Volume 3, Track 1: The Hardy Boys, “Namby Pamby”

Volume 3!  The Hardy Boys were one of the era’s many cartoon bands.  The iconic crime-solving characters were adapted for TV by Filmation in 1969, very loosely — in this version Joe and Frank Reynolds were adults, and were joined by their three musician friends, Pete the token black guy, Wanda the token woman, and Chet the token fat person (for some reason).   The character of Pete is variously described as the first black cartoon character, or just one of the first.  These five hip young adults travelled the country in a van, using music as a needlessly elaborate cover for their crime-solving activities.  There would be a musical interlude in the middle of every episode.  Yes, this is the exact same premise as Scooby Doo; the two shows also debuted at the same time and aired at the same time slot.  Scooby Doo ultimately prevailed.  The Hardys show was cut within two years, and the band had little success (their most popular song, “Live and Let Love,” bubbled under for a while on the charts).

The real-life ensemble was put together by Dunwich Records and consisted of frontman Jeff Taylor, guitarist Reed Kailing, keyboardist Devon English, drummer Bob Crowder, and saxophonist Norbert Solystiak.  While the Hardy boy band lasted, it was a fascinating microcosm of a complex time in American history.  You can read about it in these four detailed interviews by Pop Culture Addict; some snippets include the following.

• Jeff and Reed were in the Messengers, which was the first white rock group that was signed to Motown on the Rare Earth label, and got to go on tour with Motown legends like the Supremes and Temptations.
• Devon English was a classically trained pianist and jazz singer, as well as a Playboy Bunny who spend some time living in the Mansion. She and Jeff became lovers while playing in the band (although they had to keep it secret due to a morality clause), and they lived together for several years after the band’s breakup.
• Despite the group’s clean-cut image, they had some wild times.  At the opening party for the TV show Dark Shadows, a backup singer went missing for a week: Jeff says “He just disappeared.  I don’t know if the Plaster Casters got him or the groupies.”  Jeff on groupies: “Oh god.  Yeah.  Crazy.  There was a lot.”
• Reed Kaling was a Paul McCartney lookalike and starred in the Broadway show Beatlemania.
• Jeff says the whole band got along well, but Reed felt picked on: “it was an ‘all against me’ situation at one time. They [hassled] me because I liked Leonard Cohen. Jeff thought I was pretty stupid about that so on my birthday they bought me a book of Leonard Cohen poems. I thought Leonard was interesting as a poet. Well guess what! So did Bono!”
• Norbert was hired for being chubby, but says the Hardy Boys era was the the only time in his life where he was fat.  He was skinny before, and slimmed down afterward.
• Each band member had a fictional bio.  Crowder: “My bio was that I was an orphan and the orphanage burnt down and I had a brother who was crippled and I had to support the family from a poor background and I got a big break and now I’m this big music star.”  The fake bios were attached to their real names, which is weird.  Bob Crowder didn’t object to going through life with an ersatz backstory, due to his political beliefs. “During that time period the other band I was playing with was saying that the reason people took the letter X as their last name was because their lives were not their lives and the slave masters had given us their last names.  So I was looking at that and thinking ‘We’re not really us anywhere we go.’  Everywhere you turn somebody’s telling you that you’re not you.  So I just took it in stride, as long as they spelt my name right on the check.”
• Crowder also worked with a group called the Afro Art Esemble on a musical of The Autobiography of Malcolm X.  “We were singing, and I had to sing too, and the lyrics were (sings) ‘White man is my enemy/who perfected slavery/look what they have made of me/fools without a memory/always talkin’ brotherhood/white man you just ain’t no good/now we have you understood/Malcolm X is kindlen wood.’  (Laughs)  We’d be singing this song, and the next day I’d have to go with the Hardys and have to sing (sings) ‘Love and Let Love!  Tra la la la la!’  (Laughs)  Ah man, that’d put you in therapy for real!  It was a very interesting time.”
• Crowder went on to record with Marvin Gaye, Barry White and the Bee Gees.  He was the drummer on “Stayin’ Alive.”

“Namby Pamby” (written by Gary Liozzo) is a Here Come the Hardy Boys album track in the classic bubblegum style.  There’s bass, guitar, energetic drums with lots of like, fills and stuff, a flutey-sounding organ that could just be a flute, blasts of horn, handclaps, and maybe tambourine in there somewhere.  Singer Jeff has a smooth pop-singer voice. Eight-line verses followed by a chorus.  The melody is repetitive and sing-songy, but in a good way; it will definitely get stuck in your head.  Generic but well-done lyrics about how a guy is in love with a girl, whom he addresses by the not particularly flattering nickname “Namby Pamby.” Noteworthy lyric: “When you give the eye to me, I feel my heart beginning to swell.”  Hey, that’s not your heart!

This tune has some impassioned fans among those who remember it.  Youtube commenter “matt lewis” describes it as “the second greatest song ever!”  Matt doesn’t state what the first greatest song ever is, but I’ll tell you:  It’s “Underpants” by the Easter Monkeys.  3 stars.

 

 

Volume 1, Track 5: The Hardy Boys, “Good Good Lovin'”

Inspired by the success of the Archies, someone decided to make a TV show based on the Hardy Boy books, except in this version the Hardy Boys and their friends were in a band together, while also solving crimes.  Dunwich Records recruited an actual bunch of guys who looked like the cartoon characters on the show to perform live as The Hardy Boys.  The band put out two LPs and a couple of singles, but the people who played on the records were probably studio musicians and not the guys pictured on the album covers.

Based on my “research,” the TV show was extremely terrible, with the crappy animation and wooden dialogue I remember from the Hanna-Barbera shows of my youth.  The songs are pretty good, though.  That often seems to be the case with these cartoon/band pairings.  Why is that, I wonder?  Was it more expensive to create a competently produced half-hour animation as opposed to a three-minute song?  Was the music business more competitive, and thus less forgiving of an inferior product?  Or is there some deeper reason?

“Good, Good Lovin'” was co-written by Ellie Greenwich of “Be My Baby” and “Da Doo Ron Ron.”  Pop song with handclaps about a guy who is going to make a woman love him, despite unspecified obstacles.  “I’m stickin’ like glue, I’ll keep hittin’ on you.”  Sounds like an extremely effective strategy.  The chorus goes “good good love, it doesn’t come easy, you got to keep workin’ to make it just right” (etc.).  Starting with “it doesn’t come easy,” it breaks into a cool syncopated rhythm that makes this part of the song very catchy.  The syncopation, with its more “difficult” sound, also musically expresses the idea of something being not easy.  Thus the form recapitulates the content, as in all great works of art.  3 stars, but not distinctive other than the chorus.

More info here and here.