Bubblegum

Headquarters cover

Headquarters

the Monkees
Third Eye cover

Third Eye

Redd Kross
1,2,3, Red Light cover

1,2,3, Red Light

1910 Fruitgum Company
Elephant Candy cover

Elephant Candy

The Fun and Games
Sound Magazine cover

Sound Magazine

The Partridge Family
Crazy Elephant cover

Crazy Elephant

Crazy Elephant
Ohio Express cover

Ohio Express

Ohio Express
Goody Goody Gumdrops cover

Goody Goody Gumdrops

1910 Fruitgum Company
I Wonder What She's Doing Tonite? cover

I Wonder What She's Doing Tonite?

Bobby Hart, Tommy Boyce, Boyce & Hart
Middle of the Road cover

Middle of the Road

Middle of the Road
Kasenetz-Katz Singing Orchestral Circus cover

Kasenetz-Katz Singing Orchestral Circus

Kasenetz-Katz Singing Orchestral Circus
The Archies cover

The Archies

The Archies
Marshmallow Way cover

Marshmallow Way

Marshmallow Way
Green Tambourine cover

Green Tambourine

The Lemon Pipers

“Bubblegum is the naked truth,” as the 1968 compilation album, and subsequent (unassociated) book about the genre, has it. I’ve always appreciated the sentiment as a snook cocked at dominant cultural wisdom about sincerity, value, and authenticity. Of course, now we’ve lived through the days of poptimism, and research fields like cultural studies have helped us dismantle misguided divisions between high and low culture, while recognising the ongoing social sedimentation of such hierarchies, things don’t look quite so clear-cut. But the truth of bubblegum music prevails – pop music can be featherlight and yet pack a deep emotional punch; pleasure, joy and frivolity can tell us more about the world around us than emotionally eviscerating torch songs, ponderous prog rock, or indeed, pop-psychology textbooks.

The creation of bubblegum music as a genre can ultimately be traced back to two American producer-songwriters, Jerry Kasenetz and Jeffry Katz, whose Super K production house is the historical home of the bubblegum ethos. In their wish to enchant a teenage audience, they harboured a mind’s-eye view of the average teen, listening to their radio while chewing gum, and had the revelation: “Ah, this is like bubblegum music.” In this respect, bubblegum music goes hand-in-hand with the invention of the teenager as consumer category, their post-World War II boomtime creation as an audience to be relentlessly targeted with commodities as tools of identity construction.

But bubblegum music somehow came to mean more than just that. In its creative voraciousness, it chewed up and spat out the music that surrounded it: in these songs, on these records, you can hear the spirit of the Beatles, the Kinks, the Beach Boys, and so many more, all placed in service of an ultimate pop spirit that drifted, in most welcome fashion, from the songwriter-auteur stylisation that was being developed by record companies, PR spin and a nascent rock music press. The point of this music was that it was sweet, sugary, a shot of glucose – feverishly fun, yet disposable in its design. That it has lasted, in certain record collector subcultures and music fandoms, tells us much about the way aesthetic disposability develops its own legacies.

There were, of course, many more figures involved in bubblegum in its late sixties heyday. There are creative and industrial figures like Joey Levine, Tommy Boyce, Bobby Hart, and Neil Bogart, and labels like Buddah and Kama Sutra. There are media crossovers, like television shows for The Monkees (whose position in the bubblegum firmament is contentious), The Archies and The Banana Splits. There are also genre crossovers – there’s a clear through-line from garage pop and rock, the sound of amped-up teenagers getting loud and rowdy in the basement, to bubblegum’s “keep it simple, stupid” designs. And there are relationships between sunshine pop, psychedelic pop (or pop sike) and bubblegum that can sometimes be hard to track.

I guess one of the things that distinguishes bubblegum from other genres is mercenary intent. The producers and writers, and some of the musicians no doubt, were there to make a quick buck. But there is an aesthetic at play here, which pushes a song’s essential pop core to the forefront; instrumentation that’s generally rudimentary, with simple yet dynamic chord changes; sometimes, if you’re lucky, you’ll get some production flourishes, particularly on the more ‘sunshine pop’ end of things (who tended to love their baroque and rococo stylings).

