Memories of Elephant's Memory

Elephant's Memory is best known as the New York City band that backed up John Lennon and Yoko Ono between 1971 and 1973, including their 1972 Sometime in New York City album.  The 45 for that album's regrettably titled "Woman Is the Nigger of the World" is credited to "John Lennon/Yoko Ono with Elephant's Memory and Invisible Strings." (I talk about the single's soft rock aspects in my "Pillow Talk" chapter, along with its role as a manifestation of the feminized left.)

Before its alliance with Lennon, the group had roused the faith of Buddah Records chief Neil Bogart, much to the chagrin of future mega-manager and recent memoirist Ron Weisner:

"Like every A&R person in history, Neil's ears and heart sometimes led him astray, the most notable instance being a sloppy rock band called Elephant's Memory... How and why they managed to make a name for themselves was beyond me, because they were terrible, a true train wreck of a group...I knew that Elephant's Memory had no chance of succeeding beyond their core fan base of Lower East Side drug heads, because they themselves were Lower East Side drug heads..." (Listen Out Loud, pp. 20-21).

A fuller assessment of Elephant's Memory and the street cred that brought them to the attention of John and Yoko is available in James A. Mitchell's The Walrus and the Elephants: John Lennon's Years of Revolution (2013). A bonus factoid: Carly Simon briefly sang in the group. Here's what Mitchell says: "One story among many in Elephant mythology was that Carly left after members of the band threw her boyfriend down the stairs; they were that kind of group, born in strip bars and befriended by motorcycle gangs."

Their chart appearances:

Elephant's Memory - "Crossroads of the Stepping Stones" (Billboard #120, entered 6/7/69). Written by Michal Shapiro and Stan Bronstein. Produced by Wes Farrell. 45: "Crossroads of the Stepping Stones"/"Jungle Gym at the Zoo" (Buddah 1969). LPs: Elephant's Memory (Buddah 1969).

The surprisingly Harper's Bizarre-like A-side barely "bubbled under." The B-side, sounding more like a Jefferson Airplane/Mamas and the Papas team up, appeared on the 1969 Midnight Cowboy soundtrack.

Elephant's Memory - "Mongoose" (Billboard #50, entered 8/8/70). Written by David Cohen, Rick Frank and Stan Bronstein. Produced by Ted Cooper. 45: "Mongoose"/"I Couldn't Dream" (Metromedia 1970). LP: Take It to the Streets (Metromedia 1970).

This high-octane groove-rocker from their Take It to the Streets album, as I've pointed out earlier, charted alongside a mongoose single by Donovan in 1970.

John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band with Elephant's Memory and Invisible Strings - "Woman Is the Nigger of the World" (Billboard #57, entered 5/20/72). Written by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Produced by John Lennon, Yoko Ono and Phil Spector. 45: "Woman Is the Nigger of the World"/"Sisters O Sisters" (Apple 1972). LP: Sometime in New York City (Apple 1972).

The picture sleeve shows the cover of the issue of Nova magazine in which Yoko Ono had coined the phrase that became the title of this single's A-side. Ono's track on side B keeps the woman theme afloat but starts out expressing ecological concern: "We lost our green land, we lost our clean air."

Chart Song Cinema: "Grand Central Shuffle" Mystery

"Grand Central Shuffle" (1973) - Johnny Griffith, Inc.
Written by Al Browne, Ernest Kelley, and James Butler * Produced by Johnny Griffith and Ernest Kelley * 45: "The Grand Central Shuffle"/"My Love" * Label: RCA Victor * Billboard charts: Regional breakout—New York City * Entered: 1973-01-20

Johnny Griffith was the keyboardist for the Funk Brothers, Motown's house band until the label moved from Detroit to Los Angeles in 1972. Left to his own devices, Griffith tacked on an "Inc." to his name (echoing Motown's practice of giving songwriting and production credits to "The Corporation"), and kept busy recording, arranging, and producing for the GeNEVA label in Dearborn. As far as I can tell, the "Shaft"-like "Grand Central Shuffle" was his biggest post-Motown record. Picked up by RCA, it racked up enough airplay and sales in New York City to get listed as a "breakout" hit in Billboard.

