That’s the more or less one-hit wonders Sugarloaf, from Denver Colorado. That song made it to Number Three on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1970. It’s one of a legion of songs from the era that prominently featured a Hammond organ in the mix. Guys like Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, and Deep Purple, and Procol Harum all mixed a church organ way up front. Deep Purple The Moody Blues mined the same ore with a Mellotron, an organ with keys that trigger a tape recording of a note, instead of a note. The Beatles Strawberry Fields Forever has one on it, for instance.
Sugarloaf was way, way more obscure than those bands. Their trajectory is quite demonstrative of the way the music business works, or doesn’t, depending on how high up in it you get.
To get started, it’s important to be completely unable to name your band, or even decide what kind of music to play. Sugarloaf, which could have been named after a famous mountain in Brazil, or a semi-famous ski area in Maine, or a hillock in Wicklow, Ireland, is named for an obscure mountain in Colorado. The band had what seems like about fifty names at one time or another. They were The Classics, but only after dropping the name The Surf Classics, because they didn’t want to sound like the Ventures anymore. Then they “evolved” into the Moonrakers. Then a couple of Moonrakers decided to be Chocolate Hair for obscure reasons. Maybe Vanilla Fudge made them jealous. Whatever. They managed to get a recording contract, but the label’s lawyer told them that Chocolate Hair might be problematic with the brothas, so Sugarloaf it was. Green-Eyed Lady was an afterthought on the album, but it was a big hit. The music biz is like that a lot. Happy accidents.
Their second album made it to 111 on the charts. I’m pretty sure you can make it to 110 by selling your albums out of the trunk of your car, although I’ve never tried it. They were opening act performers for guys like The Who and Deep Purple for a while. Their next claim to fame was being the backup band on a Bee Gees cover song recorded by, I kid you not, the guy who played Eddie Munster. I hope the check cleared. Then they made a sort of novelty song, Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You, which featured the sound of a touch-tone phone. It was about as musical as you’d expect. That album made it to 152 on the Billboard Top 200 list. The band sorta atomized not long after that. The lead singer and keyboardist joined Disco-Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes for a spell. One of their songs was parodied on The Simpsons, so they had that going for them. I hope the check cleared.
Thirty years ago some members joined with a nostalgia tour with castaways from bands like Cannibal and the Headhunters, Rare Earth, Iron Butterfly, and other devotees of drum solos and graying chest hair. The only recent performance listed for them is from 2012, at a golf club. From there, it’s strictly the obituaries, mostly from predictable things like lung cancer. But the lead singer died from something called Pick’s Disease, something I’d never heard of. So I looked it up. It’s the informal name for behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia. According to the Wikiup. The symptoms are:
Behavior can change in BvFTD in either of two ways—it can change to being impulsive and disinhibited, acting in socially unacceptable ways; or it can change to being listless and apathetic
It must be deuced difficult to diagnose that for a rock musician. I’ve answered want ads looking for bass players who were disinhibited, and ready to act in socially unacceptable ways. But I never got the gigs. And everyone was pretty listless and apathetic at the auditions.
God rest ye, fellas. Green-Eyed Lady was lots of fun.
6 Responses
“Deep Purple mined the same ore with a Mellotron”
Nope. Moody Blues. They even had to take a Mellotron tech with them on tour to make sure the machine worked. The memories of that were supposedly the main reason Mike Pinder turned down the ‘re-formed’ group in the ’90’s.
John Lord of Deep Purple played a mean D3. Really understood how to use the Leslie.
Hi Ed- An egregious error on my part. I’ll fix it.
Traffic in their last days used a mellotron that sounded very … well, mellow. Kyna spooky, really.
Off topic. I recently heard an account of a young Virginian’s experience in the Civil War. It seemed to me that his old-timey Virginia accent was somewhat similar to the Down East accent. What say you and others?
A Firsthand Account of the Civil War
Bert & I: Down East Socialism
His talking about the cause of the Civil War prompts this observation. Whatever motivation the foot soldiers had, from reading various documents of Secession–South Carolina was the first to secede– it is apparent that for the elite of the South, slavery was THE reason for Secession. In his audio account, the Virginia foot soldier expressed chagrin for slavery–that he was glad that his children didn’t grow up under slavery. Saying states’ rights was the reason for the Civil War was a way of avoiding an unpleasant truth– that the society he grew up in supported slavery.
(My family tree embraces both sides of the Civil War– a Confederate Colonel from a slaveowning family , foot soldiers from the North and South, and a follower of John Brown who was killed at Harper’s Ferry.)
I remember Green Eyed Lady.
Yankees is Yankees, I guess.
The most interesting and succinct explanation for the Civil War I ever read was by Mark Twain, who wrote an amusing account of his two weeks or so in the Confederate army, and then skedaddled west to avoid the whole thing. He said southerners never got over their affection for Sir Walter Scott.
It was just one of many cavaliers vs. roundheads war.
Thank you for introducing the word disinhibited to me I had never heard of it before but it describes more than a few people I’ve known in my life.