Bubblegum, at its core, tends to be thought an American phenomenon. If it happened in Britain and elsewhere, it was derived in some way from the ethos of production houses like Super K, in an either overt or covert way. In the early seventies, a wave of bubblegum-esque pop emerged from Britain (Middle of the Road, Lieutenant Pigeon) but that material, in my mind, has some kind of loose connection with glam and its ‘junkshop glam’ sub-genre. And if this list focuses on that sixties heyday, with a few gestures toward bubblegum’s uptake by underground artists, that’s a function of space more than anything: you could trace another line through to teen pop like Britney, artists like Charli XCX, even k-pop. 

The other curious thing here is thinking of bubblegum as an albums genre, when so much of the music made its way into the world as seven-inch singles, one two-to-three minute pop injection after another. Yet the albums are intriguing in their oft-identikit formation (much like garage punkers The Seeds, come to think of it) and some of the compilations are brilliant collections of pop genius. Bubblegum, and neighbouring genres like sixties teen pop and girl pop, also has its own network of reissue labels and dedicated boosters.

On a personal note, I find this music endlessly intriguing, fascinating, and joyous. In its seeming lack of guard and guile, it somehow tells us just as much, if not more, about its times than the quote-unquote profound rock and pop music that has come to stand for the late sixties and early seventies in much music crit discourse. However, it’s not reducible to some kind of rockist/poptimist dialectic. In my (perhaps addled) mind, Kasenetz-Katz or Joey Levine aren’t the dialectical opposite of Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell – they simply stand proud and smart alongside such figures as indices of the great art that help create and sustain their times. Their cultural savvy might have been applied to different means and ends, but they still battled in the marketplace of ideas, and they landed some significant blows (anyone, like me, who can sing The Archies “Sugar Sugar” in their head from beginning to end will know what I’m talking about).

I’ve not come to rush to bubblegum’s defence, but rather to celebrate its unquestionable genius.

Jon Dale

Headquarters

the Monkees
Headquarters cover

They weren’t really a bubblegum group, but they were manufactured (for their TV series), and their early songs shared a core simplicity with much bubblegum pop of the era. Headquarters has The Monkees leaving that early, formative phase, and stretching out – you’d not have the stream-of-consciousness ramble of “Randy Scouse Git” on the Monkees’ debut album. It’s also the first album where the Monkees really wrestled creative control from management and record label and played on their own albums. Here, they’re joined by heavyweights like producer Chip Douglas and the great Jerry Yester on an album that aligns the group’s formative songwriting efforts with a few songs from the Boyce and Hart duo, who were closely aligned with the Monkees. It may not feature their best-known songs, but it’s a gem from a time when the Monkees were beginning to realise their potential as artists, and not as real members of a fictional band.

Third Eye

Redd Kross
Third Eye cover

They’d already done hardcore and power pop, on Born Innocent and Neurotica respectively; where next for the McDonald brothers, the lynchpins and arch conceptualists of Redd Kross? Third Eye pointed in several directions – there was a strange twinge of hair metal here at times, which isn’t a surprise, given Redd Kross influenced some of those groups, but what comes through most clearly is a bubblegum glam ethos that reconciles the sugared pop confections of sixties bubblegum with the OTT, garish hues of the seventies – no wonder there’s a song called “Elephant Flares.” Somehow, the plastic-y sheen of nineties production does favours to Third Eye, giving it a hypercolour saturation that suits its pop smarts. And the biggest signal of all, “Bubblegum Factory,” could have fallen directly from a Kasenetz-Katz album.

1,2,3, Red Light

1910 Fruitgum Company
1,2,3, Red Light cover

Their second album, with one of their most lasting songs – the title cut, of course, a pop gem that Welsh indie gang Pooh Sticks cottoned onto, covering it in an amphetamine rush as part of their 1988 singles box set – and a bunch of other chips off the same old block. Producer-svengalis Kasenetz and Katz certainly knew how to milk a thing for all it was worth, but when the source material’s this joyously good, it doesn’t really matter: indeed, the churn of the bubblegum machine is what gives these albums their aesthetic backbone. It might take a leap to think of it as conceptual art, but the intertextuality of the album is one of its charms – “1, 2, 3 Red Light” reappears as a game in “The Song Song” (how meta can you get), and moments later “Yummy Yummy Yummy” gets name-checked; a few songs later, “9, 10, Let’s Do It Again” stumbles into view, but only after a charmingly direct cover of Dylan’s song for Manfred Mann, “The Mighty Quinn.”

