SHG: Len Barry: "1-2-3"

Len Barry: “1-2-3”
Entered the chart on: 10/23/65
Peaked on: 11/20/65
Weeks at #2: 1
Song at #1: “I Hear a Symphony” by the Supremes

We have reached the end of 1965 and with it, the end of “short” years of the 60s. The reason 1965 seems to have generated few #2 hits looks like it’s because most songs didn’t seem to be spending much time at #2; that is, most songs that made it to #2 eventually peaked at #1. We’ll see the opposite over the ensuing years of the 60s, which are choked with songs that stalled at #2 behind long-runners in the top spot.

Having said that, let’s examine the case of Len Barry, probably the first alumnus of Second Hand Goods to chart with two different acts: first as the lead singer of the Dovells (remember “Bristol Stomp”?) and now as a solo act. This is another one of those songs where I kind of remember the main hook, but I don’t have a clear picture of the entire song. Methinks I need to refresh my memory...



Appropriately, starting off with someone counting in the song, a la “Wooly Bully.” Appropriate also that this should come second to the Supremes, as the arrangement here is so very Motown. The horns on this really sparkle, piano and guitar handle the rhythm with those slamming drums, and there’s even some vibes for color.

This one’s coming back to me now. I think Len’s voice has improved a good deal from the uncontrolled wail on “Bristol Stomp.” He has learned a lot more technique in the interim, and puts in a very impassioned performance here, reaching its peak with the “It’s easy, like taking candy from a baby” climax.

Better than I had remembered. A total production with an excellent vocal. Ending ’65 in style.

Rating: 4

SHG: Roy Head: "Treat Her Right"

Roy Head: “Treat Her Right”
Entered the chart on: 9/18/65
Peaked on: 10/16/65
Weeks at #2: 2
Song at #1: “Yesterday” by the Beatles

And we’re back to where we were two songs ago, with a song I’ve apparently heard, though I have no memory of ever hearing. Again, I point the finger of blame on the likes of Dick Bartley or Casey Kasem.

I’m flying blind with this one, as information on Roy Head, who never had another hit*, is hard to come by for some reason. Technically, this song is credited on the single to “Roy Head and the Traits,” who I presume is his backing band. Rateyourmusic lists the genres as “country” and “blue-eyed soul,” which I admit has me intrigued. Might as well hear if it’s worth the interest.



Wow, that’s some kind of instrumental intro! A full forty seconds of horn vamping before we get singing. I mean we get “Mmm, hmm...all right mama...” but no actual singing.

Lyrically this is on point, i.e.: “you catch more flies with honey, etc.” Vocally, Head is definitely also on point, but I guess people mistaking him for Mitch Ryder probably wasn’t helping his case in getting a follow-up hit. Seriously, if you’d told me this was the follow-up to “Jenny Take a Ride,” I’d have a hard time refuting that claim.

That said, there are far, far worse performers to resemble than Mitch Ryder. They both surfaced at roughly the same time, and I suppose it’s just Head’s bad luck that the general public preferred Mitch to him. Which is a bit of a shame, as the call-and-response he has with the Traits’ horn section is really exciting and fun to listen to.

I’d like to have heard more of that.

Rating: 4

*OK, he’s technically not a one-hit wonder, as he had two other top 40 hits, but neither of those charted higher than #31.

SHG: Martha & the Vandellas: "Dancing in the Street"

Martha & the Vandellas: “Dancing in the Street” Entered the chart on: 9/5/64 Peaked on: 10/17/64 Weeks at #2: 2 Song at #1: “Doo Wah Diddy Diddy” by Manfred Mann

Is this really our first Motown hit? Seems like it but, no, the Miracles’ “Shop Around” already made an appearance here. Actually, though, it makes a lot of sense: everyone remembers Beatlemania, but the other thing that happened in 1964 was that Motown broke through. After Phil Spector set a new standard with pop music production with the Ronnettes’ “Be My Baby,” lots of folks took the ball and ran with it, including the explosion of performing, songwriting and producing talent at Motown. This song was co-written by someone you might know, future Second Hand Goods featured artist Marvin Gaye. I’ll let you figure out which song he’ll be appearing with*.

