Favorite song by Ohio Express

:thumbsup:

This is actually a really cool creepy-sounding psychedelic-rock song from the group's debut, one of the more schizophrenic albums I've ever heard. The album is half-"Yummy Yummy Yummy"/ "Down at Lulu's" Kasenatz-Katz bubblegum, and the other half psychedelic-influenced rock. The reason being that the latter was what the original group really sounded like when they were signed, and the bubblegum stuff was what the producers wanted, and the producers ended up winning out in terms of what the bulk of the group's stuff would sound like beyond that album. (Plus, a number of members quit or were fired, some tracks were played by studio musicians while others were the actual band, etc.) But the debut album contains a pretty interesting juxtaposition of styles.

Oh yeah, and speaking of "creepy-sounding psychedelic-rock song"s I have to give some credit to the b-side of "Yummy, Yummy, Yummy", "Zig-Zag"; that one must have scared the hell out of half of the eight year old kids who bought the "Yummy, Yummy, Yummy" single. It's this weird instrumental that sounds like the track of another song played in reverse, with some creepy carnival organ playing this repetitive, dark-sounding melody over it.

But now I am reading about all of this and it's pretty interesting. The singer of Yummy Yummy Yummy, Joey Levine just did that vocal for the demo and they kept it. He ended up writing a hell of a lot of famous jungles. And like you said, a lot of the people on those records were session musicians and they had a few different names and different bands. The would mix and match different people for different songs and then release the album under a band's name.

Also, the song Hedges mentions Sausalito (Is the Place to Go), were mainly the members of 10CC. Well, they went on to become 10CC.

So much for posting silly polls.

with early bubblegum* music so I couldn't pass up mentioning one of my favorite tracks of the era. Some of these bands do have some interesting stories, and recorded a few gems amongst their inconsistent output. There is actually a pretty cool book (actually it's more a collection of articles) about the "genre" that I read a couple of years ago, called Bubblegum Music Is the Naked Truth that goes into some depth about many of the bands.

*The stuff that came out, predominately on Buddah Records, in the late-sixties/early-seventies mostly; by the mid-seventies, the term had come to stand for pretty much any disposable pop creation, most of which lacked the weird charm (at least in my, admittedly strange, musical taste!) of the original stuff.