About This Time 50 Years Ago… It’s The Hits Of May-ish 1975!

The Hottest Hit On The Planet:

On December 1st, 1975, Stuart Derek Alan Leslie Eric Pringle was born to Caroline Pringle, a 17-year-old mother from Oxford, UK.

Like so many other 17-year-old British girls in 1975, Caroline Pringle was an out-and-proud Bay City Rollers fan.

Caroline allowed that when he grew up, Stuart Derek Alan Leslie Eric might wish to shorten his name, but it went without saying that he would base his decision on whomever his favourite Bay City Rollers member was.

The case of Stuart Derek Alan Leslie Eric Pringle is just one example of the countless news headlines following the Bay City Rollers around as they cast their spell over the female half of the teenage population.

Some of those female teenagers would faint at their shows. 250 at one show alone!

Then there was that time they played on an island, in the middle of a lake, in the middle of a racetrack, at Mallory Park.

It wasn’t just the Rollers, though. There was also The Three Degrees, and a Womble (no word on whether it was Uncle Bulgaria.)

The Bay City Rollers were transported to the island by helicopter.

According to one source, they also ran across the racetrack whilst the race – a Formula 3 car race! – was being run. Concerned that the band was about to be smothered by rampaging hordes of teenage girls, the helicopter returned, but it couldn’t land.

But our lads made it to safety in the end. A little bit shaken from the experience, they didn’t end up playing that day. But apparently the Womble did.

The Bay City Rollers were a walking, singing, but usually-not-playing-on-their-records health hazard. A risk to the safety – and quite possibly the sanity – of teenage girls, first in Britain, then throuhout the Commonwealth, and then finally the world:

I was never immediately obvious to the reason for this mayhem.

Even taking into account that two of the boys – Derek on drums, and Alan, on bass – were brothers – a useful tool to have in your boyband arsenal – it’s hard not to look at the Bay City Rollers and not see a goofy looking bunch of lads.

For if I haven’t mentioned it yet – and I have not – the Bay City Rollers were a Scottish band. Other than The Proclaimers, they may have been the most Scottish band of all time.

Soon, every second teenage girl in England was wearing tartan, and anything with tartan on it was automatically repurposed to be Bay City Rollers merchandise. This was presumedly both a financial boon for the boys and a curse.

There are reports of:

And lampshades… some of which may actually have been authorised

But since you could just plop some tartan on anything and be good to go, most Bay City Rollers memorabilia appears to have been made at home. With all those tartan exports, the Scottish economy must’ve been booming.

Despite being the most Scottish band of all time, the Bay City Rollers named themselves after an American city, choosing their name via the time-honoured technique of throwing a dart at a map and seeing where it landed.

The map they used must’ve been pretty detailed, since Bay City does not appear to be a significant town (if it wasn’t called a city, I don’t think anyone would call it a city), even if Madonna was born there.

Now that they had a name, and a look, there was no stopping them.

All the news reports naturally compared the popularity of the Bay City Rollers to Beatlemania, but – judging by the Rollers love for a cartoon version of 1950s American pop culture – the boys may have considered The Beatles as when everything started to go wrong.

For the Bay City Rollers, Western civilization peaked the day that Dion recorded “Runaround Sue.” Which makes it only appropriate that the record that was arguably their biggest hit – “Bye Bye Baby” – had originally been a moderately big hit for The Four Seasons, in which poor Frankie fancies a girl, but – bad news for Frankie – he’s already married. So, he must say goodbye. By Frankie Valli standards this is a mature and responsible response.

As is the case every time that a bunch of pretty boys make a record, rumours spread that they didn’t actually play on it.

Or specifically, that Eric didn’t play the guitar solo. This at least was an improvement over the rumours about their older records, about which people said, none of the Rollers played on them at all.

Those rumours, so it turns out, were true. On their earlier hits, such as “Shang A-Lang,” lead singer Les was the only Roller involved, and he wasn’t allowed to turn up to the studio until the backing track was finished and the studio musicians had packed up and gone home. He never even met them. Here it is, if you can hear it underneath all of the teenage girl carrying-on (“Shang A-Lang” is an 8.)

“Shang A-Lang” was not only a song, it was also the name of their own television show.

The Bay City Rollers needed their own television show, because there were rumours that the BBC was considering not inviting the Bay City Rollers to play on Top Of The Pops, so tired were they of having to deal with hordes of teenage girls jumping on cars and whatnot. “Shang A-Lang” was basically Top Of The Pops with virtually nothing but the Bay City Rollers, their friends, and – when they talked – their unintelligible accents.