Elephant Candy

The Fun and Games
Elephant Candy cover

The Fun & Games were signed to Uni Records by Gary Zekley, a West Coast songwriter known by his work for The Mamas & The Papas, The Grass Roots, The Clique, Jan & Dean, Spanky & Our Gang… it’s quite a resumé. He also wrote the lion’s share of the songs on Elephant Candy, one of the better albums from the nexus of bubblegum and sunshine pop. The group came closest to a hit with “The Grooviest Girl In The World,” whose rambunctious energy and sass is pure bubblegum, but if anything, The Fun & Games excelled at the gentler, more pop-sike side of things: “Topanga Canyon Road,” the album’s highlight, is lusciously toothsome in its arrangement and the generosity of its languorous melody. If you’re a sucker for this sound, Zekley’s other sunshine pop protégés, The Yellow Balloon, are well worth hearing, too.

Strawberry Bubblegum

Various Artists
Strawberry Bubblegum cover

Many of the singles and oddities compiled on Strawberry Bubblegum have also turned up in a few other places – see the third disc, entitled Strawberry Hit Factory, of 10cc’s Before During After collection – but if you can find it, Strawberry Bubblegum is the place to go to get to grips with what happened before 10cc became the band everyone remembers for “I’m Not In Love.” These pre-10cc recordings, under names like Hotlegs, Festival, Doctor Father, Crazy Elephant, etc., make for great pop – hits that didn’t quite hit, except, maybe, for Hotlegs’ “Neanderthal Man.” Graham Gouldman was employed as a songwriter by Super K Productions, so the crossover with bubblegum royalty is there, but the folks from 10cc would probably have done this stuff anyway, given the inherent weirdness and “not-quite-right”-ness of much of their music. Such is its genius.

Sound Magazine

The Partridge Family
Sound Magazine cover

In the trailer for Born Innocent, the documentary about American rock group Redd Kross, a bemused Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth talks about Jeff McDonald of Redd Kross arguing that Sound Magazine is up there with the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds as a psychedelic pop gem. McDonald has a good point. It’s certainly the best, most consistent Partridge Family album – some say it’s “more sophisticated,” but that feels the wrong way to look at a Partridge Family album. (Sophistication is often a by-word for studio tedium, music drained of all affect, and that’s not an accusation I’d ever throw at the Partridge Family.) There are some genuinely gorgeous songs here, like the swooning “Echo Valley 2-6809,” or the gentle, sparkling “Rainmaker.” It’s a lost classic.

Crazy Elephant

Crazy Elephant
Crazy Elephant cover

It was a good jape: Crazy Elephant, the most underground of groups, made up of Welsh coal miners. In reality, Crazy Elephant was the concept of Cadillacs member Bob Spencer, who shacked up with the Super K production team. Their sole hit, “Gimme Gimme Good Lovin’,” was penned by Joey Levine and Richie Cordell; most of the rest of this, their 1969 debut album, was Kasenetz-Katz material, other than Otis Redding’s “Respect,” and Sondheim and Bernstein’s “Somewhere.” It’s a solid, smart bubblegum album with some soul and R&B edges; the production team is getting ambition with the seven-minute “Respect,” from its goth-y organ drones at the start, to the weird, cut-up rhythm in the verse. But that debut single towers over everything. They’d move to London the following year and hook up with the nascent 10cc writing team for a classic last gasp, “(There Ain’t No) Umbopo.”

Take Bubble Gum Music Underground

Zig Zag People
Take Bubble Gum Music Underground cover

It’s hard entirely to figure whether this is sincere or ironic, but The Zig Zag People Take Bubble Gum Music Underground is still a sign of bubble gum’s pervasiveness. Okay, the helium-voiced chorus on “Indian Giver” does suggest The Zig Zag People might be taking the piss, ever so slightly, as does the song title “Sally Goes to the Dentist,” but elsewhere, the ‘underground’ covers of bubblegum classics like “Simon Says” and “Hanky Panky” are smart and eloquent. Whether through design or accident, they recognise both the sturdiness of the writing and the pliability of the aesthetic.  The result is an album that skirts psychsploitation, but does some creative, playful things with songs that weren’t short on such smarts in their initial incarnation. Not bad for a session and album invented by management heads at Decca Records, with ‘the group’ helicoptered in at the last minute.

