When the Beatles, Stones, Who etc., found God, Lucifer, Tommy, Art etc., a whole new genre of mundane fantasy sprang up to replace them. Stephen Barnard chews it over.

Page 18 & 19 LET IT ROCK — November/December 1975

Television has never been a particularly teen-oriented medium: In both America and Britain a supposed need for ‘family entertainment’ dominates tv thinking, and programmes have to appeal to the widest possible cross-section of the public to satisfy both audience and advertisers. Rock music was originally too violent, too raw and too overtly sexual for family viewing and for some time was only given the minimum of coverage on television variety shows — and even then producers insisted that Elvis Presley be photographed from the waist up as a built-in safeguard against complaints from the Mothers’ Union. Dick Clark’s American Bandstand gained advertising sponsorship by diluting the music itself, by making It clean, presentable and safe — in short, making it acceptable for family viewing, for young children and adults as well as record buying adolescents. Yet while television came to terms with pop music in this way, it was years before it began to appreciate the vastness and potential gullibility of the teenage market and, until the unveiling of the Monkee enterprise in 1966 by those old hands of American television, Screen Gems, all the major hype operations were instigated by people from within the pop industry itself, not from within television.

‘Bubblegum’ music and television are synonymous: the records promote the particular tv show, the show promotes the records. The importance of the Monkees’ show, however, was that it was aimed at an age group whose interest in pop music was supposedly minimal, at a very young audience that the record industry had long ignored because of its limited record buying power. So by adding pop music to a proven television formula (the situation comedy series) and screening the show at children's peak viewing time, the Monkee-makers not only set a remarkable tv precedent but also revealed the existence of a vast and hitherto untapped market of five to thirteen year olds ready, willing and quite able to buy the pop of their choice. And if that pop was mostly mundane, computerised and banal that was only to be expected: these kids were after all probably too young to have even heard of the Beatles, on whom the Monkees for one were so closely modeiled, and could hardly be expected to have much sense of musical discrimination. Monkee music and the bubblegum that followed was therefore music aimed at the lowest common denominator and the fact that the group did record some good songs and did eventually make some artistically worthwhile records is incidental: musical supervision of the series naturally fell to Don Kirshner, head of Screen Gems Music, who utilised material by the same gang of songwriters he had employed years before in the Brill Building organisation — Neil Sedaka, Goffin and King, Neil Diamond. Not even nostalgia for 1967 can colour the fact that every Monkees record was recorded and released with an almost cynical lack of finesse, epitomised by Kirshner’s decision to use session men on instrumental work rather than the group members themselves.

By the end of 1967 the Monkees’ popularity was fast waning and Screen Gems were losing interest in their property. Plans were drawn up for the production of a new series of shows along similar lines, but this time in cartoon form: The Archies. The fact that cartoon nonentities could take over in popularity from physically real people illustrates just how faceless bubblegum music was for, paradoxically, none of the bubblegum groups that followed the Monkees traded on an image at all. Kirshner and company rightly saw that you can’t sell puppy love to a seven year old, that sex appeal or hero worship really had little to do with a child’s preference for a particular tv series or character: buying an Ohio Express single to a young kid was just like buying a scribbling pad with a picture of Yogi Bear on the front. None of the Express or the 1910 Fruitgum Company ever made the centre spread of 16 or any of the other teenybopper magazines: bubblegum music was simply infant musak and the kids who bought it didn’t care about personalities as long as the nursery rhyme lyrics and chugging rhythms were there.

The bubblegum ‘sound’, though, was not Kirshner’s creation: the credit belongs to Kasenetz and Katz, the co-owners of Buddah Records in New York, who simply adapted the idiosyncratic ‘Mendocino’ style of the Sir Douglas Quintet to suit a very crude pop formula, placing the musical emphasis on rhythm rather than melody: K-K’s productions are notable for the extensive use of organ and bass. They specialised in groups with long, colourful names, among them the 1989 Musical Marching Zoo, Lieutenant Garcia’s Magic Music Box, the JCW Rat Finks and the St. Louis Invisible Band, but their biggest successes were with the Ohio Express (‘Yummy, Yummy, Yummy’) and the 1910 Fruitgum Company, whose ‘Simon Says’ was, as the title suggests, just the well known children’s game set to music. For good measure they brought all their groups together and toured American cities under the name of the Kazenetz-Katz Singing Orchestral Circus and even in Britain, which none of the K-K groups ever visited, their single ‘Quick Joey Small’ reached the Top Twenty. Also on Buddah, but not produced by Kasenetz or Katz were Saltwater Taffy and the Lemon Pipers. Taffy sounded exactly like Harpers Bizarre and were handled by Rod McBrien and John Giametta, but their one record ‘Finders Keepers’ made no impression on the charts (incidentally, if anyone has a copy of this record and is willing to part with it, please write), but the Pipers had two hits that managed to parody psychedelia quite brilliantly — ‘Green Tambourine’ and ‘Rice Is Nice’ both gave the listener some impression of what it must be like to get high on lemonade. The likeable thing about K-K’s records was the certain inane humour inherent in them, but it is also true that whenever anybody wants to put pop music down for its supposed illiteracy they never fail to quote that immortal line from ‘Yummy, Yummy, Yummy’: "I got love in my tummy! and I feel like I’m wanting you."

