Kasenetz-Katz and Their Super-Duper Rock & Roll Kavalcade
by James Porter

Of all the revered record producers with a hitmaking streak and an identifiable sound, the Kasenetz-Katz duo has to be among the most underrated. Garage freaks worship at the altar of Ed Cobb (Standells, Chocolate Watchband), Ken Nelson (Buck Owens, Wanda Jackson) is a big name with the retro-country set, the outer-space sonatas of Joe Meek (Blue Men, Tornadoes) have a strong cult, and Phil Spector is probably the only non-performing producer who has his own section in record stores. But even though Jerry Kasenetz and Jeff Katz produced their share of radio-active hits in '68-'69, most rock historians regard them as a footnote. In The New Book Of Rock Lists by Dave Marsh and James Bernard, producers as diverse as Lee “Scratch” Perry, Dr. Dre, and Giorgio Moroder are celebrated (“Best Producers”), yet K-K are summed up elsewhere (“Ten Famous Bubblegum Groups”). While admitting that the genre of music “spawned some of the most ludicrous, if occasionally transcendent, trash produced in the rock and roll age,” Marsh acknowledges K-K as “the cream of the crop, but that doesn't mean a lot.”

End of story. Roll credits. Finito. Okay, some of the original LPs that K-K produced are a chore to sit through (they make “greatest hits” albums for a reason). But even though Marsh is an occasionally brilliant writer (see his book about the song “Louie, Louie,” or his early ‘70s writings in Creem magazine), the man seemingly can't write an article without working Bruce Springsteen or Michael Jackson into the story. Still, considering that all the Hendrix worshippers thought the Ohio Express and 1910 Fruitgum Co. (K-K's two big cash cows) set the rock movement back a million years, Kasenetz and Katz took full advantage of their success to experiment, mostly on flipsides and album cuts. It was partially for shits and giggles, but mostly to make sure DJs played the right side of the single. “In analyzing previous years on records,” the K&K duo now says, “we noticed that there were a lot of records where there were like two-sided hits, and we know that hits are hard to come by and we didn't wanna put two sides on a single, so we wanted to put something on we knew that nobody would play. The funny thing is that people actually played it! We just wanted to make sure that there wasn't gonna be a two-sided hit.”

One of the greatest rock b-sides ever was “Zig Zag,” which played second fiddle to the Ohio Express' “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy.” They basically took the backing track to “Poor Old Mr. Jensen” (a song recorded by several in the K-K stable), ran it through the tape player backwards, and gave it a title. And it sounds better like this—personally, I've probably spun “Zig Zag” more times than “Yummy.” Forwards, it's a blah little number that K-K used for flip-side and album-cut filler, but in reverse, minus the vocals, the eerie organ-dominated melody actually stands on its own.

Lord knows what kind of audience Kasenetz and Katz had in mind for “There Ain't No Umbopo” b/w “Landrover,” a 1970 single by Crazy Elephant on Bell, and it's just as well (it wasn't a hit, anyway). “Landrover,” a filler instrumental, sounds like the pit band from The Tonight Show trying to do a Motown song (badly). As for the other side, well, according to Webster's New World Dictionary, there sure ain't no “umbopo,” or else I'd tell you what that word means. The producers themselves asked Graham Gouldman, then a writer in the K-K stable, the same question—Gouldman just liked the sound of the nonsense syllables. The song proper isn't that remarkable, but the vague words appear to be narrating a suicide (“he said goodbye to the world on his short-wave radio”).

“Up Against The Wall,” a cut from the Ohio Express' Mercy album, is probably the only bubblegum song about a police riot. And what is the deal with that song about Ronald Reagan (“Up In The Air,” which Kasenetz & Katz call a “spoof”) that appeared on the Kasenetz-Katz Circus' debut album, back in 1968? “A man who has so much hair/ a man who is not all there/ a man who just loves the chair”— I think they meant “electric,” not “rocking” or “easy”—and at least one band unearthed this during Reagan's presidency (Tru Fax and the Insomniacs, a Washington, D.C. punk outfit). Bizarre tangents like these made them even more subversive than any old blues-jamming hippie from the Bay Area, and to only associate Kasenetz and Katz with a bunch of near-novelties that 12-year-olds bought like biscuits is only telling part of the story.

