A West Indian, a Sri Lankan, and a British Guy Walk Into a Bar…

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.

Pretty Flamingoes

That’s Manfred Mann performing Pretty Flamingo in 1966. Nifty video to accompany it. People have always spent a lot of time on their appearance, and still do. We have recently, however, forgotten that becoming exquisitely unpleasant-looking wasn’t the point of the exercise.

Manfred Mann is a person, and the name of the band. It makes for pronoun trouble, but we’ll carry on regardless. Pretty Flamingo made it to Number 1 on the UK pop chart, and deserved it. It’s a sprightly little tune. Manfred Mann was no stranger to the number one slot. They had already covered The Exciters’ Doo Wah Diddy, and even though it’s a half-step removed from a novelty song. it made it to Number 1. They later recorded Bob Dylan’s Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn), another odd but interesting choice, and had another number 1.

The band was one of those nurseries for other bands. Cream’s Jack Bruce, and Klaus Voorman were Manfredians. Voorman is just about the most famous person you never heard of. He played the bass. He was friends with the Beatles, and lived in their shared flat for a while. He ended up playing on many of their assorted solo records after everybody met Yoko Ono. Klaus was an artist, too, and designed the LP sleeve for Revolver, among many others. He had more offers than he knew what to do with. The Hollies and the Moody Blues tried to hire him to no avail, although he appeared with the Hollies on TV a couple of times. He could play the flute well enough to be recorded, too. Versatile? Hell, he appeared as Von Schnitzel the Conductor in the movie Popeye. Mad Magazine hired him to draw the cover for one of their issues. He collaborated, one way or another, with everyone from Howlin’ Wolf to the Bee Gees.

None of the members of Manfred Mann wrote Pretty Flamingo. If I asked you to guess who wrote it, and stood on one leg and held my breath while you took a stab at it, I’d fare worse than Yoko Ono’s audiologist. Mark Barkan wrote it. Who? Well, he was American, and he also wrote this:

Not exactly Ode to Joy, but I dare you to get it out of your head by the end of the day. Sorry.

Pretty Flamingo is one of those songs that has legs, as we used to say in the cover band business. It’s recognizable enough to elicit a kind of enthusiasm when you start playing it. It’s also obscure enough to seem like a potent re-discovery.

The song is pleasant enough and interesting enough musically to make even a bad rendition of it pretty good. Or a good one:

Over On the Corner, There’s a Happy Noise

Ludwig van Beethoven: Do you like it?

Anton Felix Schindler: Shh!

Ludwig van Beethoven: I cannot hear them, but I know they are making a hash of it. What do you think? Music is… a dreadful thing. What is it? I don’t understand it. What does it mean?

Anton Felix Schindler: It – it exalts the soul.

Ludwig van Beethoven: Utter nonsense. If you hear a marching band, is your soul exalted? No, you march. If you hear a waltz, you dance. If you hear a mass, you take communion. It is the power of music to carry one directly into the mental state of the composer. The listener has no choice. It is like hypnotism.

Steel Soap Bubbles Need Not Apply

Ah. Irish Setter hairdos and braless babes in hot pants. What’s not to like?

I’m too young for the first go-round of this song. I played in an oldies band many years after this, and it was plenty popular then. The pretty girls all danced in front of the bandstand just like that — just like their moms and aunts and big sisters did for the original. There’s no reason for it, really. The song would have to get a lot more sophisticated just to be considered a trifle. It’s a three-chord raga with lyrics about as compelling as a self-addressed stamped envelope. So what? Soap bubbles wouldn’t float as well if they were made from steel.

That’s the McCoys from Union City, Indiana. They got their name from the extremely B side of the Ventures Walk Don’t Run single. I’ve been in a lot of bands that spent more time trying to come up with a witty name than they did practicing. I’m right there with the McCoys  here. Use whatever’s handy and get on with it.  Hell, people used to name their children random things by opening the Bible to any old page, placing an unseeing finger on the text, and using the words under their digit. Of course the modern method of using a Boggle game or spilling Scrabble game tiles on a Ouija board is much less silly.

There’s two brothers in the band. The Zehringers. Brother Rick eventually changed his name to something easier to spell, and became Rick Derringer. That song might be as simple enough to be played by a chicken pecking a toy piano, but Rick is no slouch. He played guitar on several Steely Dan records. If you’re familiar with their coterie of session men, you know that they didn’t settle.

This is Rick playing the guitar solos on Chain Lightning:

The McCoys were marketed as a bubblegum pop band by their record label. Sloopy made it to Number One on the Billboard chart, sold a million copies, and was named the “Official Rock Song of the State of Ohio.” I’m not sure if that last one is an encomium or an unintentional diss, but it sure is something.

Most musicians can’t handle that kind of success. The McCoys wanted to make heavier rock and psychedelic music. They quit their music label over it, and signed with Mercury Records, who let them make two unlistenable flopparoos before cutting them loose. Two of the original band members didn’t make it to fifty years old by living the serious musician lifestyle a little too seriously.

Rick Derringer hooked up with a bunch of interesting people like Edgar and Johnny Winter and Steely Dan. He eventually had a hit of his own in the mid-seventies called Rock and Roll, Hootchie Coo, which rivals Sloopy for pedestrian lyrics and a general kind of enthusiasm.

Everybody, yeah, tries to put my Sloopy down, but sometimes the simple things are best.