The Candy Ass Charisma of the Archies
by David Smay

You can sneer at Britney, scorn Christina, mock 'N Sync, and snicker quite openly at Backstreet Boys but you don't mess with the Archies—not unless you want to wind up at the bottom of a lemonade vat with a pair of sticky pink boots. The Archies are the crème de la creampuff. Through the brief aperture of their existence, the Archies focus the entire history of rock into a laser beam of scintillant pop, refracting out through the spectrum of all musics, ushering in feminism, re-establishing diplomatic ties with Red China and bolstering the Consumer Price Index by .0374%. All to a groovy little dance beat. But perhaps I understate their importance.

In 1968, while a batch of hippies blew themselves up in Weatherman labs, a generation of 13-year olds came of age jonesing for a hook. Two men understood this need, this terrible teen craving for a meaty beat slathered sweet. On the East Coast, Neil Bogart reigned as head of Buddah Records, ringing up Top 40 hits like a carnival game, with one Kasenetz-Katz shadow-band supplanting another on the radio. On the West Coast, Don Kirshner sat brooding over his ouster in The Great Monkees Coup, plotting his vendetta carefully. He'd make his own group, and this time he wouldn't make the mistake of using actual humans with their tedious desires for autonomy.

Though seemingly carved out of a solid block of suet, Kirshner had a mind as devious as an untenured English professor at a small state university. He brought on Jeff Barry to head his bubblegum triad. That's Jeff Barry of the songwriting credit Barry-Greenwich ("Be My Baby," "Da Doo Ron Ron," "Leader of the Pack")—a musician whose influence in rock and roll is more pervasive than herpes (and whose songs are twice as catchy). Cast Andy Kim as the second-in-command, the grooviest Lebanese popstar to ever write two number one hits. And singing lead for the Archies, Ron Dante, a man so talented that chart-topping singer is only the fifth most successful career on his resume. Toni Wine ably abetted the Archie core, giving voice to Veronica and Betty and sending ecstatic shivers down the spine of many a listener.

These were professional hitmakers, my friend, not some pimply-assed pack of garage rockers. They had one job and one job only: create the absolutely irresistible pop song. Again and again and again. Together the Archies isolated the genetic strand of the perfect pop hit and replicated it like a honey-dipped virus. This pop genome worked its way deep into your brain, beneath the higher functions of the cerebral cortex, burrowing down into the primitive lizard brain which craves only sex, junk food and the pure cane syrup of pop music boiled down to 7 inches of black vinyl spinning at 45 revolutions per minute.

And yet, for all their clinical pop competence no band so perfectly evokes the happy hippy daydream of 1969 than the Archies. No San Francisco band ever came close to the Archies’ suburbatopian vision of picnic blanket sex in a grassy park, radiantly sunlit in an afterglow of everlasting sweetness. At least, that's the way it sounded to kids at the end of the sixties. A generation too young to care about Altamont heard the Archies, latched onto the sugartit of late-American capitalism and got a buzz that would last a decade. Other bands promised a revolution, but the Archies saw the future, and it looked a lot like the Seventies.

The first Archies single, "Bang Shang-A-Lang," skimmed into the charts at #22 in 1968, roughly a year after Kirshner got the boot as the Monkees’ puppetmaster, and coincident with the Monkees slow fade from the charts. You don't need a protractor to draw a line from "Da Doo Ron Ron" to "Bang Shang A Lang." Lyrically, the Archies pick up where Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich left the Ronettes, spinning self-conscious teen mumbles into a poetry of giddy do wah diddy ron ron. The main difference being that the Ronettes sang with voracious yearning and the Archies sing from exultant satiation. That being the difference, of course, between Top 40 before The Pill and after The Pill.