That story started when K&K were college students at the University of Arizona, where Katz was on the football team and Kasenetz was one of the managers. After graduation, they began managing bands. As Katz recollected in Goldmine recently, “We had this black group, King Ernest and the Palace Guards, and they were sensational. We got 'em signed to Mercury, and I don't remember who did the record, a single, and we heard the record—it was terrible. And we said, ‘We could do better than that.’ And that's actually how we got into producing.” The early K-K productions, in '67, were right in line with the garage-rock sound, which had about a year to go. “Little Bit O’ Soul” by the Music Explosion (on Laurie) hit #2, and the Ohio Express' “Beg, Borrow and Steal” (on Cameo, actually recorded by the Rare Breed and previously issued on the Attack label) also made the Top 40 that year. Both of these songs sonically sounded like the band was set up in the basement while the microphone was on the stairs leading down. The lo-fi technology evidently didn't hurt sales and airplay any. The Music Explosion disc is still an oldies radio staple today, and “Beg, Borrow and Steal” is a great “Louie, Louie” rewrite.

The duo stumbled onto the bubblegum tag in the early part of '68, when they discovered a band known at various times as the Lower Road, the Odyssey, and Jeckell and the Hydes (named after guitarist Frank Jeckell). K-K saw them at a house party and liked the band enough to sign them, providing they change their name to 1910 Fruitgum Co. No problem. A few months later, the organ-heavy “Simon Says” (#4), and the sound-alike follow-up, “May I Take A Giant Step (Into Your Heart)” (#63) rushed the charts. Around this same time, the Ohio Express shot to #4 with “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy,” a song that was originally written for Jay and the Techniques but rejected by their producer Jerry Ross for being too young-sounding (for the band that gave us “Apples, Peaches, Pumpkin Pie”?!?). Other acts in the K-K stable had the one hit and the mildly-selling follow-up, but these two proved to be the longest lasting. Joey Levine was brought in to sing lead on several Ohio Express tracks. His hard, nasal voice was one way you could distinguish them from the Fruitgums. Another is the fact that the Fruitgum album cuts were more childish, just a heartbeat away from being out-and-out nursery rhymes. Both groups’ material had just enough of a garage-rock edge to get by, but it seemed as if the more juvenile rejects appeared on the Fruitgum albums. The Simon Says LP included “The Story Of Flipper,” about the TV dolphin (maybe their answer to “Snoopy Vs. The Red Baron” by the Royal Guardsmen?), and when they sing “Let's Make Love” (from the Indian Giver album), there is a distinct lack of moisture, passion or drama—the vocalist sounds like he's asking his lover to play board games. But the singles were a whole ‘nother neighborhood—“Indian Giver” (later covered by the Ramones and Joan Jett), “1-2-3 Red Light,” and “Special Delivery” (MVP Award: the bass player) deserved their Top 40 status. “Goody Goody Gumdrops,” another chartmaker, included the hilarious line “look into her baby-blue eyes/ right down to her dainty shoe size...”

The two bands ran parallel to each other in eerie ways. The Ohio Express started out as typical post-Beatles garage-rockers, as documented on most of their self-titled Buddah debut (the one with “Yummy”) and all of their Cameo album, Beg, Borrow And Steal. By 1970 they had more or less devolved into faceless bubble rockers. The 1910 gang, meanwhile, started out childish and wound up “progressive.” They padded four full albums with songs that took off from playground games and other kiddie koncepts, but after a year of this “kiddie-a-go-go” music, the band decides they want to be Taken Seriously As Artists, so they added a few members to the existing lineup and cut album #5, Hard Ride. (By now, the 1910 bunch were purely a studio creation; all the promo pix from this era feature eight members, but the back cover lineup lists six musicians different from the ones credited earlier. Although K&K insist that Mark Gutkowski was the only member who stayed with the group through all its phases, he is not listed on the back cover credits.) “Don't Have To Run and Hide” and “The Train,” the token “commercial” songs, began and ended, respectively, the first side. Apart from that, it's a vain attempt to impress the college crowd: all the songs, even the two bubblegum tracks, are smothered in a jazz-rock horn section, with obscure lyrics and nary a recognizable melody line to be found. “Eulogy/ Seulb” is a corny attempt at white-boy blues. “In The Beginning/ The Thing” bears more than a passing resemblance to Pink Floyd during their Syd Barrett days. If you're into albums by teen-idol types trying to go progressive, like the metallic thud of the Osmonds' Crazy Horses, Shaun Cassidy's flirtation with new wave (Wasp), or Bobby Darin's folk-rock LPs on the Direction label, you need to dig up a copy of Hard Ride. Just look for the cover with the motorcycle gang posing on the front.

