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ICE CREAM DAYDREAM
In 1967, Spanky and Our Gang were America’s hottest new act. By the end of 1968, they were finished. Led by Elaine ‘Spanky’ McFarlane, the good-time group scored smash hits including “Sunday Will Never Be the Same”, “Lazy Day” and “Like to Get to Know You” before their career was cut short by controversy and tragedy. HUW THOMAS charts the short but explosive career of sunshine pop’s merry pranksters.
The legend goes that Spanky and Our Gang formed in a chicken coop during a hurricane in 1965. As band origins go, it’s one of the weirdest - and it’s the truth. Elaine McFarlane was holding a hurricane party in a converted chicken coop near Miami when she was visited by Oz Bach and Nigel Pickering, desperate folk wastrels looking for shelter. McFarlane, a singer herself, took them in and the three sang together as they waited for the storm to pass, some say for three days straight. They discovered they had a perfect vocal blend; none of them wanted to sing with anyone else again. When the two men left, McFarlane told them to look her up next time they were in her native Chicago. She didn’t expect to see them again. That Winter, Bach and Pickering travelled to Chicago in search of the girl who looked like a silent film star and sounded like Barbra Streisand.
Elaine McFarlane had pedigree in roots music. A troubadour out of Illinois, she’d gate-crashed the music world in September 1961 when she joined a recording session for local legend Little Brother Montgomery and impressed the blues pianist with a rendition of Bessie Smith’s “Oh, Daddy”. The following year, she joined the New Wine Singers, a popular Chicago group who injected a healthy dose of New Orleans-style jazz into the folk revival. McFarlane's powerful, deep blue voice cut through smoky Playboy clubs and made her a hit at Chicago’s legendary Rising Moon, but that venue had been torched to the ground by the mob by the time she met Oz Bach and Nigel Pickering. Spanky, as she’d been nicknamed in reference to child star Spanky McFarland from the Our Gang film series, considered herself retired.
Bach and Pickering were an odd couple only recently acquainted. Bach had kicked around Miami coffeehouses for years; his big break came when, as he recounted to Michael Oberman in 1967, he “was sweeping the stage once in a coffeehouse and I knocked over a guitar rack. It got applause, so I decided to come back the next night and do it again.” Pickering, meanwhile, was a self-described “zen Baptist” who had lived many lives. He was a decade older than his new friends and had been a Western swing guitarist, a radio DJ and a cop.
When Bach and Pickering looked McFarlane up in Chicago, they found her working as a hat check girl at the Old Town Gate, dispensing one-liners to punters and, on occasion, perspiring pure charisma on stage with a Dixieland band. The hurricane buddies were broke, carrying snivelling colds and wearing thrift shop threads (Bach and Pickering’s luggage was stolen when they arrived in town), but this was the Winter of “California Dreamin’”; McFarlane, who’d known Cass Elliot back in her New Wine Singers days, would later recall hearing the song on the radio and thinking “I can do that”. The three put together an eccentric act with Bach on guitar, Pickering on stand-up bass and McFarlane on jug, washboard and banana-shaped kazoo, and made their stage debut at Mother Blues, a hip joint that had risen from the ashes of the Rising Moon. "We sang some show tunes, a little Andrews Sisters, a little rock and roll,” McFarlane told the Pantagraph in 2007. “We were pretty eclectic, kind of a jug band that sang.” The group would ham up the weepy ‘Amelia Earhart's Last Flight’, thunder through the racial satire ‘The Klan’, finish on the tongue-twisting ‘Ya Got Trouble’ from The Music Man and take a bow with both audience and dignity intact. Everything was for the taking – folk songs, blues numbers, standards, vaudevillian skits – and none of it was to be taken seriously. “We wore knickers, World War I coats and train engineer hats," McFarlane told the St. Augustine Record in 2010. "But it was a steady gig."
As the trio’s act became more refined, Nigel Pickering emerged as musical leader. “I never wanted to sing without Nigel,” McFarlane admitted to the St. Augustine Record in 2010. “He was my rock." Pickering also assumed the role of straight-talking ambassador when the group gained a manager in Curley Tait, the co-founder of Mother Blues. Tait drummed up local press for the group, meaning their goofy stopgap name of Spanky and Our Gang stuck, and got them into bigger venues in Illinois. He even bagged them a cameo in a hopelessly obscure short film version of The Emperor’s New Clothes starring John Carradine. Tait’s efforts bought the Gang to the attention of the locally based Mercury Records, who signed them in Summer 1966. “They were the first to ask us,” McFarlane told Music Connection in 1990. “We didn't know there might be a choice, we were so dumb.” Mercury believed they'd found their version of the Mamas and the Papas in Spanky and Our Gang and a fourth member, deadpan guitarist and vocalist Malcolm Hale, was duly recruited. Hale, who had played with McFarlane in the New Wine Singers, was fresh from a concert tour of Vietnam and quickly settled in as the ‘baby brother’ of the group.
