That’s not a joke. That’s the Foundations. They were Britain’s somewhat overmatched answer to Motown, and they hailed from all over. The late sixties were a very fertile time in the music business. Rock and pop bands were making serious money, and producers slapped together bands to cash in on the seemingly limitless hunger for new material from an ever-growing audience. The Foundations fit right in — eventually.
Musicians often have crazy side jobs and obscure backgrounds before they get their head above water in the music biz. The Foundations are a wild bunch, even by music biz standards. Clem Curtis, who is singing (or pretending to sing for the camera) is from Trinidad. He was a boxer, a wrestler, and an interior decorator. Hmm. I don’t think I’ve ever seen those job descriptions on the same resume before. At any rate, the keyboard player, Tony Gomez, was a clerk in a government architectural office. Peter Macbeth, the bass player, was an English teacher — in Singapore. The drummer, Tim Harris, was a deckhand on a cargo ship and sailed all over the world. Mike Elliot, the sax player was 38 years old when the band formed. Tim Harris, the seagoing roustabout, was still only 18, which makes me wonder if they were still impressing cabin boys in England in the sixties. The rest of the band was from all over, too, but were mostly jazz musicians who discovered that pop music paid better.
The Foundations grew out of a profoundly unsuccessful band call the Ramong Sound. It featured Clem Curtis and a guy name Raymond Morrison singing duets like Sam and Dave. Morrison went to jail for one thing or another, so they went looking for someone to sing duets with Clem. They tried Arthur Brown.
If you can’t place Arthur’s name in the musical firmament, this should be enough to give you the general idea:
Arthur used to paint his face, wear a mask, and a don a helmet that he set on fire, but even he thought the proto-Foundations was a little too rough and tumble. He reminisced later that when he walked into an off-hours bar to audition for the band, he found Curtis holding a spear to the drummer’s throat, who was bent backwards over the bar rail. So Arthur didn’t work out. The band auditioned Rod Stewart, who turned down an offer to join. They hired his girlfriend to do clerical work, however, so it wasn’t a total loss. Eventually they just went with the lineup they had, changed their name to the Foundations, and had a Number One hit with Baby, Now That I’ve Found You.
The band started touring with lots of big name rock acts. Success of a sort went to everybody’s head. As soon as any band starts making any money, it’s considered poor form not to start fighting over it like Kilkenny cats, and the Foundations were no exception. Curtis left to try his hand at a solo career after demanding that the band be named Clem Curtis & the Foundations, and being told to pound sand into a rathole by the other members. Morrison got out of prison and sued everyone. It took a judge only three hours to decide that it was unlikely that he was responsible for the band’s success while he was in prison.
But don’t call the Foundations a one-hit wonder. They got a new lead singer from Barbados named Colin Young, and became a two-hit wonder:
That one made it to #2 or #3, depending on what version of English the chart was being compiled in. Buttercup was a hardy perennial in the cover band circuit. I freely admit to playing in a band that performed the song twenty-five years after it was recorded. Of course we changed the words to an NC-17 version to freshen it up for a new audience.
I am led to believe that some version of the Foundations is still poking around, although it’s unclear exactly how much DNA they share with any of the original members. Then again, most old pop groups never die. They simply fade away.