Kasenetz and Katz claim today that on the strength of this weird album the band almost got booked into the Fillmore East, name unknown and sight unseen—until the legendary rock haven found out who it was. “I forget who it was that we saw,” reminisces the duo, “but we saw somebody. We were talkin' to 'em without even playing anything, 'we'd like to get the Fruitgum in here.' He laughed, he says 'the Fruitgum Co.? It's impossible. They'll laugh me out of business.' 'Well, here's a new group, let me play you this album.' We had a test pressing of it, and we played it. He says 'now this group definitely I could take in here, they'll love this group.' I said, 'well, I don't know how to tell you this—but this is The 1910 Fruitgum Co!” They now laugh. “He says, 'no way!' I said, 'yes, this is the test pressing.' He says, 'listen, call it something else—I still can't put 'em in with that name! Even though I love it—this is great, this is what we're lookin' for, but it can't be the Fruitgum Co!' We were just tryin' to get them in a more favorable light from what they wanted to do. We were not thrilled about it, because I didn't think, personnel-wise, that they could pull it off.” They fooled the talent booker at the most prestigious rock venue in town for a hot minute, so they must have done something half-right.

Similar stories have circulated—Silver Apples, the avant-garde synth duo, reportedly opened a Fruitgum show (the Apples bombed). Another tale has the Fruitgums opening a show at the Whisky A Go-Go in L.A. for the Illinois Speed Press and Slim Harpo, the Louisiana bluesman. But possibly because they were squarely in the middle of the road, no one in the industry expected much from Kasenetz and Katz, so with minimal pressure, they explored any direction they chose. Their greatest strength was tapping into the trashy teenage pulse of America, and their main gig was putting the fun back in rock & roll when others used it as a political platform. Singles like the Great Train Robbery's “Wasted” (flip of “Heartless Hurdy Gertie,” on the ABC label), “You Got The Love” by Professor Morrison's Lollipop (on White Whale), “Live and In Person” (a medley of “Land of 1000 Dances,” “Gimme Some Lovin',” and “Satisfaction”) by the Carnaby Street Runners (Buddah), and “Captain Groovy and His Bubblegum Army” (by the artists of the same name, on the duo's own Super K label) all sound like lapsed, anachronistic garage records, too late for the trend, but far too early for the revival. Eventually the K-K stable became a clearing house for garage bands who’d outlived their era. The Ohio Express and the Music Explosion were prime examples, and the Shadows of Knight and Question Mark and the Mysterians were not far behind. The Shadows' self-titled LP on the Super K label is probably one of the most underrated rock albums ever. Garage purists hate the metallic edge the band took around this time, but if you like the hard-rock sound of Blue Cheer or Sir Lord Baltimore, this album is right in line with those skull-crushers. The singles were more catchy and commercial, but not enough to wreck their punk credentials. The best-known was 1968's “Shake”, which made it up to #46 on Billboard's singles chart. It's a lot more keyboardy than the Shadows' usual output, but every bit as evil as their earlier Dunwich-label records. (Consumer note: “Shake” was redone on the Super K album, and the raw result—retitled “Shake Revisited '69”—sounds suspiciously like a demo. The hit version from the single somehow wound up on The Very Best Of The Ohio Express, on Buddah.)