The Gang were ushered into the studio with New York-based producer Jerry Ross, hot on the back of cutting Bobby Hebb’s “Sunny” and Keith’s “98.6”. Speaking to Spectropop in 2006, Ross described meeting the Gang for the first time. “I walked in on their rehearsal with my Brooks Brothers suit and tie - I was a corporate soldier, you know, ha! As I went over to introduce myself to the group, Spanky looked at me and said, ‘If you're gonna' work with us, you gotta take your fuckin' tie off!’” After the Gang’s first single, a rushed version of the Beatles’ “And Your Bird Can Sing”, flopped, Ross drafted in Innocence arranger Jimmy Wisner and a small army of session musicians to carve the motley group into something bright and cute. With instruments given to them by Baldwin, the Gang moved to Miami and went electric. This jug band now had electric guitar, electric harpsichord and electric banana.
The group chose the wistful ‘Sunday Will Never Be the Same’, written by Terry Cashman and Gene Pistilli, for their second single. The ballad had been rejected by both the Left Banke and, inevitably, the Mamas and the Papas, but the Gang had no qualms about taking others’ scraps. They sped the song up, adding a choral opening devised by Malcolm Hale and a funky rhythm part underneath the flowery arrangement. Released in April ‘67, ‘Sunday Will Never Be the Same’ quickly became a national smash. “Murray the K loved us and was the first to play the record in New York,” McFarlane told Music Connection. “In those days, a record wasn't played in New York until it was a hit across the country first. It was so easy for us. I have to say it was the easiest thing I've ever done.” The record’s top-ten success bagged the group an appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show on 18 June 1967. That same day, the Mamas and the Papas played Monterey Pop Festival along with the Who, the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Ravi Shankar. The Gang had turned the festival down, not expecting it to be a success.
The Gang, immediately recognisable thanks to their colourful, proto-steampunk look, were now bona fide stars. Such was their fame, they came to the attention of the real Spanky McFarland, then retired from Hollywood and working as an appliance salesman. He apparently seethed over the borrowed name for the rest of his life. Now with permanent drummer John “The Chief” Seiter, the group toured college campuses and the odd masonic temple. Their live set dipped into everything from Rodgers and Hart to the advertising jingles they’d made for Sears and Ban deodorant.
McFarlane described what the band did as “good-time music”, telling the press “We just have a lot of fun, and we want everyone around us to have fun.” That sense of fun was truly infectious; few performers have looked as genuinely joyful as a beaming McFarlane skipping along to “Lazy Day” on the Ed Sullivan Show. That song, an enchanting baroque pop romp that sounds like the Swingle Sisters covering “Good Vibrations”, was their second US top 20, but McFarlane never liked the words. “I thought it was trite,” she admitted to Music Connection. “I don't believe in squirrels saying hello. I'm more realistic than that.”
The group’s eclecticism survives intact on their self-titled debut album. “Spanky and Our Gang”, released in August 1967, features vaudeville hijinks jutting out between the hits. Any listeners settling down for a half-hour of harmony pop would be troubled by zany patter songs like “Commercial” and by “Come and Open Your Eyes”, a protest song against protesters. For all the Mamas and the Papas comparisons, the group sound more like the Association on this album as they bend pop, folk, jazz and psychedelia to their will, only they might be a little too awkward to get away with it. McFarlane has said that the album was released unfinished, but it remains an excellent prescription for convalescent hippies. "I just really enjoyed working with [the group],” producer Ross recounted to Spectropop in 2006. “They were entertaining, they were good musicians, they worked hard and took direction … then years later, Spanky was quoted as saying that Jimmy Wisner and I were tyrants and she never liked her records! So much for success, oh yeah!”
For their next record, Spanky and Our Gang sought a new direction. They’d been unhappy with the polished treatment they’d had with Ross and Wisner and chose jazz musicians Bob Dorough and Stuart Scharf to replace them. “We do not want to be put into any one musical bag,” McFarlane announced to the Penn. “We want to sing the songs we dig!” As it turned out, the Gang didn’t dig several songs that were later hits for others; they turned down recording both “Celebrate” (Three Dog Night) and “Leaving on a Jet Plane” (Peter, Paul and Mary) around this time. Oz Bach, meanwhile, didn’t dig any of it – he quit the band in late 1967 and was replaced by the double-whammy of bass player Kenny Hodges and guitarist, banjo player and Frankie Valli soundalike Lefty Baker. The appointment of Hodges and Baker advanced the group’s sound. With six voices to play with, their arrangements became more outré and the Mamas and the Papas comparisons became even more off-beam. The new Gang introduced themselves with another big US hit, “Sunday Morning”, written by Margo Guryan. One could be forgiven for thinking the group were repeating their previous successes here, but “Sunday Morning” sounds more passionate, more grown-up than the old hits.
