The Atrocious Music Collection: #3 in a series
Artist: The Buckinghams (1966-1970)
Album Title: The Buckinghams' Greatest Hits
Category: Producers Gone Wild
Year: 1969
Cover art style: “Meet the Beatles” meets “Nuclear Apocalypse
Audio samples:
- Kind of a Drag
- Susan: see below
- Foreign Policy: see below
Click on pictures for full-sized images
Look, mistakes are made by everyone. Ethel Merman recorded a disco album. Saturday Night Fever spawned Staying Alive. Hundreds of rock stars have released Christmas albums. These acts of poor judgement don’t negate all of the good work that otherwise was produced, that’s all I’m saying.
So, I want to be clear at the opening: The Buckinghams were a capable band who had a number of hits during their short hey-day. Having said that, two songs on their Greatest Hits disc are strikingly of two minds. As you might guess, I’ll be focusing mostly on them.
The Buckinghams may have come out of Chicago, but like so many groups, they really existed in the wake of the British Invasion. The name is kind of giveaway. The story of how they got that name, though, is terrific. The group was called the Pulsations when a Chicago variety show producer suggested the group get a more British name.
If you have ever been in a band, you know that naming the group can be the hardest decision you’ll ever make. One guy in my high school band didn’t want anything that started with “R,” because there were too many bands with names that started with “R,” although he couldn’t name more than two or three. Another member wanted it to “The” Something. Someone else insisted on one word (after the “The”). And so on. (I’m sure I had my issues, too – I just choose to forget them.)
In the case of the Pulsations, it was a security guard, John Opager, of all people, who suggested the name The Buckinghams, and thus they were anointed. It makes me realize what my band was missing in our name-debates was a disinterested third party with no particular knowledge or experience with bands or naming them.
Meanwhile, back to the music. The hits are solid, mostly written by professional songwriters for the group. Kind of a Drag¸ their big break, got to #1 on the charts, but I’m partial to Don’t You Care. However, for a really terrific hook, my money is on Susan. For about 90 seconds, Susan is pure pop:
I’m losing my mind.
I’m wasting my time.
And the final 45 seconds of the song contains one of those great ‘60s ending riffs:
Foreground voice: I love you, yes I do. I do.
If you’ve ever heard Susan on the radio, those two parts are probably all you’ve heard, a 2:15 gem that made it to #11 on the charts. Here on the album, though, is the original, full version, which is 2:45. Like the missing 18 minutes on the Nixon tapes, you may be interested in knowing what was cut. Super long songs have often been cut for radio. Ray Manzarek somehow spins the removal of the long instrumental section in the middle of Light my Fire into tale of mystery, suspense and outrage that last longer than… well, longer than the cut version of Light My Fire. (To hear him tell it, start at 8’ into this interview.) But what could be so outrageous that the radio stations would cut 30 seconds from this pop pastry which certainly did not need to be trimmed?
The answer lies with the group’s producer, James William Guercio, who would later go on to very successfully produce the bands Chicago and Blood, Sweat & Tears. Guercio inserted an avant-garde, Beatles-influenced, backwards-tape-filled, psychedelic section in Susan, a section which includes a quote from Charles Ives’ experimental orchestral work Central Park in the Dark, a section which is so alien to the mood of the rest of the song it can accurately be described as “extremely jarring.” It’s the musical equivalent of having a Tom Hanks rom-com interrupted by Mad Max half-way through.
If you have never heard this, I will only say that before clicking on the link below consider this will be the only time you will ever hear this for the first time. Please devote your entire attention to this experience. Do not skip ahead – you need to hear this in context. Only after fully establishing what Susan is, and all of the thousand things it isn’t, will the full impact of bringing in one of those things that it definitely isn’t be felt.
Ok. It’s at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfjoQ4fUw78. Have fun.
Band member Carl Giammarese recalled that when recording the song, “Guercio had left so many bars of click track with nothing in it at the end of the song and we kept asking him what he was doing here… He said ‘Don’t worry about it. I have this idea. You guys will hear it and it’ll be great.’ So…we received an acetate of the recording…. and put it on their record player and Susan played, and we thought it sounded great and all of a sudden it gets to this part in the record and we were going ‘What’s that? What’s going on?’ We took the needle off the record and played it again. We thought there was a flaw in the test pressing at first. We hadn’t any idea what was going on.”
One of my common sayings as a composer to my composition students is “once a mistake, twice is a theme.” So, it is quite gratifying to come to the second-to-last track of Greatest Hits and find that Guercio didn’t make a mistake with Susan. Or, if he did, it was a mistake he meant to make. Because he did it twice.
Guercio wrote Foreign Policy for the group’s 1967 album Time and Change, where it was the last song on the album. The anti-war message is not subtle. (This is the song that led to putting a mushroom cloud on what is otherwise a rather mundane cover. Kudos to the design team for having the guts to combine visually two things that seem to have very little to do with each other, therefore matching the effect of these two songs.) This time, the mid-song sound jumble even includes a John F. Kennedy speech cut into it. The lyrics are sparse, but pointed, ending with this Hunger Games-like statement:
With no thoughts of all the people down the street
Thinking only, “We must win.”
The song can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWHRxQ7KJYs.
At least Foreign Policy is unusual for a pop record from the beginning, starting with flute and then horns. Thus, it is not nearly as bizarre as Susan because in Foreign Policy we’re at least somewhat prepared for the weirdness when it comes. But these two cuts show the dangers of a producer and an artist who are beyond being on different pages, but appear to be reading different books, possible in different languages.
Reportedly, the Buckinghams and Guercio parted ways due to these kinds of creative differences. Or maybe it was due publishing rights and money (this according to Giammarese). The group’s last album, In One Ear and Gone Tomorrow (technically the last album until a reunion in the ‘80s) resulted in no hits, but it wasn't surprising. They no longer had Guercio's hit making skills, and Columbia Records didn't really back the record - they bascially dropped the ‘Hams after the 'Hams dropped Guercio.
Sometimes I’d like to live in a world suggested by the hits of The Buckinghams. They are sunny. They are innocent. They are catchy and invite you to sing along. But the real world is perhaps a lot closer to Susan, which promises to be sunny, innocent, and catchy, but then hits you in the back of the head, when you aren’t looking and least expect it, with a modernist, atonal, backwards-tape sound collage. Wham!