Just before their stint with Super K, Question Mark and the Mysterians were in the middle of a nasty dispute with Cameo, their previous label. In the early sixties Cameo (and brother label Parkway) was in the middle of a golden age, milking Chubby Checker, Bobby Rydell, and other Philadelphia teen/dance stars for all they were worth. After the Beatles came along in '64, rendering the Cameo-Parkway empire passé, the company floundered around for a while before rebounding in '66 with “96 Tears,” a #1 hit for the Mysterians, a group of Chicanos based in Flint, Michigan. By '67, the Mysterians were considered as expendable as the twistmasters they replaced. Cameo had tied the band up in a nightmarish contract, refusing to promote their records. Label prez Neil Bogart, who later headed the Buddah, Casablanca and Boardwalk imprints, acted like a sixth member of the band, forcing organist Frank Rodriguez to repeat his “96 Tears” riff on all their songs. In the blunt words of Question Mark himself, Cameo “screwed” (“I don't cuss, but I use that word, and even to me that's cussin’”) the band in the worst way. Kasenetz & Katz had nothing to do with the Mysterians' final single for the label, “Do Something To Me” (later re-recorded by Tommy James and the Shondells), although they produced several records for Cameo at this time. In any event, the band unwittingly pioneered the basic bubblegum style—Morse-code organ, stuttering bass—on this record. Cameo folded soon after this ill-fated disc, and like several other artists on that label (including the Ohio Express, Five Stairsteps, and, later, Chubby Checker), they later popped up on Buddah for an additional single on the Buddah-distributed Super K. Unlike the hard-rocking Shadows, who were pretty much left alone, the Mysterians' “Sha La La” seven-inch (built around the recurring guitar riff from the Beatles' “You Can't Do That”) was full-blast bubblerock, straight off the K-K assembly line. After you get over that fact, this 1969 single is a good record in spite of itself. The Ohio Express redid “Sha La La” on their Mercy album, just barely—Joey Levine dubbed his voice over the same backing track—but Question Mark's version remains superior. The flip side, “Hang In,” is a moody, uptempo instrumental that vaguely recalls “Going All The Way,” the 1966 cult-classic by garage-rockers the Squires.

For their part, Kasenetz & Katz have some interesting memories of Question Mark. “Uhhh...he was a little strange at times... the funny thing is, he was actually no Prince, talent-wise, but looking back now, I'd say in weirdness both artists had a lot in common,” they now laugh. “Nowadays, looking back, you know for some strange reason, I don't know particularly if it's the glasses he wore or what, but he reminded me of Prince.” Today, Question Mark likes to remind everybody how he pioneered much of Prince's shtick, so he'd probably be happy that someone else finally got the point. (For the record, K&K referred to Question Mark as “Rudy,” his given name, making them among the few people who do!)

Beyond the heavy hitters, there were several lesser lights in the K-K stable. Robust-voiced Bobby Bloom recorded a few singles in a blue-eyed-soul vein, and when Bloom himself moved to another label (L&R, a subsidiary of MGM) and had a hit (“Montego Bay,” 1970, #8), Buddah reissued the Kasenetz-Katz sessions on an album cashing in on Bloom's short-lived fame. Crazy Elephant, on the Bell label, were another in the long line of faceless K-K studio musicians; a news item in Cashbox said they were Welsh coalminers, but when the needle hits the vinyl, none of that matters. The anarchic, giddy “Gimme Gimme Good Lovin',” #12 on the pop charts in 1969, was Crazy Elephant's only hit and, in my modest opinion, K-K's finest moment. This disc is a head-on rock-n-soul collision from start to fade—the vocal chorus that shouts “gimme, gimme good lovin' every night!” sounds like a group of happy-hour drunks. That hillbilly guffaw (“ha-huh-ha-huh-ha...”), at the end of each chorus, makes it tuff to stay in a bad mood for long. Lead singer Robert Spencer (a former doo-wopper with the Cadillacs, in addition to being the author of Millie Small's ska hit, “My Boy Lollipop”) hollers like a man with a week-old erection. And you should hear that wolf-howl he does at the end of the inept, fumble-fingered guitar solo. The lyrical demands are all in the title: “Gimme Gimme Good Lovin’.” None of that Tyrone Davis “pretty please” shit! This is clearly a feel-good number, the type of song that makes you do sixty in a forty-five zone. The b-side was a bizarre psychedelic tune that featured fuzztone by the gallon, and a monotone voice muttering something about “The Dark Part Of My Mind.” An album, which today is very hard to find (unlike most of the Buddah albums), wasn't long in coming, along with the expected follow-ups. Spencer's harsh vocals appear to be a one-off, as he's not featured on “Gimme Some More,” an attempt to cash in on their big moment. It's a good song in its own right, but the even-tempered “white” vocals are just going through the motions, compared to Spencer's slobbering R&B fervor.