Martha Reeves may not have been a “face” like Mary Wells or Diana Ross, but I think she and her Vandellas are underrated. “Heat Wave” is one of my most beloved Motown hits and this one has had a long life as well. An amusing review over at RateYourMusic goes: “In case anybody was wondering how Bowie and Jagger did not get better reviews for their version of this song, you may not have heard the original. It is more than somewhat better.”



“More than somewhat better.” That’s an understatement!

Songs like this make me yearn for the days of real instruments on records. That horn section, oh my! And it sounds like there’s a baritone sax honking away in the background the whole time. There’s lots of background touches that are so nice on this one, the piano, the Vandellas’ backing harmonies, and so forth. Supposedly someone was banging a chain on the floor to amplify that monster beat. I can believe it!

But really, it’s Martha’s lead voice that makes this one so special. She has such a wonderful tone and it’s just a joy to listen to her, the way she she sings “Everywhere around the world” the second time gets me every time. So splendid, hardly anyone could touch her in her prime.

I think this might be the first time we get “mention as many localities in the major radio markets so we can be sure this gets airplay” kind of lyrics. Later on, this would come across as blatant pandering** (“The Heart of Rock & Roll” by Huey Lewis & the News, anyone?) but I’ll grade this on a curve due to the quality of everything else. And at least it’s not a dance craze record, just a song that celebrates the simple joy of dancing itself.

It’s songs like this that display the superiority of the Motown era to the Cameo-Parkway era, as if there were any doubt.

Rating: 5

*I know I keep acting like this is some kind of arcane knowledge of which I am the only wizened overseer, but it really isn’t. This information is out there for anyone to seek out.
**Not just “later on,” actually. Anyone else remember Tommy Facenda’s “High School U.S.A.”? “Hey, he mentioned my high school! I feel so special!”

SHG: Millie Small: "My Boy Lollipop"

Millie Small: “My Boy Lollipop”
Entered the chart on: 6/6/64
Peaked on: 7/4/64
Weeks at #2: 1
Song at #1: “I Get Around” by the Beach Boys

We’re going into what appears to be a lull in the Beatles’ popularity. It must have been a relief to the Beatles’ hate squad to see an old-school musical song by someone from the old guard (namely jazz legend Louie Armstrong* with the title song from Hello Dolly) topping the charts after that first rush of Beatlemania.

It turned out not to be the case. What really happened was that Capitol grabbed the reins of control over the Beatles catalogue, and began metering out their releases at a more moderate pace. So Beatles songs continued to top the charts for the rest of the year, and the decade, proving this was no mere fad like the Twist had been.

That said, let’s examine the case of the first artist on Second Hand Goods from a third-world country. Namely, an eighteen-year-old girl from Jamaica named Millie Small (née Millicent Smith). It wouldn’t be the first time Antillean music would make it to the U.S. pop charts. Cuban bandleaders like Perez Prado had topped the charts multiple times in the 50s, and then there was the calypso craze (spearheaded by Harry Belafonte and his “Banana Boat Song”) that came and went. This is the first time “ska” ever appeared on the charts, and unlike the “Banana Boat Song,” it wasn’t the beginning of a trend. In fact, poor Millie never scored a second hit**.



Well, I have a hard time believing she’s eighteen. Based on this, if you’d told me she was eight years old, I’d have a hard time refuting that claim. She has this voice that sounds like her ovaries never dropped. An “acquired taste,” I guess.

For sure the arrangement is what sells this song even if you don’t like Millie’s “little girl” voice. Those horn blasts are impossible to resist. There’s also an extremely raunchy harmonica part, which blasts into a solo in the middle eight that is by far my favorite feature of this song. I heard somewhere that it’s actually a young Rod Stewart blowing the mouth harp on this tune. I have no idea if that’s true or not, but it’s a funny bit of trivia if so.

So...enjoyable, but based on this I can’t imagine her having a lasting career.