Ohio Express

Ohio Express
Ohio Express cover

Always dug Ohio Express for the way they turned bubblegum songs into garage band stormers: “Yummy Yummy Yummy” is classic bubblegum, but its reductive arrangement – twangy, chiming guitars; accents on the four; clattering drums, lithe bass, the strain in singer Joey Levine’s voice – offers a direct route from those early Them sides to garage outsiders like Mouse & The Traps. Of course, Ohio Express weren’t really Ohio Express; the band that performed live on television were miming to session recordings from the young Levine and co. It didn’t really matter for this album, which benefits from the studio largesse, though it must have chafed for the actual group Ohio Express, who had a local rep for grittier R&B sounds. If you’re going to get steamrolled into a Super K production fantasy, though, at least your name will be attached some great proto-jangle pop songs as part of the deal.

Goody Goody Gumdrops

1910 Fruitgum Company
Goody Goody Gumdrops cover

From the kid-scrawl cover art, with photos of the group edited in, collage-style, to the classicism of its construction – eleven songs, none hitting the three-minute mark – Goody Goody Gumdrops has valid claim to perfection, if that’s something you’re looking for. But what matters about 1910 Fruitgum Company’s third album isn’t so much its contours and structure, as its ease of performance and its melodic nous. If the intro to the album’s title song hints at garage rock, it gets kaleidoscopic soon enough, without losing its essential pop-ness; “Mr. Cupid” points towards the daffier end of psychedelia for a moment. I’m not sure ‘development’ really plays into a bubblegum group’s career, and there isn’t much of a shift from 1910 Fruitgum Company’s debut album Simon Says through to this one, but I enjoy Goody Goody Gumdrops more; it lands all its blows, however softly. And Teenage Fanclub, a group who know a thing or two about a perfectly crafted song, covered the title song.

The Super K Kollection

Various Artists
The Super K Kollection  cover

These two compilations, released in 1994 on the Collectables label, are great places to start for an introduction to Super K, the most important production house for sixties bubblegum pop. They mop up some of the strongest songs from the best-known groups from Super K – 1910 Fruitgum Company, Crazy Elephant, The Shadows Of Knight – and supplement that material with lesser-known cuts from the Super K team’s stable of bands, some of which are every bit the equal of the bigger names. It’s a curious thing, but with the benefit of hindsight, bubblegum pop feels custom designed for the collector, for people who obsess over unexpected one-offs, strange 45s, blips on the pop-cultural radar; these kollections are rich with such fabulous oddities.

I Wonder What She's Doing Tonite?

Bobby Hart, Tommy Boyce, Boyce & Hart
I Wonder What She's Doing Tonite? cover

Bobby Hart’s memoir was titled Psychedelic Bubble Gum, which tidily sums up the best things about his co-written songs for the Monkees. On I Wonder What She’s Doing Tonight?, he and Tommy Boyce essayed their second take on their signature sound, a light, sweet-tasting pop that points, at times, back to the gentler end of folk-rock, while embracing the elegance of pop at its most eloquent, and bubblegum at its sweetest. And the psychedelia? Well, those sitars that introduce “Love Every Day” gesture toward the intersection of Indian classical music and psychedelic pop that invigorated the late sixties counter-culture, I guess. It depends on how wide your purview is, when it comes to psychedelia, but there’s certainly something gently trippy about Boyce & Hart’s admixture of folk and sunshine pop, at its best.

Middle of the Road

Middle of the Road
Middle of the Road cover

Over to Scotland, then, for a next wave of bubblegum-esque music. There are subtle yet important differences between American and British bubblegum, and the latter seems to sit more neatly alongside the ‘junkshop glam’ aesthetic – lesser-known glam groups from the first half of the seventies, rough around the edges but full of spark and verve – and the novelty hits of the likes of Lieutenant Pigeon’s “Moldy Old Dough.” But Middle Of The Road had something extra in the tank; while “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep,” the song they’re still best known for, might feel corny at first glance, subsequent covers by indie artists Lush and PJ Harvey have exposed the bizarre melancholy at the heart of its super-pop-ness. Listening to the songs on Middle of the Road, it’s no surprise that they were an influence on ABBA.