Other K-K studio aggregations followed, like Captain Groovy and His Bubblegum Army. Their answer to producer Don Kirshner's success with the Archies, this proposed animated series never materialized—the cartoon kings at Hanna-Barbera wanted to take a full 50% share of the project, so it never really got past the drawing board, a series of “coming soon!” ads in the trade 'zine Cashbox, and a single that some sixties punk collectors swear by. Their main biggie, waiting in the wings to happen, was the Kasenetz-Katz Singing Orchestral Circus (hereafter referred to as the K-K Circus). In June 1968, Buddah Records booked Carnegie Hall in New York to showcase seven bands from the K-K stable. Playing simultaneously. (Reportedly it was eight bands, but since the missing link was the non-existent St. Louis Invisible Marching Band...) Potentially this could have backfired, but K&K spent a long time in the woodshed getting it right. The K-K Circus was scheduled to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show, but presidential candidate Robert Kennedy died around the same time. That Sunday, Sullivan's program was reportedly preempted for a Kennedy retrospective, and K-K never got rescheduled. For those keeping score, that's two American dreams killed with one bullet. It didn't stop the K-K Circus' overall momentum, as they went on to have a hit that year with “Quick Joey Small” (#25 in the charts).

The K-K empire also had some measure of success in the European market, where promotional videos had already started to catch on. The duo made a number of clips with their acts, including “Quick Joey Small.” Kasenetz & Katz animatedly recall the plot synopsis: “We had these little wooden toy dolls being pulled—you couldn't see it being pulled in the front—by a string, and people holding on to it like they were chasing Quick Joey Small, running through a barn... I mean really way-out things—just like you see on videos today.” K&K still have a few of these films in their archives —Rhino or some other hip video manufacturer should lease these for reissue.

The K-K Circus lineup, in addition to the invisible marching band, had the Fruitgums and the Express prominently featured. The Music Explosion were dusted off, even though they were chart-cold and hitless for a year. The Teri Nelson Group were originally an all-black female vocal outfit who did an unremarkable soul album for Kama Sutra the year before; by now they were Nelson plus an all-white backing band (five male, one female), curiously photographed separately. Lt. Garcia's Magic Music Box, who also had a mediocre Kama Sutra album in '67, were resurrected for the gig. The J.C.W. Rat Finks and the 1989 Musical Marching Zoo completed the set. The self-titled original cast album that resulted has to be one of the greatest long-playing fiascoes committed to wax. Half the songs have dubbed-in crowd noise to simulate the Carnegie Hall gig. At the top of side two, the Music Explosion's Jamie Lyons dedicates the next three songs to the guys who the band was named after; we then hear “Little Bit O’ Soul”, “Simon Says”, and “Latin Shake” (originally recorded by Lt. Garcia). They didn't even bother to re-record the songs—these are the original versions with phony crowd noises added. They even had a bunch of people singing and clapping along, to fool some middle-schooler into thinking he or she missed the concert of the century! Elsewhere on the disc, Count Dracula does a 1:39 monologue, they cover two Beatles songs, remove the blue-eyed you-know-what from the Righteous Bros.' “You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling,” give the Beach Boys treatment to Stevie Wonder's “A Place In The Sun,” and five songwriters in the K-K stable have the nuts to take writer's credits for the inept version of “Hey Joe!” And to signify that the show is over, we hear a horn section playing “Taps,” followed by flying-saucer noises! The fold-out cover, featuring the outlandishly-dressed K-K Circus standing in an auto junkyard, is a camp classic. According to Kasenetz and Katz, this was done on the set of one of the video shoots. Look closely—-you can just make out Kasenetz and Katz in tuxedos.