The songs Jeff Barry and Andy Kim wrote for the Archies park themselves squarely in Freud's Oral Phase where lickin' is lovin' and there's not much distinction between candy corn and cunnilingus. In this infantile orality all the pleasures of the world enter through the mouth: sex, candy and "slices of sunshine" (the inevitable oblique drug reference from "Sugar and Spice"). Still, this is not the famously fellated songbook of Kasenetz-Katz ("Chewy chewy chew me out of my mind"). Due to Andy Kim's enlightened loverman lyrics, Archies songs are surprisingly girl friendly and rife with early morning pillow talk (like the giggly-lewd spoken intro to "Who's Your Baby"). The Barry-Kim songbook never suffers from the sadness of a swinger stranded on a Saturday night, so common in Boyce & Hart's records which "trail off into hopelessness and disconnection." (Kim Cooper, editrix and B&H chronicler). In "Jingle Jangle," Veronica boldly invites Archie to "Sing me, sing me baby" and put his mouth where her moneymaker is. Sung as a duet: [him] “so darling don't be weeping/ and please don't be a' sleeping / when I come a' creepin' down the hall / to sing you [her] sing me sing me, baby (groaning).” This is bubblegum that Erica Jong could sink her teeth into.

Sonically, the Archies lacked the oomph of Spector's Wall of Sound, but neatly rip off the bubbling bottom from Motown and the joyous vocal surge of the Beatles. Chuck Rainey laid more hooks in the bassline than anyone this side of James Jamerson. And the drummer on "Sugar and Spice" (Buddy Saltzman? Gary Chester?) commits some of the most savage cymbal abuse since Keith Moon demolished "I Can See For Miles." Cotton candy harmonies spun out over a bassline chewier than Red Vines, a rock candy beat, and Veronica's organ spread like a thin layer of marzipan holding it all together: Is that rock and roll? "The basic bubblegum sound could be described as the basic sound of rock and roll—minus the rage, fear, violence and anomie that runs from Johnny Burnette to Sid Vicious." (Lester Bangs, "Bubblegum," The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll, 2nd edition). By Lester's definition, three-fourths of the bands that ever came out of Scotland are bubblegum.

Consider Jeff Barry's credentials as the one true Messiah of Gum: he co-wrote "Hanky Panky," for Tommy James in 1966; he produced "I'm A Believer," for the Monkees in 1967; he co-wrote and produced "Sugar Sugar," the biggest selling single for all of 1969 in both the U.S. and the U.K.; and he co-wrote "Da Doo Ron Ron" which was Shaun Cassidy's only hit. And those are just the Number One Hits.

Jeff Barry is nothing less than The Omnipresence of Pop. Pick the hardest band imaginable, the very antithesis of bubblegum as you know it and we'll play a quick round of Six Degrees of Jeff Barry.

Archies to the Melvins: Jeff Barry co-wrote "Sugar Sugar" for the Archies; which was covered by Mary Lou Lord; who famously gave Kurt Cobain a blow job; Kurt produced the Melvins. (From Kurt it's only two bed-hops to Nine Inch Nails. In fact, Courtney's underwear is second only to Hal Blaine's drumming as a hub for making musical connections.)

Archies to Einstürzende Neubauten: Jeff co-wrote "I Can Hear Music" covered by the Beach Boys; Glen Campbell played with Beach Boys; Glenn had a hit with "Wichita Lineman;" Nick Cave covered "Wichita Lineman;" Blixa Bargeld played with Nick and Einstürzende Neubauten. (One more hop from the Bad Seeds gets you to the Gun Club or the Cramps.)

Archies to Public Enemy: Shangri-Las record Jeff & Ellie's "Leader of the Pack;" Shadow Morton produces Shangri-Las; Shadow produces second NY Dolls album; Sonic Youth covers "Personality Crisis;" Chuck D. guests on Sonic Youth's "Kool Thing."

(If you want to continue playing you can easily hook Jeff Barry up to Miles Davis, Merle Haggard, or Run-DMC in less than five jumps.)

In 1969 Ron Dante hit number one with "Sugar Sugar" and simultaneously sang lead on the Cuff Links hit "Tracy" (#9 on the charts). For most people, having two songs in the Top 10 at the same time would be a career peak, but most people are not Ron Dante. After the Archies, Ron hooked up with a jingles writer and now he owns one tiny corner of your brain: they wrote "You Deserve a Break Today" for McDonald's. Then he produced that jingle writer's first eight gold albums—Barry Manilow. Then, straining all credulity, I came upon this fact: "In 1971 [Ron Dante] became publisher of the literary magazine The Paris Review." (The New Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll, 1995.) That's right, two years after "Sugar, Sugar" Ron Dante was publishing Gide, Foucault and Susan Sontag. Itching for new challenges, Ron decided to bankroll Broadway shows (a quick way to lose your life savings): "Children of a Lesser God," "Whose Life Is It Anyway" and "Ain't Misbehavin'."