Mysteriously, the original label for the track shows the following: "From the Neil Sullivan movie, 'The Candidate'." No such movie exists, as far as I can tell, although one starring Robert Redford and directed by Michael Ritchie, about a Senatorial race in California, certainly did. This is the one Joel Whitburn lists under the single's heading in Top Pop Singles, but nothing in the soundtrack for the Redford film sounds remotely close to Griffith's slick number, nor would any scene seem to call for it. Some other Candidate movie—perhaps slated for direction by the same Neil Sullivan whose Why Russians Are Revolting got slammed by the New York Times in 1970—likely fizzled in time for RCA to give Griffith's single some attention on its own merits.

"Grand Central Shuffle"

The Primal Sounds of Jimmy Castor

Listening to the Jimmy Castor Bunch feels a bit transgressive today. The New York City vocalist/saxophonist Castor's first charting hit was the 1966 boogaloo Top 40 party track "Hey, Leroy, Your Mama's Callin' You," featuring an African-American taking on a Puerto Rican accent. His 1972 "Troglodyte (Cave Man)" told the story of a neanderthal who growls "gotta find a woman, gotta find a woman" before grabbing the hair of a female named "Bertha Butt" ("one of the Butt sisters"), who, after lying there "frightened and cold," comes around and says "I'll sock it to ya, Daddy!"

This was the stuff of Top Ten hits in 1972. A huge-selling novelty "break in" track called "Convention '72" confirmed this. Recorded by a a Pittsburgh DJ named Bob DeCarlo who called himself "The Delegates," it relied on "Troglodyte" as its central gag. When Castor's follow up single, "Luther The Anthropoid (Ape Man)," conked out at #105, it indicated that he perhaps misunderstood his previous hit's appeal. His 1975 Top Twenty hit "The Bertha Butt Boogie - Part 1," though, showed him in a state of comprehension concerning the profitable (aka "lascivious") side of primal.

Aside from all of this novelty song talk is the fact that Jimmy Castor - who wrote Frankie Lymon and the  Teenagers' "I Promise to Remember" and would often stand in for Lymon in the fifties - was an extraordinary entertainer, sax player, and vocalist who could lay down a monstrous groove with that band of his. You can see what I'm talking about if you watch this whole clip from a 1973 appearance on the SOUL! TV show. Here he leads his six-piece combo through the oft-sampled "It's Just Begun," "Hey Leroy," a savory instrumental version of "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," "Troglodyte," a timely investigation of the preteen condition called "I'm Not a Child Anymore," and a scorching "Foxy Lady."

Also worth checking out: "King Kong - Pt. 1," a 1975 Rufus Thomas evocation that followed up "Bertha Butt Boogie" and likely electrified dance floors in its day. By 1977, Castor's Hot 100 days were over, although his back catalog proved to be a borrower's wonderland.

Jimmy Castor Bunch - "Troglodyte (Cave Man)" (Billboard #6, entered 5/13/72). Written by Castor Bunch. Produced by Castor-Pruitt Productions. 45: "Troglodyte (Cave Man)"/"I Promise to Remember" (RCA Victor 1972). LP: It's Just Begun (RCA Victor 1972).

The picture sleeve to Side A misspelled it as "Troglodite." Side B contains an updated version of Castor's "I Promise to Remember," the 1956 #10 hit he'd written for Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers.

Jimmy Castor Bunch - "Luther the Anthropoid (Ape Man)" (Billboard #105, entered 8/5/72). Written by Jimmy Castor, Gerry Thomas, and John Pruitt. Produced by Castor-Pruitt Productions. 45: "Luther the Anthropoid (Ape Man)"/"Party Life" (RCA Victor 1972). LP: Phase II (RCA Victor 1972).

Power to the peephole.

The Delegates - "Convention '72" (Billboard #8, entered 10/21/72), Written by Nick Cenci and Nick Kouselaneos. Produced by Nik-Nik Productions. 45: "Convention '72"/"Funky Butt" (Mainstream 1972). LP: The Delegates (Mainstream 1972).

Side B is a non-album piece of organ-rock instrumental music, the kind teenagers would play at parties on early seventies TV shows.

Jimmy Castor Bunch - "The Bertha Butt Boogie - Pt. I" (Billboard #16, entered 2/22/75). Written by Jimmy Castor and John Pruitt. Produced by Castor-Pruitt Productions. 45: "The Bertha Butt Boogie - Part I"/"The Bertha Butt Boogie - Part II" (Atlantic 1974). LP: The Jimmy Castor Bunch Featuring the Everything Man: Butt of Course... (Atlantic 1974).

