If There’s a Co-Writing Heaven, Bobby Bloom Is In It

That’s Bobby Bloom with his Top Ten hit from 1970, Montego Bay. It’s a sunny little tune that’s mostly forgotten nowadays.

Bobby Bloom is one of those guys. They’re mostly anonymous, but they make the music business go, or they used to, anyway. The seventies was back when people still played real instruments and sang into microphones instead of mumbling into autotune machines. But don’t call him a one-hit wonder, just because you can’t remember another hit he had but this one, and you didn’t remember this one until I posted it.

He had other hits, too, but not so’s you’d notice. For instance, he wrote and recorded Heavy Makes You Happy, and it was a minor hit back in the day for the Staple Singers, too:

The secret sauce here was “co-writer” in the credits. Back in the day, lots of songs got written by songwriting teams. Some were long-term arrangements, like Brill Building piano bangers. Outfits like Motown had Holland-Dozier-Holland working behind the scenes. The Beatles were a songwriting duo, despite George’s occasional input. Writing stuff together seems to make pop hits more likely.

Bobby Bloom was a co-writing steam engine for a while. He half-wrote Mony Mony, for instance, and some Monkees songs. But it’s his co-writer for Montego Bay that’s really intriguing: Jeff Barry.

OK, just off the top of Wikipedia’s addled head, Jeff Barry co-wrote Doo Wah Diddy, Da Doo Ron Ron, And Then He Kissed Me, Chapel of Love, River Deep-Mountain High, Leader of the Pack, Sugar, Sugar, and (ugh) I Honestly Love You.

Oh Yeah. I almost forgot. He half-wrote Chapel of Love, Iko Iko, Walkin’ In the Sand, and Leader of the Pack. By the look of that list, Martin Scorsese must have to mail the guy a check every month.

Guys Like Jeff Barry and Bloom veered back and forth over the dotted lines between producers and writers and performers. Barry produced a bunch of Monkees albums, which needed more producin’ than they needed the Monkees, now that I think of it. He got dragged to LA to work on the Monkees TV show, and told Don Kirshner, the show’s musical director, he had a song in his pocket written by Neil Diamond called I’m a Believer. He produced the hell out of that to reach #1 on the charts. Lord knows who eventually taught the Monkees how to play it.

So where are we now? Bobby Bloom blew his brains out in 1974 while “cleaning his gun.” Uh huh. Montego Bay is still a desirable place to vacation, that is if you don’t mind living in an armed camp surrounded by a Mad Max world. And Jeff Barry is still alive, and as recently as five years ago, he was (co)writing music for the Lego City Adventures Nickelodeon TV show. I hope he enjoys many more years of shuffling out in his slippers and bathrobe to his mailbox, and fishing out the pile of residual checks from a zillion re-runs.