Generally, it was the small independent labels who concentrated on bubblegum during the late sixties: even the Monkees and Archies, despite the backing of a huge financial corporation, were recorded on Colgems, a minor subsidiary of Screen Gems. All the Archies’ songs were written, played and sung by Jeff Barry (former Monkees producer) and a select band of session musicians that included the ‘Rock Me Gently’ man Andy Kim, but the Archie enterprise was most notable for Screen Gems’ exploitation of the centralisation principle: quite simply, this was record merchandising at its most economically ‘efficient’, as Screen Gems owned the record company, the publishing firm, distribution rights, several television networks and exclusive worldwide screening rights. If the Archies could not sustain their initial popularity (and they were never a group as such, anyway) this was due more to their anonymity than to poor promotion. Perhaps the only group playing bubblegum who could be said to have a recognisable group identity were Tommy James and the Shondells, who had an incredible string of eleven Top Twenty hits in America during 1968. Their trademark was a steady stomp matched to a semi-screeching vocal that built up to a crescendo in mid-song and then suddenly trailed away. A couple of their records, ‘Mony Mony’ and ‘Hanky Panky’ (which told all in their titles), stand up today as examples of good, danceable pop and so transcend the bubblegum pigeonhole: if after six years ‘Sugar Sugar’ sounds twee and almost embarrassing, ‘Mony Mony’ can still bring the best out of a disco crowd. They too recorded for an independent company, Roulette Records.

Bubblegum was a late sixties phenomenon, so whether Dawn really qualify is dubious, as their first hit -- 'Knock Three Times’ -- came in 1970, when the Partridge Family heralded the return of out-and-out teenybopperdom. But so few American pop singles released in 1967-70 were aimed at a teenage market: most companies seemed solely interested in the very young kids and teenage idols (the biggest was Bobby Sherman and he only lasted a year) became scarcer. Dawn, led by Tony Orlando of early sixties fame, recorded for Bell, whose one big bubblegum hit prior to their signing was 'Dizzy' for Tommy Roe. Bell had previously issued only records for the rhythm 'n' blues/soul market but Dawn represented a change in commercial direction that was fully vindicated. Their songs, mostly written by stalwart Tin Pan Alley men Russell Brown and Irwin Levine, had interesting if slightly ridiculous stories — 'What Are You Doing Sunday?', 'Candida’, ‘Tie A Yellow Ribbon' — and have lasted, which is more than can be said of most bubblegum songs, and Dawn’s records were indeed the best produced bubblegum records of all. 'Yellow Ribbon' was one of the best singles of 1973, despite what anyone else on Let It Rock may tell you, and Orlando’s faithful re-creation of the vocal sound of the old Drifters has made their records consistently likeable. Only recently has Orlando seemingly lost his way by throwing together a number of albums cashing in on the ragtime craze, tending to confuse endearing corn with godawful mush.

Bubblegum was not made to last and didn’t: the kids who bought those records had to grow up. A seven year old bubblegum fan of 1967 would be approaching 12 in 1971 and just going through the first pangs of adolescence, but there was nothing, no love object, no idol on television or in pop music on whom she could focus her adulation: having grown out of bubblegum, the music without image, the post-Monkee generation found they needed a Monkee type figure to fill the vacuum. Wisely noticing that the wheel had turned full circle once again, Screen Gems again stepped in with The Partridge Family — a television series about, of course, the adventures of a mythical pop group. The show’s star, David Cassidy, proved in turn to be the catalyst for the whole seventies teenybopper revival, and it was not long before his chief rivals in the teen idol stakes — the Osmonds and Jackson Five — were being promoted by means of their own television series, cartoon presentations of showbusiness life. The Partridges’ music, and that of the Osmonds and 15, was not bubblegum in the sense that the Archies’ was: their music and their appeal were more old-fashioned than that, created for a female teenage market and not just children of primary school age. Nor is the music of Mud, Sweet or Suzi Quatro true bubblegum — just regurgitated teenage pop with pre-bubblegum roots. It is the principle of bubblegum that remains though, of selling conveyor belt pop through television — the K-Tel venture is just one indirect result of the commercial breakthrough made by the producers of The Monkees back in 1967. The Wombles are probably the nearest seventies equivalent to a sixties bubblegum group, and look how successful they (or their maker Mike Batt) has been. Another natural extension of the bubblegum principle is the record made by session musicians under an invented name, to cash in on a particular sound or trend.

The rise of bubblegum was paralleled by other developments — psychedelia, easy listening, the alienation of the 'skins' detailed by Pete Fowler in RockFile 1 — all dating from 1967, widely regarded as the year of the ‘great divide': the record industry, hitherto restricted to thinking of pop music in terms of purely teenage appeal, discovered new markets for the first time and began to realise their commercial potentialities. Between 1967 and 1971 the pop industry in both America and Britain concentrated its attentions on three main markets bubblegum (5 to 13 year olds); 'progressive’ rock (17 to 25 year olds); and that section of the record buying public euphemistically called 'mums and dads’ (30 plus). There was very little teenage pop created or performed during that period, and it is because the teenage element in pop was abandoned (and pop must stand or fall by its appeal to teenagers) that the music scene became so dull in the early seventies, so much so that by the time record people started trying to institute a full scale pop revival around 1971-72 so few creative young performers or writers were coming through that it was left to the old guard —Paul Gadd, Shane Fenton: Chas Chandler, Mike Leander et al—to revive their brand of pop. Imitation without innovation is therefore the legacy of the late sixties, Bubblegum by itself had no solid cultural base to allow it to develop into anything more than just a passing craze, yet another manifestation of the pop industry’s perennial search for new and commercially exploitable markets, Looking back, 1967 certainly has a lot to answer for . . .

(A big American thanks to Guy Lawrence for submitting this article!)