Sha Na Na's 2 Early '70s Charting Singles

Here's what I wrote about them in my book (p. 66): "Underneath the iconic [Woodstock] music festival's mud, grass, and layers of '60s hippy mythology, a quintessentially '70s seed flowered in the form of '50s revivalism when Sha Na Na, in pompadours and gold lamé, raved up on golden oldies like Danny and the Juniors' 'At the Hop.'"

And here's what their one time manager Ron Weisner wrote about them in his Listen Out Loud (pp. 66-67): "On more than one instance, they duked it out before they took the stage...I often had to break it up; what usually put the kibosh on the scuffle was me telling them, 'If you guys don't get your sh*t together, they'll cancel the show, and if they cancel the show, you won't get paid.' That always ended the fight...for the time being. Sometimes they waited until after the show to beat the sh*t out of each other."

A hard working band, nonetheless, New York City's Sha Na Na was among the most visible manifestations of the seventies' yearning for a simpler time. It's easy to forget, though, that before the band's TV variety show years, which ran between 1977 and 1981, they were comparatively confrontational. The full page ad above appeared on the back of the July 17, 1971, issue of Billboard and flashed their early '70s slogan: "Greased and Ready to Kick Ass."  In his Performing Glam Rock, Philip Auslander equates the group's implicitly violent disdain for the counterculture with that of Alice Cooper. He reports that the group "often taunted their audiences with such lines as 'We gots just one thing to say to you f*ckin' hippies and that is rock 'n' roll is here to stay!'" (pp. 33-34).

Interestingly, out of the three singles Sha Na Na charted with in Billboard, two of those happened in 1971. (Their third, a disco-tinged cover of "(Just Like) Romeo and Juliet," reached #55 in 1975.)  The first of these, "Only One Song," was a ballad no one today would peg as the product of a '50s revival, while "Top Forty," another song on the outer edges of the typical Sha Na Na sound, still managed to tap into nostalgia, radio format lingo, and the concurrent God rock trend while sending up the Statler Brothers. (Both of the 1971 A-sides were written by group keyboardist "Screamin'" Scott Simon.)

Sha Na Na - "Only One Song" (Billboard #110, entered 5/15/71). Written by Scott Simon. Produced by Eddie Kramer. 45: "Only One Song"/"Yakity Yak [sic]/Jailhouse Rock (Medley)" (Kama Sutra 1971). LP: Sha Na Na (Kama Sutra 1971).

Side B contains the more standard representation of the Sha Na Na sound.

Sha Na Na - "Top Forty" (Billboard #84, entered 8/7/71). Written by Scott Simon. Produced by Eddie Kramer. 45: "Top Forty"/"I Wonder Why" (Kama Sutra 1971). LP: Sha Na Na (Kama Sutra 1971).

The picture sleeve for this showed the song title as "Top Forty of the Lord" but with the label simply as "Top Forty." Side B, as with the previous single, delivered a truer rendering of the band's live sound, covering the Dion and the Belmonts classic.

Grand Funk circa 1970

Here's a photo of Times Square from June 1970. Grand Funk Railroad, from Flint, Michigan, were a true "rock for rock's sake" vehicle for the early '70s generation, too irritatingly apolitical for the tastes of the fading sixties counterculture. Here's an illustrative companion clip for this billboard image, capturing the band playing "Closer to Home (I'm Your Captain)" at Shea Stadium, a show they sold out faster than the Beatles had done a half-decade previous.

Grand Funk Railroad - "Heartbreaker" (Billboard #72, entered 2/14/70). Written by Mark Farner. Produced by Terry Knight. 45: "Heartbreaker"/"Please Don't Worry" (Capitol 1970). LP: On Time (1969).

The single and album versions both play for the full 6:30.

Grand Funk Railroad - "Closer to Home" (Billboard #22, entered 8/15/70). Written by Mark Farner. Produced by Terry Knight. 45: "Closer to Home"/"Aimless Lady" (Capitol 1970). LP: Closer to Home (Capitol 1970).

The 45 version of "Closer to Home" (linked to above) clocked in at 5:30, while the Closer to Home album version (confusingly titled "I'm Your Captain") stretched out to 9:47 on the album.

Grand Funk Railroad - "Mean Mistreater (live)" (Billboard #47, entered 10/12/70). Written by Mark Farner. Produced by Terry Knight. 45: "Mean Mistreater"/"Mark Say's Alright" [sic] (Capitol 1970). LP: Live Album (Capitol 1970).

Side B, spelled "say's" on both the album and single, is an instructive, polarizing document.