This was followed by the stripped-down Kasenetz-Katz Super Circus. This album contained an actual hit, “Quick Joey Small,” and the liner notes tell us that the involved parties were now the Fruitgums, the Express, the Music Explosion, the Shadows of Knight, and Prof. Morrison's Lollipop, “joined together in the world's first all-rock orchestra.” All the excesses have been trimmed, but it's still rather eccentric around the edges. The aforementioned Ronald Reagan tribute appears here, as does “The Super Circus,” which is nothing but whoops, hollers, and jungle drums. Musically, this is probably one of the more consistent K-K albums. Joey Levine does all the leads, although the K-K stable was so interchangeable that “Down At Lulu's” was a hit for the Ohio Express, in the same version heard on this album. For “Shake,” the Shadows' near-hit, Levine removed Jim Sohns' vocal track and added his own. Songs like “I Got It Bad For You,” “Easy To Love,” and “I'm In Love With You” represented the bubble-rock genre at its best—just commercial enough for the teenies, but with a solid hard-rock center and a throbbing bass pulse. This is more than I can say for the overrated Archies, who emphasized the lighter, poppier side. Guilty pleasure, this ain't—just a consistent rock LP that stands up to repeated listenings. But the geeky cover art doesn't stand up to repeated lookings—Professor Morrison's Lollipop, as well as one member of the Ohio Express, are drawn in the style ripped off from Mad magazine's Don Martin. Alfred E. Neuman is shown holding a balloon advertising 1910 Fruitgum Co., a slim Johnny Cash is around for no apparent reason (he looks more like Billy Lee Riley), Jerry Kasenetz is drawn wearing a superhero outfit that says Super K, and Jeff Katz is depicted as a ticket-taker for the circus. Buddah must have really liked this uncredited artist, or he worked cheaply, as his “Draw Tippy” artwork also graces the cover of the Fruitgums' Goody Goody Gumdrops.

K-K were on such a hot streak that they even ventured into soul music, on and off, like with Teri Nelson's album, or “Slide,” a pretty good Archie Bell-styled dance number by Howard Johnson on the Shout label. Freddie Scott was an R&B mainstay, in the tradition of Ben E. King or (especially) Chuck Jackson. Scott's velvet pipes fired up hit singles like “Are You Lonely For Me” (1966) and “Hey Girl” (1963). “Loving You Is Killing Me” (Shout) was written by Bo Gentry and Bobby Bloom, as “A Product of Kasenetz-Katz Associates, Inc.” It sounds like it—Scott is his usual soulful self, but even for an R&B record, the drums are unusually heavy, and a tremeloed rhythm guitar keeps bossing its way through the arrangement. Even Bo Diddley wandered into the K-K fold for a solitary single, “Bo Diddley 1969” b/w “Soul Train” (Checker). The same heavy drums from the Scott record were present on the top side, and Bo gets a nice call-and-response going with the female backgrounds. The other side was Bo ad libbing over a K-K track that had been used before—you can hear it backwards on “Dom's Frantic Pandemonium,” the flip of “Live and In Person” by the Carnaby Street Runners.

In their '68-'69 heyday, the duo were literally unstoppable. Studios were used continuously, with the end results being farmed out to various labels. Eventually the duo started their own Buddah-distributed companies, Team and Super K, which appeared to release some of the more experimental, less-adolescent material, although they dabbled in pop, too. The Beeds' single on Team has a lead vocalist who sounds exactly like Ronnie Spector (calm down, Spectormaniacs, it's not). Wahonka was a singer-songwriter in the K-K stable with that beefy voice common in post-Woodstock rock (think Rare Earth, David Clayton-Thomas in Blood, Sweat and Tears, or Jim Peterik with the Ides of March). Although the liner notes and the front cover (a serious, double-exposure photo of long-haired, mustachioed Wahonka bathed in psychedelic lights) to his self-titled Super K album make him sound like a sensitive, introspective Singer of Sad Songs and Teller of Truths, he's essentially singing the same old bubblepop hash that K-K is famous for. (It's still a good listen—“There Was A Time,” not to be confused with the James Brown showstopper, could be a snarling, garage-punk tune if they beefed up the guitars.) Some of K-K's more offbeat psychedelic stuff ended up on these two labels, and they even found time to do a third K-K Circus album, Classical Smoke, where they attempt the world's only classical-bubblegum fusion.

Mention should be made of K-K's apparent Beach Boys obsession. Several songs from the Kasenetz-Katz stable have those high-pitched oo-wee-oo-oo background vocals that made the Beach Boys what they are. Today, Kasenetz & Katz insist there was no covert Brian Wilson agenda—the K-K background vocalists would just fall in that groove when they felt the song needed it. It's doubly ironic when you consider that in 1970, some wag from Rolling Stone magazine, reviewing “Add Some Music To Your Day” (the Beach Boys' then-new single), said it sounded like “the 1984 Bubblegum Conspiracy.” He did not mean it as a compliment.