Les was pretty new.

“Well, I don’t think that’s a career choice we can offer you right now,” he was told. So he “threw poos in paper towels into the teacher’s lift” in order to get expelled. It did the trick.

“Throwing poos in paper towels” did not exactly fit in with the Bay City Rollers clean-cut image.

How clean-cut were the Bay City Rollers?

Although nobody from the Bay City Rollers played on “Shang A-Lang,” by the time of “Bye Bye Baby” things were beginning to change.

The band was going through the demanding-to-play-on-their-records- phase that all teenybopper bands must go through, getting a new producer in the process. Whereas previously they’d been working with Phil Coulter and Bill Martin aka the guys who wrote “Puppet On A String” for Sandie Shaw, now: They had Phil Wainman:

That transition – from working with Eurovision winners to working with glam rock masterminds – explains a lot of the Bay City Rollers sound. Glam rock fashion at its dumbest fused with bubblegum pop tunesmith, all recorded with the undeniable sense that everybody involved in making the record is having the time of their lives. That no band has ever enjoyed making a record, quite so much before.

Within a year or so, all of this got a bit out of hand.

One of the Rollers – Alan – quit.

The kids pleaded for him to stay, and he did for a while. When he finally got out, they replaced him with an 18-year-old.

Alan probably could have waited it out for a couple more months, because soon it would be all over anyway… bar an American television show called The Krofft Superstar Hour, and –

…look, I’m not gonna lie, I honestly don’t know what’s going on here.

Still, they got their photos taken with H.R. Pufnstuf, so it can’t have been a total loss.

There are less dignified fates for teenybopper acts. But not many.

Hopefully the fate of Stuart Derek Alan Leslie Eric Pringle turned out better.

“Bye Bye Baby” is a 7.

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Meanwhile, in Hard Rock Land…

The members of Kiss certainly looked as though they rock’n’roll’d all night and partied every day.

But… did they?

Well, if by “partying” you mean “taking drugs” – (and just to be clear, “partying” doesn’t necessarily mean “taking drugs:”)

Not really.

Gene Simmons is reputed to have only gotten stoned once, and that was by accident: a waitress was moving through the crowd with a plate of brownies.

Gene apparently really likes brownies. Gene couldn’t understand why anyone would defile a brownie with drugs. Gene ate six or seven brownies (some sources say only three.) I’m sure you can guess what happened next.

That Gene otherwise never touched drugs is particularly impressive given that Kiss were signed to Casablanca Records:

A record label run by a guy who changed his name from Neil Bogatz to Neil Bogart:

He got away with all of this because Warner Brothers owned the intellectual property to both – a company whose biggest cost may have their cocaine bill.

In addition to Kiss, Casablanca also signed Funkadelic.

Kiss and Funkadelic were, what with the outfits and the levitating drums, and – and in the case of Funkadelic, the $100,000 spaceship! – not exactly cheap bands. These were the kind of bands that came with cash flow problems.

If by partying you mean sex, then Gene has claimed to have slept with 4,800 women, some of which were wearing his “Demon” make-up at the time.

Not as high as the chances of being a member of Kiss and getting pubic lice because their costumes were all kept together – those chances being 100% – but still pretty high.

Guitarist Ace Frehley on the other hand, was a different matter.

As much as Ace liked to indulge in cocaine:

Ace had already had at least one car accident whilst drunk, and was consequently forced to have his promo photos taken of just one half of his face (not because the other half was deformed exactly, but because he wasn’t allowed to put make-up on that side, on account of the stitches), not to mention that time a few years later when he drunkenly took the New York police on a car chase in his Delorean.

So Kiss were trouble. And Kiss were expensive.

Warner Brothers hated Kiss.

“Rock’n’Roll All Nite” was written because Neil Bogart, the owner of Casablanca Records needed Kiss to write a hit. If Kiss didn’t write a hit, then the whole record company was going to go kaput.

So they wrote it, whilst buying frozen hot dogs and a can of beans. That’s how unglamourous a lifestyle Kiss were living at this point. That’s how broke Kiss and Casablanca were; although Kiss probably more so, since Casablanca was withholding their royalties.

Casablanca was withholding their royalties because they didn’t have any money.

