THE ARCHIES – "Sugar, Sugar"

The first single I ever bought, or at least asked my dad to buy for me (RCA 1872, price 7/6), mostly because they were cartoon characters – make of that what you will, but I was only five at the time – so from my PoV the record is beyond criticism. But of course it’s also Kirshner’s Revenge in that cartoon characters can’t demand UDI and dispense with your services as those pesky Monkees did…but of course it can also serve as a subsequent missing link between Teletubbies and Gorillaz…

Lead singer Ron Dante (who was also the “frontman” of the Cufflinks) was on “Leader Of The Laundromat” by the Detergents back in ’65 and ended up as Barry Manilow’s arranger/producer.

I am not entirely sure, and am probably completely wrong, but I distinctly recall one of the “I’m gonna make your life so sweet”s being given to Hot Dog in the rather primitive “video” shown on TOTP…

I even persuaded my dad to buy me the album, whose British cover was typically over-literal:

http://www.vinyltap.co.uk/gallery/ar/archiss4985039822494040.jpg

“A life on the sugar wave”

This isn’t the first single I ever bought (I was only 4 at the time), but this is the first ‘modern’ – i.e. post-Beatles – pop single that entered our family home: my sister (7) received it as a present from a relative, Christmas 1969. For my part, I got an EP of marching tunes by the Band of the Grenadier Guards.

Prior to this point, we only had my parents’ small, dusty collection of 7″s – EPs of highlights from West End musicals, some slushy Malcolm Vaughn records, Frank Ifield’s “Lucky Devil”, Johnny Preston’s “Running Bear” and a Bachelors record – plus a bunch of kids discs, some of it on coloured vinyl (fairy tales and nursery rhymes, Pinky & Perky, a Thunderbirds episode) to play on our boxy, single-speaker 3-speed gramophone with auto-repeat and Stack-O-Matic record-changer.

So, like Marcello, this record meant a lot to me at an early age. Not that it started a revolution – it was a couple more years before my sister and I got into pop music in any serious way. Between Xmas ’69 and 1972 our pop diet consisted mainly of Ed Stewart’s Junior Choice radio programme on weekend mornings. On which “Sugar Sugar” no doubt featured regularly, though my sister and I were probably listening out for songs like “My Brother” (“Who locked granddad in the loo?” Whoosh! “My brother”).

Some years later, when I was old enough to be trusted with our new stereo hi-fi, this record got caned – as did the B-side “Melody Hill”*. I was blissfully unaware that the Archies were cartoon characters (I can’t even remember if we had a TV in 1970. I suppose we must have had a small B&W one, but I have no memories of watching anything on it.) So I happily accepted that “Melody Hill” and “Sugar Sugar” were by the same, real-life pop band, even though they sound completely unalike.

*written by Ritchie Adams & Mark Barkan, rather than Barry & Kim. Possibly the only overlap in personnel on the two sides is Ron Dante?

I even persuaded my dad to buy me the album, whose British cover was typically over-literal:

OMG, and a direct precursor to the cover for McCartney! This might be the last undiscovered piece of Beatle trivia. Marvelous.

As for “Sugar Sugar” I’ll have to wait before I get home and can track it down to offer my two cents – I haven’t heard it in years and while I can hear most of it in my head, the “ba ba ba”s aren’t springing to mind. I recall it, though, as being a really obnoxious song – maybe it’s well-crafted, but shouldn’t great pop be well-crafted and have something else to it? Something that connects? Some drama or window of relevance? Even something like “Da Doo Ron Ron,” whose lyrics are about the equal of “Sugar Sugar” in terms of lameness, carries a melodrama, a hugeness, a swelling that befits teenage love. “Sugar Sugar” is for eight-year-olds imagining teenage love and might as well be “Lily The Pink” or this intriguing “My Brother” for its total lack of convincing realism. It’s not just that it’s made by a fake cartoon band, it’s that everything in it feels like a fake cartoon of a real song. A richly animated cartoon that knows how to use all the tricks, perhaps, but ultimately, who cares if the Teletubbies movie is gorgeously shot?

The Archies comic book isn’t nearly as cool as this song. Ok, maybe Jughead, but still…

The female lead is sung by Toni Wine, who co-wrote “Groovy Kind of Love” and “Black Pearl,” among others. (According to All Music, she also was “Dawn” alongside Tony Orlando in the studio for “Candida;” after some solo recording, she married Chips Moman. Interesting career trajectory.)

The rhythm section is Hal Blaine and (I think) Joe Osborne, making the Archies the cartoon brethren of the Byrds, the Raiders, the Mamas and the Papas, Simon and Garfunkle, the Grass Roots, and hundreds more.

This is another huge hit that I have no clear memory of hearing back then. I bought it in my early 30s, after reading Lester Bangs’s essay on bubblegum and deciding to renounce all shame when it came to my bubblegum love. I’m now the proud owner of five Archies albums, among many other bubblegum acts of the period. (I actually prefer “Bang-Shang-a-Lang” to this one, but I like both a lot.)