Paradoxically (considering his successful solo career), Andy Kim remains the most enigmatic of the Great Pop Troika, a pseudonym, wrapped in a stage-name, within a missing ethnicity. In one of the kookier double-blind show biz switches, Andy Kim obscured his Hispanic roots by changing his name from Andrew Joachim. Except, he didn't have Hispanic roots. He was born Andre Youakim in Montreal and he was Lebanese. Clearly a complex man with many layers, Andy now performs under the name Baron Longfellow. No, not as a porn star. Think of a cross between Tom Jones and Neil Diamond and you'll grasp Andy's current incarnation. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Jeff Barry groomed Andy Kim for stardom concurrently with the Archies. Through 1969 and 1970, Jeff and Andy wrote the majority of material for the first three Archies albums, the last Monkees album, Changes, and put out five Andy Kim albums on Jeff's own Steed Records. One imagines them screeching into a Sunset Boulevard boutique parking lot, snatching up a pair of multi-stripe hip-huggers and a realllly wide leather watch band, shooting the gate-fold photos for Rainbow Ride and racing back to the studio for their third session of the day. When you write nine albums worth of material in two years you've got to have a system. The Archies formula was to cook the sixties down to one sticky popcorn ball: Brill Building songcraft, girl group innocence, Beach Boy harmonies, a touch of folky jangle, Motown handclaps, a dollop of psych.

While the pop cognoscenti track down obscure Hudson Brothers records, Emitt Rhodes longplayers or Michael Brown's work with Stories, Andy Kim's early solo career molders in the "K" bin. And that's shameful, because Andy's turn-of-the-decade work outshines his peers in hooks, production, danceability and mild bouts of loopiness. Almost any cut off Rainbow Ride or How'd We Ever Get This Way would enhance a Poptopian band's setlist. Andy's early solo records on Steed feature Jeff Barry's distinctive production touches like the ringing, son-of-"Last Train to Clarksville" guitar figure on "Rainbow Ride," the psychedelic drench of "When You're Young," the rack of exotic rhythm instruments on "How'd We Ever Get This Way," and the infectious Bubble-Gospel of "Love That Little Woman" (a favored genre they also exploited on the Archies classic "Get On The Line"). Andy's tender lyrics reach a goofy political pinnacle on "Tricia Tell Your Daddy"—a protest song addressed to Tricia Nixon. To achieve the desired teen-idol/castrati effect, they tape-manipulated Andy's voice up to a higher pitch (a fate which David Cassidy also suffered). His natural range can be heard in the gruff, Neil Diamond-like growl he affects on his proto-Disco smash, "Rock Me Gently."

Ritchie Adams produced the fourth and last Archies album, This is Love—a labored and self-conscious effort, lacking the effervescent charm of its predecessors. The Barkan-Adams songs try too hard to whip up some kinderpop vibe and miss the distracted artistry of the Barry-Kim songs. Jeff and Andy rarely wasted more than 32 seconds on a set of Archies lyrics, content to slip a few subversive lines to the kids, and going back to work on one of Andy's solo records. Perhaps I’m too hard on Barkan-Adams songbook; they bop along beautifully and sport some of the weirder subtexts in the Archies catalog. One Barkan-Adams song bears particular note, "My Little Green Jacket." Ostensibly a tune about a stud donning his chick-magnet wardrobe, the song reveals more than this ladies-man intends” I reach into my closet/ and slip my secret on/ I sashay out the door..." Closet? Secret? Sashay?

It's clear in retrospect that the Archies caused the ‘70s. While other musicians drifted across the airwaves with the flicker of public taste, the Archies ran on TV every Saturday morning from 1968 to 1978. The effect was profound. The Archies molded the taste of a whole generation of pre-teens before their runny little brains had a chance to gel. Not only did it infect these kids with the pure, viral distillate of Pop, it taught them to presume instant gratification as their birthright: Glam, Disco, Cocaine, Inflation, Rapacious Sexual Indiscretion, and Flaky Enlightenment followed inevitably.