Rating: 3

*I have been known, on occasion, to offer up my own impression of Louie Armstrong singing the Schaeffer Beer jingle. It’s probably not something I should be doing, but there you are. **technically she did, as the follow-up single “Sweet William” was a top 40 hit. But peaking at #40 is not an unqualified success by any standard. Maybe when I finish this feature I’ll do songs that peaked at #40.

SHG: The Village Stompers: "Washington Square"

Village Stompers: “Washington Square”
Entered the chart on: 10/5/63
Peaked on: 11/23/63
Weeks at #2: 1
Song at #1: “I’m Leaving It Up to You” by Dale & Grace

So...it seems that we here in the States weren’t completely barren of Dixieland jazz in the 60s. Here we have a homegrown group; though as you can tell from their name and the title of their one big hit, they hail from New York and not N’awlins. They’re considered to be adjacent to the folk boom we’ve already been examining with some earlier hits this year, and called their style “folk jazz.”

There’s a check-mark next to this entry in my copy of Joel Whitburn’s Top 40 Hits, but I can’t say I remember what this sounds like. Time to give myself a little reminder...



Starting with a ragged, almost out-of-tune electric guitar part, we get the lead played on a banjo. This is not what I expected at all! It’s almost like something out of an Ennio Morricone western soundtrack! It doesn’t really start sounding Dixieland until two-thirds of the way through, when the piano and drums finally join in, and the horns, which had been softly crescendoing in the background for a while, finally start blasting fortissimo notes.

I don’t know what it is about these 60s instrumentals, but they have something that really appeals to me. I get the feeling that if I was alive in 1963, I would have owned this record. Simple, yet highly appealing.

Rating: 5

SHG: Ferrante & Teicher: "Exodus"

Ferrante & Teicher: “Exodus”
Entered the chart on: 11/28/1960
Peaked on: 1/23/1961
Weeks at #2: 1
Song at #1: “Wonderland by Night” by Bert Kämpfert

Here’s proof that instrumentals were the flavor of the month: both of the top 2 are instrumentals! I’m pretty sure I’ve never actually heard “Wonderland by Night” and if I have, I wouldn’t know it by name. I suppose that’s the peril of instrumental songs; how do you know what you’re listening to without the DJ to tell you what it is? Nowadays, with Shazam and its ilk, we’re pretty spoiled in that regard.

When I was very wee, I was actually a Ferrante & Teicher fan, thrilling to their extravagant twin-piano pyrotechnics on TV appearances and listening to their Greatest Hits on albums my parents owned. Even at the age of eight, I rather knew there was something deeply un-cool about liking them, and hid my fandom from my friends.

Little did I know they’d receive a hipster re-appraisal during the “lounge-core” era of the 1990s. Mind you, that was for their very early sides at Westminster, when they were doing Space Age prepared piano music, such fans considered them to have “jumped the shark” once they became Liberace-esque superstars at United Artists. Though even with the very early “prepared piano” stuff, we’re not exactly talking John Cage and David Tudor here. Even there, they were offering up renditions of the likes of “Tico Tico” and “Tea for Two.”

So, here we have a movie theme, which is what all their chart hits were (this is the follow-up to their two-pianos version of the theme from The Apartment). Exodus was a film by Otto Preminger, back when he was still a respected filmmaker, before the likes of Hurry Sundown, Skidoo and [shudder] Rosebud turned him into a laughingstock. So it pays to check out the original Ernest Gold orchestration before I listen to the Ferrante & Teicher arrangement. Which I shall now do.



Hmm...sounds like Ferrante & Teicher cloned Ernest Gold’s original arrangement of the intro, all big brass and strings, then shook things up in the rest of the track to spotlight their flashy piano playing. The original was bombastic movie music, spirited and very loud. Ferrante & Teicher’s rendition captures the feel of the original, just alters the arrangement to fit their pianos in and make it front and center. Hands down, this is the loudest orchestration we’ve had since “Don’t You Know.” Of course, for the big finale, they do that tinkly, descending semi-glissando thing (well, what would you call it?) which was their trademark.

People will argue until they’re blue in the face over which version is better, but it’s “push” as far as I’m concerned. As with Floyd Cramer’s tune, this one is just fine.

Rating: 4