There’s a lowest common grade-school denominator to chipper bangers like the bouncy “Time to Love” “Hot Dog,” an ode to food largely bereft of double entendres and the “group”‘s first single, the head-over-heels “Bang-Shang-a-Lang,” which was reminiscent of early Barry-penned hits like the Crystals’ “Da Doo Ron Ron.”īut then you stumble across harder rock like “Truck Driver” (narrator tries to hitch a ride in order to find missing girlfriend) and the mildly naughty “Hide and Seek” –-which has such a funky guitar lick and backbeat that it was almost featured in The Get Down, Netflix’s sadly canceled series about the early days of hip hop. The people behind the Archies - songwriter and producer Jeff Barry, singers Ron Dante and original female voice Toni Wine, renowned musicians like guitarist Hugh McCracken and bassist Chuck Rainey - knew what pre-teens of the time wanted - unadulterated silliness like the Ohio Express’ “Yummy Yummy Yummy.” The first two Archies albums, The Archies and Everything’s Archie, pretty much delivered on that promise. Throughout the five discs, there aren’t too many other tracks to rival the undeniable hook and “pour a little sugar on it” grit of “Sugar, Sugar.” (Even soul great Wilson Pickett covered it, albeit as a slow-jam groove.) But the box set also serves as an instruction manual on the glories and pitfalls of bubblegum pop, lessons we’re still seeing played out today. The naysayers of the time, like the emerging rock press that dismissed the Archies records as disposable junk, weren’t completely wrong. (And let’s not forget the way the Gorillaz inherited the cartoon-band legacy decades later, or that Bored Ape Yacht Club, those cartoon monkeys that are the talk of the NFT world, are venturing into music.) In that context, the existence of Sugar, Sugar - The Complete Albums Collection (Goldenlane)– which boxes all five of the Archies LPs (minus their obligatory Christmas record) - makes some sort of crazy sense. Riverdale, the self-consciously somber update of Archie, revived the Archies as a “band,” albeit as a predictably gloomier one playing dour pop like “Midnight Radio.” Last month, Netflix announced a “live action musical” film version of The Archies, to be directed by Zoya Akhtar and set in India. The series is hardly remembered as a high watermark of animation, and neither are the five Archies albums -billed to the cartoon characters but sung and played by uncredited studio players - recalled as anything but forgettable cash-in product for a Saturday morning cartoon show.Īnd yet the Archies continue being reanimated. But of all the Sixties artifacts to survive and prosper five decades on, it’s doubtful that anyone, even Kirshner, would have predicted the Archies would make that list. The cartoon series, which launched in 1968, just as The Monkees was being cancelled, had its dopy charms. 1 spot, where it stayed for four weeks it also became the biggest-selling hit of that year. Kirshner knew a hit when he heard it: In 1969, “Sugar, Sugar” (cowritten by Jeff Barry and Andy Kim) wound up knocking the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women” out of the No. “That’s all because the Monkees wouldn’t do my song and that got me pissed off.” The band’s musical gatekeeper, the one most preoccupied with the TV-generated combo being allowed to write its own songs and play on its own records, Nesmith famously rejected “ Sugar, Sugar” - a bubblegum pop song as basic as it gets, brought to them by producer Don Kirshner.Īs the late Kirshner told RS in 2009, Nesmith’s dismissing of the song inspired him to turn to animation: “Mike said, ‘It’s a piece of junk–I’m not doing it.’ I came home and my son Ricky was reading Archie comic books.” Inspired by that sight, Kirshner flashed on turning the comic into a cartoon series - and having Archie, Jughead, Veronica and the gang perform the songs, instead of actual three-dimensional humans with opinions. Earlier this month, we lost the Monkees’ Michael Nesmith. In an utterly accidental way, a box set devoted to the Archies, the infamous TV cartoon band of the Sixties, couldn’t have arrived at a timelier moment.
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