Sugar sugar archies page music series#

Barry, together with Ellie Greenwich, was responsible for some of the biggest pop hits of the decade, including Da Doo Ron Ron, Then He Kissed Me and Do Wah Diddy Diddy, a number 1 for Manfred Mann in 1964. He wasted no time in hiring Jeff Barry to co-produce with him. Kirshner’s job was to hire the songwriters and musicians for the songs The Archies would be performing. The show had a 17-episode run, premiering in the US in September 1968 until January 1969. Rich girl Veronica Lodge also sang and played keyboards, and tomboy Betty Cooper was lead guitarist and percussionist. But unusually, this wasn’t just a boy’s own setup, very unusual for that time. His best friend Jughead Jones was their drummer, with wisecracking Reggie Mantle on bass.

Based on popular characters from The Archie Comics, which began in 1941, it followed the adventures of a bunch of all-American teenage friends from Riverdale High School that had formed a band.ġ7-year-old Archie Andrews was the central figure, lead singer and rhythm guitarist.

Sugar sugar archies page music series#

Kirshner was hired by CBS in late 1967 to be musical supervisor on their new Saturday morning cartoon series The Archie Show. All had been going well until The Monkees got too big for their boots – why not start over, only this time, why not remove all pretence that the band is real? And why not use cartoon characters that already had a huge audience to give the project a head start? After all, it had worked in the 50s – Alvin and the Chipmunks had been and still are very successful. And it was Don Kirshner, the man that had been dumped by The Monkees, that came up with the idea of turning a comic into a band in 1968.įrom his point of view, it was a no-brainer. Motown aped the production-line of the car factories of its hometown Detroit, and The Monkees were a pop phenomenon whose songs were mostly written and recorded by other musicians, until they broke free. It would be a lie to say this type of thing had ever really gone away though. But as the pop audience matured and moved on to buying albums, the gap was starting to be filled by bubblegum pop – squeaky-clean commercial songs, like Dizzy, made to order by hit-making teams, much like in the 50s, and given to singers such as Tommy Roe. What 'Sugar, Sugar' offers is a complete escape from reality, sticky-sweet feel-good music so blatantly commercial and artificial it wasn't even attributed to three-dimensional performers - coming at a time when counterculture credibility meant seemingly everything, it would be almost tempting to call the Archies revolutionary if that didn't defeat the entire purpose of what they were all about.The slick pop of Sugar Sugar by cartoon band The Archies was the penultimate number 1 of the 60s, sitting pretty in the top spot for close to two whole months, and only narrowly missing out on the Christmas number 1 spot.Īrtists like The Beatles and Bob Dylan had made self-penned songs fashionable, and for most of the 60s, it was they and others of their ilk that often reached the top spot. The song is the very essence of simplicity, a classically constructed pop record with an undeniably infectious melody and charmingly inane puppy-love lyrics nothing revelatory and nothing earth-shattering, which is precisely the point - as the 'bubblegum' appellation suggests, it's total ear candy, and lord knows it struck a chord, selling over six million copies. Conceived by producer Don Kirshner following his firing by another pre-fab (albeit flesh-and-blood) group, the Monkees, and inspired by the long-running Archie comic book line and subsequent animated series, the cartoon band was in reality a group of session musicians including vocalists Ron Dante, Ellie Greenwich, Andy Kim, and Toni Wine Kim co-authored 'Sugar, Sugar' with Jeff Barry, Greenwich's husband and longtime songwriting partner.

For better or worse, 'Sugar, Sugar' and the countless bubblegum records which came before and after didn't reflect their times, but rejected them - escapist fare at its purest and most palatable. With the Archies' 'Sugar, Sugar,' pop music moved 180 degrees away from the overtly political, consciousness-expanding aesthetic which emerged during the Summer of Love toward a calculated simplicity and innocence not heard since the years prior to the British Invasion.

In fact, it wasn't even the work of a real band at all. In spite of (or, more likely, because of) the momentous cultural turning points which stretched across 1969 - among them, Woodstock, Vietnam, the moon landing, and the beginning of the Nixon presidency - the biggest-selling pop single of the year was not the product of a generational torch bearer like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, or Bob Dylan.