It's generally considered that K-K sat out the period between 1971-73, as their recorded activity cooled off during that era, although today they insist that they focused their energies on the European market, working with the band that later became 10cc (Graham Gouldman, Kevin Godley, Lol Creme, and Eric Stewart). At the time, they were ghosting as Silver Fleet (“Sister Honky Tonk”), Crazy Elephant (“There Ain't No Umbopo”), and the Ohio Express (the insanely catchy “Sausalito”). Kasenetz & Katz actually staged a mild comeback between '74 and '78, when no one was looking. Maybe more people would have noticed if they'd had more than one hit (more on that later), but the sixties were over. One-off singles by studio acts were going strong in R&B—that's how the disco movement got started—but in the white rock world they were being phased out by existing bands with albums. By now, bubblegum was the sole province of actors, like Shaun Cassidy and Leif Garrett, hardly the stomping music it was back when 1-2-3 red lights and crazy elephants were rampant.

The one constant about the K-K sound is the close proximity to the punk vibe. In the sixties, songs like “Gimme Gimme Good Lovin’” and “Quick Joey Small” were two steps from being pure Standells-styled garage raunch. In the seventies, K-K's productions sounded like a halfway point between heavy metal (the hard power chords) and what was later called power-pop (the insistent hooklines). Part of the reason for this is that several K-K bands were based in Ohio, which by then was producing a host of glam (Left End) and power-pop (Raspberries, Blue Ash, Circus) bands that somehow made the world safe for punk. According to K&K, Ohio radio was more likely to support local musicians and play their records. You would think that Kasenetz & Katz would have gotten in on the ground floor of punk—many of the New York bands like the Ramones owed a huge debt to K-K's sixties hits—but despite some unissued sessions with Tuff Darts (who went on to record an album for Sire), the duo dismisses the movement as not being “commercial” enough, unlike Ram Jam, K-K's big ‘70s superstars, famous for their heavy metal retooling of “Black Betty,” originally written and performed by Leadbelly.

Kasenetz & Katz pick up the story: “We had a studio in Great Neck, N.Y. that we had built. (Ram Jam guitarist) Bill Bartlett came in one day, and we knew him from the Buddah days when he was with the Lemon Pipers, and he said, 'I have this great record that I did and I want you guys to hear it.' It was just a local thing they had (on their own Starstruck label). Nothing ever happened to it. It got a couple of plays, but nobody ever bought it, and the reason being, when we heard it, I said, this is more of a country-type record... country, rockabilly, whatever you wanna call it, I said, 'this is really not what we're lookin' for,' and I couldn't promote it. I said, 'I think we could redo this and something good could come out in a rock style,' so Bill said 'okay.'”

It soared to #18 on the charts, but it was a rough ride. Apparently, Rev. Jesse Jackson believed it was degrading to black women—the ad for the album featured an African-American model and her pet ram in a ravaged living room (from the ad copy: “It may not actually destroy your living room, but we guarantee it'll mess up your mind”).

“We were getting a lot of calls from black women, saying it was demeaning to them,” the duo remembers. “In Minnesota, at some small radio station, the program director called us and says 'listen, I'm gonna have to pull the “Black Betty” record.' I said, 'why, what's the matter?' He said, 'we're getting all these calls, from ministers and whatnot, saying we shouldn't be playing it, it's demeaning to the black woman.' I said, 'listen, it was written by a black person!' It was a blues thing! I heard the original record (an a capella chain-gang chant), it was slow, and I said (to Bartlett), 'how did you get the idea for doing it the way you did it uptempo?' He said, 'well, we just speeded it up off the record player and it sounded pretty good!' I said (to the Minnesota program director), 'listen, I swear to you, that is the greatest thing that could ever happen—the controversy in the record, and people calling up, this thing is gonna be a hit. I said, if you stick with it for a week, I guarantee and promise you you're gonna have more positive calls than you're gonna have negative calls.' He says, 'you guys have had a lot of hits, I promise you I'll stick with it, but if I don't have a turnaround by next week, I gotta take it off.' I said, 'that's fine, I have no problem with it.’ He called me the next week, he said, 'I have to tell ya, you're Top 10 already. The store can't keep 'em in. They're selling like hotcakes. We're getting all sorts of calls requesting the record.' I said, 'see. there you go.'” And it was all due to K-K's promotion efforts—the hit version was released on Epic, but the label didn't do a thing to help move any records.

