had sex with your underage child, sang some catchy songs, and left town. By liking the music, you were complicit.
No sooner have you come to terms with the ways of the world in Bubblegumland than Levine returns, this time with The Third Rail. A girl is “looking so kooky on a Suzuki”. With our minds now poisoned we’re left wondering if that’s a motorbike or a Mr Suzuki. It takes a welcome dose of The Electric Prunes to fully expunge the badness, though ‘Everybody Known You’re Not in Love’ really isn’t bubblegum pop. Lt. Garcia’s Magic Music Box‘s ‘Latin Shake’ would have to go out of its way not to be worth listening to with a name like that and indeed it’s excellent stuff. Not very Latin at all, it’s funky, danceable and wholesomely ridiculous. No one bought it. Maybe people really just wanted more suggestive songs, after all. Other tremendous band names include The Rasberry Pirates (their misspelling, not mine, though double marks as their track ‘Looky looky my cookie’s gone’, a Sailor-esque gem); Patty Flabbie’s Coughed Engine; The Peppermint Trolley Company; The Pineapple Heard; Pastrami Malted, and Cartoon Candy Carnival (who contribute a song about the proliferation of Mickey Mouse merchandise, ‘Everything is Mickey Mouse’).
The formula for making hits was deemed so simple that Salt Water Taffy made an Archies-by-numbers single called ‘Loop de Loop’, based on the kid’s song. It’s disgracefully saccharine though utterly harmless. So harmless that clearly someone felt so uncomfortable that something had to be done. To bring order to the universe, the single had a lingerie ad on the back of the sleeve. Unbelievable.
Tommy James and Tommy Roe bookend disc two, both of whom come across as Sinatra-like titans among the proliferation of one-hit-wonders and coattail riders. Standing out like a sore thumb on the set is The Velvet Underground, who appear with ‘Who Loves the Sun’, which it’s difficult to argue as qualifying both musically and lyrically. Sandwiched between The Fun and Games and yet more from The Archies, it’s an arch, disrespectful and wholly welcomed wildcard. Less unlikely but still not who you’d expect to find is Halfnelson, shortly to be renamed Sparks, of course. Less fitting on the set is The Box Tops – not sure what the thought process there was.
The Music Explosion return to filth with ‘What’s Your Name’, reeling off a string of girls’ names and announcing “What’s your name/Where are you from/I want to be where you are when you come”. Nothing compared to Ohio Express‘ ‘Chewy Chewy, of course. Such a great song though. There’s an underlying ferocity buried beneath, a surging confidence that I suppose you need if you’re singing a song ostensibly about blowjobs to young people. Levine really was a master of his craft, ear worms and trouser snakes, they all came naturally to him.
If you’ve spotted the curious lack of any women on the collection, you’d be quite right – beyond backing singers, there are scandalously few, with Mama Cass plying the flag with ‘Move a Little Closer Baby’. Maybe there really were fewer female singers in the genre or maybe they’re simply rebranded as girl groups. It’s perhaps easier to brand something as bubblegum when it’s a bloke singing in either a falsetto or cartoony voice. The situation is so desperate that even Ruthann Friedman turns out to be two chaps. Melanie‘s ‘Brand New Key’ shows that the girls could compete when up to the challenge, whilst Bonnie and the Clydes bring the nonsense with ‘Ninny Bop Bop’.
Astonishingly The Lemon Pipers don’t just appear with ‘Green Tambourine’ but also with ‘Jelly Jungle (of Orange of Marmalade)’, a reminder that they somewhat unfairly bundled with just one track more often than not. South Amboy Port Authority‘s ‘How Do You Like Those Apples’ manages to avoid the trappings of bubblegum sex and stalking and instead plumps for a ‘fuck you’ song mocking a girl being dumped.
Free Design‘s ‘Can You Tell Me How to Get to Sesame Street?’ feels an appropriate way to wrap things up. Recognisable and comforting, prompting images of a made-up place we once felt safe to visit and now belongs to someone else. We remember how we felt when we heard the song when we were young but now it just exists like a birthday card you keep in a suitcase above your wardrobe. Were they really better times? Will there ever come a time when it’s relevant again? Bubblegum has always existed to be disposable, music cranked out and shared between a bizarrely incestuous group of individuals who knew exactly what they were doing and who they were doing it to. It has survived, by happy accident, intact. And it still, somehow, sounds great.
Daz Lawrence