Casablanca had invested a whole lot, in a double-album of appearances – comedic as well as musical, as well as President Nixon doing something – on the Johnny Carson Show titled:

It may be the biggest flop album of all time. They sent out 750,000 copies. Virtually all of them were instantly sent back.

Now, Kiss were already doing everything they could to have a hit record. In addition to the make-up, Gene was already spitting blood, breathing fire, and showing off his freakishly long tongue at the slightest provocation… but still they couldn’t score a hit!

The problem, I guess, is that you couldn’t see any of that on the record. Not at least until they released Alive!, the live-double album that wasn’t 100% live. It couldn’t be 100% live because although

Kiss looked great on stage, they didn’t really sound great on stage: they kept on making stupid mistakes, they kept on knocking over microphone stands.

“YOU WANTED THE BEST AND YOU GOT IT… THE HOTTEST BAND IN THE LAND… KISS!!!”

Now, it is doubtful if Kiss ever were the hottest band in the land. On virtually every metric you can measure, except for maybe lunchboxes, action figures and comic books, metrics in which most rock bands don’t compete (you can now buy Kiss coffins and Kiss toilet paper, so I’m sure they are the hottest band in the land in those categories as well) – Kiss were far less popular than they liked to make out. But lying is how you become legends.

Kiss were so willing to do anything required to score a hit that even covered an old Bobby Rydell record, “Kissing Time”, to coincide with a nationwide kissing competition called the Great Kiss Off.

It was also their first record to make the Hot 100 (and up until “Rock’n’Roll All Nite”, their biggest hit.)

If Kiss were willing to go along with that, then they were certainly willing to write a party rock anthem when the head honcho of their record company told them what was at stake.

With the exception of the entire AC/DC discography, “Rock’n’Roll All Nite” may be the ultimate party rock anthem.

There’d never really been anything like it before; except for maybe Slade’s “Cum On Feel The Noize.” Or maybe another Slade song that “Rock’n’Roll At Nite” is alleged to have been based on, all the way down to the “cool” spelling:

Did lead Slade Noddy Holder actually think he looked cool in that hat? Did he think Noddy was a good name for a rock star? (it is, at least, a more rockin’ name than the one he was born with: Neville.)

The original version of “Rock’n’Roll All Nite” is a great little party number. There’s hardly a line that doesn’t feel designed for a stadium of rock pigs to keep on shoutin’, you keep on shoutin’, that hasn’t been scientifically formulated to both drive you wild and drive you crazy… and having that moment where it’s just drums stomping in time, allowing you to catch your breath, before the Great Big Chorus… that’s Pavlovian dog shit!

Still, on that original version, it doesn’t sound as though Kiss want to rock’n’roll all night, and party every day. It sounds more like everybody’s favourite Kiss mondegreen:

For the true “party everyday” experience, you need the live version from Alive!, the version that sounds the way Kiss looked. Even though the crowd cheering along is almost certainly fake, this “Rock’n’Roll All Nite” is the pure distillation of rock’n’rolling party energy. “Rock’n’Roll All Nite” needs all of Gene’s asides: Both the cliched – “C’MON!” “I CAN’T HEAR YOU!!” – and the utterly random and confused: “WHAT??”

“Rock’n’Roll All Nite” needs the crowd noises. It needs the entire stadium pledging allegiance to both rockin’ and rollin.’ It needs an entire crowd to affirm that there is no higher purpose in life, than to dedicate your life to partying every day.

The original “Rock’n’Roll All Nite” is an 8. The “live” version is a 10.

On a personal note: “Rock’n’Roll All Nite” may be my first musical memory. It may be my first memory of any kind. I still remember how I felt when I saw the video on TV.

I felt terrified.

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Meanwhile, in Soft Rock Land…

Or:

How can one band be responsible for some of the worst records of the decade, and also, one of the best?

Short version: they were a talented bunch of popsmiths:

A supergroup of session musicians, whose entire identity appeared to be based on being “a bunch of hit-making studio boffins”, a band without an instantly recognizable look, or sound; switching genres with every record, switching lead singers nearly as often.

But who were they? Who was this supergroup of session musicians?

The most important member of 10CC, at least if we are talking about “I’m Not In Love”, is it’s composer Eric Stewart. Eric was probably the closest thing 10CC had to an actual star.

Eric became their lead singer after Wayne left, and they just called themselves the Mindbenders and had a hit with “Groovy Kind Of Love.” Possibly the least groovy song ever to contain the word “groovy” in it’s title.