The sleeve of “I’d Like to Get to Know You”, Spanky and Our Gang’s second album, taps into the contemporary Bonnie and Clyde fad with the group posing as both bandits and Keystone Cops. The record inside sounds like a cocktail party happening next door to a variety show. The Gang are still genre-hopping - Nigel Pickering becomes a Nudie-clad cowboy on “Chick-a-Ding-Ding" and McFarlane goes blues shouter, with help from her old friend Little Brother Montgomery, on “Prescription for the Blues” - but this is much more cohesive than the first album. The title track, which bookends a 10-minute suite on the album, has rightly become the group’s most enduring song. Lush and loungey, it is sunshine pop at its very finest.
The Gang’s career took an unexpected turn when they were approached by John Lindsay, the mayor of New York City. A socially liberal Republican, Lindsay was running for re-election and his ‘Give a Damn’ campaign, focused on aiding underprivileged inner-city residents, needed a theme song. “He offered Peter, Paul and Mary and Simon and Garfunkel the chance,” McFarlane, never shy about these things, told the press. “But they couldn’t come up with a song, so we took it”. Dorough and Scharf wrote a 30-second jingle that was so successful, it was expanded to become the next Spanky and Our Gang single. The full version of “Give a Damn” is as sophisticated as "Like to Get to Know You”, but this is no cocktail party record. The group sound solemn as they deliver a direct message about inequality and class consciousness. The song was only a regional hit but it made a significant dent on the American psyche in the year of the Civil Rights act. A performance on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour resulted in a barrage of complaints over the song title; if Tom Smothers’ account is to be believed, one of the letters came from Richard Nixon.
Emboldened by the public reaction to “Give a Damn”, the Gang dropped their comedy routines and set about recording their most ambitious album yet in Autumn 1968. “Anything You Choose B/W Without Rhyme or Reason” would be a progressive pop jamboree made up of two long suites running the gamut of genre. This album would surely earn Spanky and Our Gang the respect and credibility they had been chasing since they shuffled onto the stage at Mother Blues, but the group lost a member before it was released.
Malcolm Hale died in his sleep on Thursday 31 October 1968, the day Spanky and Our Gang were scheduled to perform a campus gig in Montana. The cause of death was reported as bronchial pneumonia, though it was later said he had died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Hale had been living with McFarlane and her fiancé, road manager Charly Garvin. “He was one of our key members,” McFarlane told Music Connection in 1990. “He was our arranger, bass voice, trombone and guitar player. He was almost irreplaceable. It brought us down. We were having so much fun...and he died, and all of a sudden it wasn't fun anymore.” Spanky and Our Gang were forced to honour their touring commitments – within three weeks, they were back on the road. “He was such a great person and such a humanitarian,” Lefty Baker told the Roanoke Times ahead of a local appearance. “He would have wanted it this way.”
In truth, the Gang knew they couldn’t carry on. McFarlane and Garvin had their wedding ceremony in a coffee house on New Year’s Eve 1968. When the clock struck 1969, Spanky and Our Gang were done. “Anything You Choose B/W Without Rhyme or Reason” was released in early 1969 to little attention. An album intended to mark the beginning of a new era had become a tombstone. “You can only do it for love,” McFarlane told Music Connection in 1990. “I did it for the last four years for love. So did the band. They were totally devoted to the project, and I love them for it.”
McFarlane assisted Mercury in compiling Spanky’s Greatest Hit(s) (1969) before retiring to raise a family. Tragically, Lefty Baker died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1971. By that point, the Gang was an unwanted memory. McFarlane, now a mother, was singing only to her babies. She couldn’t bear to listen to the old hits. Pickering had gone AWOL in Europe. John Seiter was in-demand as a session drummer, but the rest of the old gang had gone quiet. “Fuck the money and success,” McFarlane told Music Connection in 1990. “All that does is make you famous and people point at you, stare at you and chase after you. That's boring. I freaked. I regressed. I got weird, hid at home and stuff. I hated it. The only fun part is that hour or two on stage. The rest is bullshit.”
The Gang had a brief second wind in the mid-1970s. After McFarlane recorded an unreleased solo album with Michael Nesmith, she reconnected with Pickering and the two created a new, countrified version of Spanky and our Gang. The group recorded a one-off album for Epic, Change, boasting a golden lead single in the power pop-ish “I Won’t Brand You”, but success was elusive this time. The scene had changed. In the years since Spanky and Our Gang disbanded for a second time, McFarlane has described the group as a fluke, a case of right place in the right time. but their work more than holds its own against the hipper likes of the Free Design. With the release of a new boxset compiling their entire 1960s output, now’s a good time to give a damn about Spanky and Our Gang.