The self-titled album that followed wasn't half bad for its genre (stoopid, Grand Funk/ Kiss-styled rock, with hooks you'd swear came from somewhere else but couldn't quite place)—they even covered a Tuff Darts song, “All For the Love of Rock and Roll,” which the Darts originally performed on Atlantic's Live At CBGB's compilation. (The disco remix of “Black Betty” which Epic released as a 12-inch single wasn't too shabby, either.) The follow-up LP, Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Ram, rocked harder, but the songs didn't have any hooks—it was generally the kind of record you can listen to ten consecutive times and not remember a single note. A long, long way from previous K-K blasts like Crazy Elephant, whose notorious one-note guitar solo in “Gimme Gimme Good Lovin'” will stick in the mind for years.

Other prime K-K productions from their hard-rock years included Ohio, Ltd., on the Buddah label, who recorded the incredible “Wham Bam.” Even better was Canyon's “Top Of The World” (on the London-distributed Magna Glide label, and it's not the Carpenters song). This adolescent hard-rocker from 1975 should have been the tune to bring the K-K duo back—the vocalist is confident to the point of sounding downright arrogant, and the singalong fade (“top of the world, la la la la!”) almost sounds like a nasty schoolyard taunt. This would have been a perfect KISS song, and I can easily imagine a place for it on the Dazed and Confused soundtrack. It's easy to visualize some 14-year-old metalheads having an illicit beer in an empty parking lot with this song blaring on somebody's portable radio. This actually made the charts that summer (#98 in Billboard), so maybe, in some parts of the country, they did.

During this time, they even brought back the K-K Circus with “Mama Lu” (Magna Glide), where their ongoing Beach Boys obsession (see “Down At Lulu's” by the Ohio Express, or “Go Away,” an obscure Fruitgum Co. single on Super K) refuses to die. Since Ram Jam had their one-shot, Kasenetz & Katz have been keeping a relatively low profile, producing bands in their New York studio. Every now and then the duo and their stable of acts are remembered, but a full-scale revival hasn't happened yet. When the punk/ new wave movement got rolling, there was the occasional homage. The Cars’ “Just What I Needed” has practically the same guitar intro as “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy,” and reportedly “1-2-3 Red Light” was a part of Talking Heads' club set, before they started making records. Liz Phair's “Whip Smart” (the song, not the whole album) sounds like some lost K-K master of years gone by, and Redd Kross' Third Eye album emulates the double K duo twice: “Bubblegum Factory” was an unmistakable homage, while “Faith Healer” swiped the chorus to the Fruitgums' “Goody Goody Gumdrops.” Material Issue scored a coup by getting Mike Chapman (the Sweet, the Knack, Nick Gilder) to produce them, but Jim Ellison's brilliant pop songs would have been hell on wheels with a Super K production. Going back further in time, the Doors' Jim Morrison was actually promoted as a teen idol for a short period, before his oddball streak became too hard to ignore. The Doors' “Hello I Love You” (1968) sounds like an attempt to snag the bubble set, with it's chunky drumming, repetitive lyrics, and cheap fuzz. Whether intentional or coincidental, all these examples are right in the groove of what K-K were doing.

Kasenetz and Katz own the names to all of their ghost groups, but as with most bands with no standout personalities, occasionally some broke musician will rip them off for their own purposes. There was a fake 1910 Fruitgum Co. playing the revival circuit in 1980, and in an unrelated, more recent incident, Kasenetz and Katz were at the China Club in New York, checking out a local band, when they got the shock of their lives when some joker was impressing a table of friends by claiming he drummed with the Fruitgums. K&K are overhearing his spiel.

Jerry Kasenetz: “He don't look familiar to me!” Jeff Katz: “I don't remember him either. It's been a while, maybe he changed!”

The aging process does strange things to a person, but Jeff Katz, in particular, thought this was stone ridiculous. “I knew right off the bat this guy was not on 'Simon Says'! It was four people, I knew exactly who they were, I still speak to 'em nowadays... I said 'that's unbelievable! Let me introduce myself—I'm Jeff Katz, this is my partner Jerry Kasenetz, we're the ones who produced these guys. I have to tell ya—I don't remember you from Adam!' The guy turned all red, and everybody looked at the guy. I said, 'thank you very much!'“

The musicians had no identity, but the sound has a life all its own.