Then there was Graham Gouldman, the guy who had written the Yardbirds two big hits – “For Your Love” and “Heart Full Of Soul” –

Who then went on to pen two more British pop classics – “Bus Stop” by The Hollies and “No Milk Today” by Herman’s Hermits – before making the switch to writing for Super K Productions, the company behind Ohio “Yummy Yummy Yummy” Express.

And that’s when he started to work with Eric, and also with two other dudes:

Those two hadn’t really done much yet, although they certainly would later on. These were the guys who would end up being 10CC, but for now it was their job to churn out all sorts of novelty rubbish, by bands that didn’t really exist. And you could tell that these bands didn’t really exist because… well, just look at these names:

According to their promotional material, Crazy Elephant were a bunch of coal miners from Wales who hadn’t seen the sun for four years, but spent all their spare time at the bottom of the coal mine playing rock’n’roll, which. to me at least, feels structurally inadvisable. Hotlegs didn’t have such a fun backstory, but they did have a hit record: “Neanderthal Man.”

So: We are basically talking about a bunch of guys with undeniable pop smarts, thrown into the world of silly novelty songs and… Neil Sedaka albums?

Yep, they were also the band behind Neil Sedaka’s soft rock 70s comeback. They worked out of Strawberry Studios in Manchester, a studio set up so that the UK could have at least one recording studio north of London.

A silly hit factory, writing novelty songs across a multitude of genres, from doowop (on their first 10CC hit “Donna”, a song that manages to be both boring and annoying at the same time) to reggae (on their last hit, “Dreadlock Holiday”, which is just annoying… and problematic) to a “Jailhouse Rock” pastiche:

In which the governor decides that’s-quite-enough-of-that-thank-you and sings about gleefully shooting the inmates for comic effect:

But somehow in the middle of all of this – and following the truly ridiculous single “Life Is A Minestrone:”

(sample lyric: “life is a minestrone/ served up with parmesan cheese/ death is a cold lasagne/ suspended in deep freeze):

They came up with “I’m Not In Love.”

Lyrically and melodically, “I’m Not In Love” is simply an evocative piece of songwriting. Eric keeps your picture, upon the wall. It hides a nasty stain that’s lying there. I’m personally still a little unsure whether Eric is head-over-heels in love or not. Whilst the robotic angel choir certainly makes it sound as though he’s in love, that nasty stain gives him plausible deniability.

Whilst Eric was the writer of “I’m Not In Love,” the real genius was Kevin Godley.

After they had originally recorded a bossa-nova version that was so bad they destroyed the tape, Kevin came up with the idea:

• “I tell you what, the only way that song is gonna work is if we totally f*ck it up and we do it like nobody has ever recorded a thing before. Let’s not use instruments.

• “Let’s try to do it all with voices.”

All voices?

• “Yeah, we’ll keep a rhythm going with something simple; a bass drum, whatever. We can have a guitar just giving us chords, but otherwise it could be all voices.”

How?

• “Tape loops. Endless voice loops. We can make endless loops of a chromatic scale.”

Don’t feel too impressed by the fancy musical terminology here.

So they spent three whole weeks, standing around a microphone going “AAAHHH!!!” 48 voices for each note of the chromatic scale. 624 voices in total.

Now don’t forget, they didn’t have samplers yet. In order to play those 624 voices and turn them into chords they had to use the mixing desk, each channel responsible for one note.

This is insanely complicated, but after three weeks of going “AAAHHH!” they couldn’t really back out now.

They also couldn’t totally turn any of the channels, and therefore any of the voices, off. Which is why, underneath the entirety of “I’m Not In Love”, there is the fuzzed-out background hum of all the notes in the chromatic scale, all playing at once. Lovely stuff.

Then for some reason no one remembers, they dragged in the studio receptionist,Kathy-

I’m sure you’ve always wondered what that bit was all about. Well I’m here to tell you, it apparently means nothing at all!

You’d think after three weeks of all of that, the guys would have been heartily sick of “I’m Not In Love.” But, once they had finished, they apparently spent the next three days just sitting there, listening to it, gaping in awe, wondering “what the f*ck have we created?”

What indeed?

Still, being so much work, 10CC never tried to make anything else like it ever again.

“I’m Not In Love” is a 10.

Now I just need to get my head around the appeal of Supertramp.

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