My band does a medley of bits from songs using this same 1-4-5 chord progression and rhythm. If I recall all the songs, it goes: Louie Louie/Sugar Sugar/Wild Thing/Farmer John/Downtown/Game of Love/Like a Rolling Stone/Twist and Shout/Hang On Sloopy. The irony we enjoy in the first three songs is that the first and third are supposed to be dirty, but aren’t, and the second is supposed to be innocuous, but might be dirty.

Don’t see it as mindless, trivial and contrived, altho it obviously came out of a test tube/committee (so to speak). It’s practically perfect in every way and just soooo irresistable.

Doctor Casino is right.

Ergo, TWO Doctors here agree that this much sugar is dangerous to your well-being.

Overexposure to this song–and I daresay it was overexposed–can put anyone in a diabetic coma.

Although I suppose “Bang Shang A Lang” owes considerably more to “Ring-A-Ding-Ding!” now that I think about it. (Now that would be a skewed taking-sides…)

Dr T says: this record is great.

2

You forgot the Jonathan King “prog” cover, issued under the guise of Sakkarin, Top 20 in ’71.

My favourite cover of “Sugar Sugar” is by one of the artists whom Tom will be writing about very soon! It may even be on the B-side of their 1970 #1, but Google won’t confirm this.

. . . must have been the kiss of death as far as serious rock fans and the charts were concerned

For serious fans my age (I was 18 in 1969), it certainly was. We didn’t have Rolf here, but we had more than enough garbage on the chart (some of which made it over to your side of the Atlantic). Over here we had FM radio, and by this time the singles charts weren’t exactly the center of our musical sensibilities. Album-oriented rock had already begun to take center stage, a trend that probably dated back to Sgt Pepper.

I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with being mindless, trivial and contrived – it’s just this song I don’t like.

As for the childhood thing, well I obviously used to be a child, and by that time this had somehow become part of the list of records that adults thought children would like. If we got to hear pop music at my primary school, we’d get this amongst a limited rotation; the only other one I can recall now is ‘Superman’ by Black Lace.

Well, if you don’t hate soul and you want to hear an interesting spin on this one, you might consider the Wilson Pickett cover version.

I’m in the middle on this one, probably give it a 6 or 7. To emphasize what maybe Tom and a few others have been edging towards saying: for bubblegum, “Sugar, Sugar” is actually quite TEPID, owing to the vocals, which are unnecessarily pale and don’t do the song justice. Seem more like sugar substitute than actual sugar. But even as a song, I don’t see how “Sugar Sugar” has got nearly the hooks and melody of “Solitary Man” and “Crimson and Clover” and “Na Na Hey Hey” and “I Want You Back,” not to mention “Time of the Season” and “The Boxer” and “Pinball Wizard” and “Volunteers” and “Whole Lotta Love.” So I don’t see this song as particularly emblematic of either bubblegum or pop world 1969. As for the something else that great pop (or even average pop) ought to and usually does have: how about passion and dramatic tension and at least something going on in the lyrics? All the bob sh-bops and a-ding-a-dong dings from the old rock ‘n’ roll era gave singers a slalom run to show off their style and gave kid listeners vocal footwork to aspire to and to annoy adults and other kids with. And as for “the skills of compacting complex observations and emotions into direct and compact form” that’s accessible to a ten-year-old (sir pynk s lord of sukrat on another thread), few have ever done it as well as Jeff Barry & Ellie Greenwich did over and over back in their teenpop heyday: “He used to act bad/He used to but he quit it/It makes me so sad/’Cause I know that he did it/For me.” The relatively light-hearted “I met him on a Monday and my heart stood still/Da doo ron ron ron da doo ron ron/Somebody told me that his name was Bill/Da doo ron ron ron da doo ron ron” sketches a world and a situation with a couple of brush strokes. You met him (on a particular day, a particular time), somebody told you his name – this dreamboat, your heart skips a beat but you don’t even who he is, so there’s a distance to cross (and a song to listen to). And the joyous “Chapel of Love” gives you a dark backdrop in six words – “And we’ll never be lonely anymore”: so the condition of this happy wedding is a base state of loneliness, this joy springing from that sorrow. Same thing happens in teenpop nowadays: “Don’t let nobody tell you your life is over,” sing a couple of frightened home-schooled teenagers named Aly & A.J. exhorting you and themselves to heed the call of the world and not to hide out in fear, the delirious beauty of this song feeding off the terror depicted in their others. Or the kiddie-Oprah-pop in High School Musical – “You know the world can see us in a way that’s different than* who we are” – is what gives these kids something to soar and fly away from. Or a pop lyric can simply be a whammy ball to toss against the world and see what happens: “How come every time you come around/My London London Bridge wanna go down.” Not that every great pop song has to have interesting words, or any words, but they sure help.

(No doubt somewhere, someplace “Sugar, Sugar” tossed itself against the world in an interesting way, and some of you were there. But I don’t feel my way into this happening when I hear “Sugar, Sugar,” which isn’t nearly as good as the other songs I mention in this post.)

*I grimace at this “than”; I’m probably just showing my age.