“It went against the grain so much that people dismissed it as a song, but people wanted to hear the song again,” says Kim, who wrote the song in about 10 minutes strumming his guitar face-to-face with Barry while his Brill Building elder and mentor fiddled around with percussion. Like sugar itself, after all, “Sugar, Sugar” can be rather addictive.
At least until a single radio programmer in San Francisco put it out on the airwaves one day in the spring of 1969 and watched the telephone lines light up with requests from listeners anxious to experience its sunny disposition. With a song, interestingly enough, that no one wanted to take seriously, nor even play, for a good nine months after its creation during a period when Woodstock, the Vietnam War, Charles Manson and the breakup of the Beatles were on everyone’s mind. Kim already had a couple of hits under his belt in the form of “How’d We Ever Get This Way” and “Shoot ’Em Up, Baby” when “Sugar, Sugar” rolled around, but he maintains he’s forever “indebted” to those artists for giving him genuine credibility as “a songwriter in other people’s eyes.”
More “serious” music fans might have harboured some disdain for “Sugar, Sugar” in the beginning, perhaps because it was written for a cartoon band starring in a TV show based on the eternally teenage Archie comics - a fact that led the blog This Day in Music a few years ago to term it “possibly the best bubblegum song ever, by a group who didn’t even exist.” It was briefly marketed as a 7-inch flexidisc affixed to boxes of Super Sugar Crisp cereal.īut the tune, sung with giddily youthful zeal by Ron Dante and performed by a band that included Kim and such studio-session fixtures as drummer Gary Chester, keyboardist Ron Frangipane and bassist Joe “Joey Macho” Mack, would swiftly prove its staying power above and beyond its own eternal teenhood in a slew of hit cover versions: a boyish reggae take by Bob Marley later in 1969 a languid R&B romp by Wilson Pickett that would also top the charts in 1970 a faithful reprise, albeit with leather pants and a bit more wiggle in the hips by Tom Jones later that same year and a sweaty Ike and Tina Turner soul jam in 1977. It’s genius and maybe a little devious, too, because it wins you over even if you don’t necessarily want it to win you over. Whether you’re 2 or 82, you’re stuck with it. It is pop in its purest, most universal form. You’re hearing it in your head right now, I’d wager - “Sugar / Aaah, honey honey …” - because once you’ve heard “Sugar, Sugar” it never leaves you. 1, just ahead of that Beatles song.Īnd “Sugar, Sugar” has never gone away since. , just behind the Beatles’ “Get Back.” In the U.K., it ended up at No. 1 single of the year in the States, according to Billboard. The song, co-written by a young Canadian lad named Andy Kim and Brill Building producer/songwriter extraordinaire Jeff Barry, and first released on by the Calendar Records label, wound up becoming the No. singles chart - for four weeks and eight weeks, respectively - as of Sept.
13, a half-century since it simultaneously did the same on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States and the official U.K. 1 on the RPM 100 in Canada and stayed there for three weeks as of this coming Sept. It will be 50 years since “Sugar, Sugar” hit No. And swiftly send them back to Omicron Persei 8 with the hook lodged in their lizard brains for life, satisfied that now they’ve got it. If the fate of the world hinged on a quick demonstration of the essential meaning and the indefatigable power of pop music, “Sugar, Sugar” is the jam you play for the invaders. The ageless Archies jam is like a master class in precision popcraft jammed into just two minutes and 47 seconds: exuberantly joyful, simple but not too simple and almost debilitating in its catchiness. Why, you reach for “Sugar, Sugar,” of course. It’s an unlikely scenario, granted, but suppose hostile aliens landed on the front steps of the Canadian Parliament demanding to know the meaning of the word “pop” or else they reduce our cities to ashes.
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