Kasenetz-Katz Singing Orchestral Circus

Kasenetz-Katz Singing Orchestral Circus
Kasenetz-Katz Singing Orchestral Circus cover

Kasenetz and Katz get preposterous here, forming an ‘eight-group all-rock orchestra’ from their stable of artists – with great names like Lt. Garcia’s Magic Music Box and J.C.W. Rat Finks – and pulling together a fake live album recorded ‘at the Carnegie Hall’. Yeah, right. Beatles and Righteous Brothers covers are part of the package, though they kind of disappear in the haze of the album’s ridiculousness – see the “Count Dracula” rant, Jamie Lyons’s various interjections. The hidden gem here is a lithe, lowdown and slippery version of rock’n’roll classic “Hey Joe,” with a buzzsaw tone to die for. You could measure the quality of a garage gang by their cover of “Hey Joe” – looks like you can also do that with bubblegum supergroups.

The Great White Wonder

The Pooh Sticks
The Great White Wonder cover

By the time of The Great White Wonder, Wales’s The Pooh Sticks had pretty much become the UK’s mirror-image Redd Kross, in their depth of understanding of the detritus of sixties and seventies pop. The Great White Wonder casts a wider net than their earlier, ironic indie-pop sides, aiming for grandiosity on the fifteen-minute “I’m In You” (named after a Peter Frampton song), including a love-on-the-road anthem (“Desperado”), and front-loaded with covers, or detournements, of garage pop and radio hits (e.g. The Four Seasons’ “Who Loves You”). The bubblegum ethos is writ large here, though it’s rendered with a clattery joy that transmutes it through the independent music ethos: you could hear the group trying to reach for a million seller. That cover art, too, is telling – they were the best cartoon band since The Archies.

We're the Banana Splits

The Banana Splits
We're the Banana Splits cover

Who didn’t want to be a Banana Split? Well, the writing team behind the TV series’ four-piece, and their songs, was pretty far-reaching – they called on Barry White, Al Kooper, and Gene Pitney at various points through the We’re the Banana Splits album. As far as “albums from the TV series” go, it’s a treat, the sound of Fleegle, Bingo, Drooper and Snork perfectly pitched within the bubblegum pop universe; sweet songs of deep simplicity. The Ramones might have covered some bubblegum classics, but the Dickies might have bested them with their brilliantly dumb 1978 punk cover of “We’re The Banana Splits,” a hit in the UK and yet another signal that the space between punk and bubblegum was smaller than most’d think. It all makes you wish their rival group, the all-girl Sour Grapes Bunch, had recorded an album too.

The Archies

The Archies
The Archies cover

The Archies are, perhaps, the first band people think of when they think of bubblegum music. That makes plenty of sense, given their story: a fictional cartoon group designed for The Archie Show, their music was recorded by session musicians, and they gifted bubblegum its biggest, most memorable song, “Sugar Sugar.” But the album it eventually appeared on was plenty of fun: they definitely caught the mood of the bubblegum moment and mercilessly exploited it. The ace up their sleeve was having their songs written by Jeff Barry, whose history includes co-writes with the likes of Ellie Greenwich, Phil Spector, and Shadow Morton. Pop royalty, in other words, and his time with wife Greenwich at Red Bird, not to mention a stint with The Monkees, served him well for these craftily designed pop nuggets. In 1970, a post-Box Tops, pre-Big Star Alex Chilton gleefully immolated “Sugar Sugar” in the sessions for his debut solo album. He knew what was up.

Quick Joey Small, I’m In Love With You

Kasenetz-Katz-Super-Circus
Quick Joey Small, I’m In Love With You cover

The vocal delivery of “Quick Joey Small,” by Joey Levine, is one of my favourites of all time – a faux-snottiness that both nods at the formulaic nature of Kasenetz-Katz productions, while transcending that very formula through an overriding conviction that draws the entire song into its orbit. It’s a great way to start Quick Joey Small, I’m In Love With You, the second of several weird Kasenetz-Katz ‘circus’ albums / compilations / cash-in endeavours. It’s a riot, though, from the daffy Beatleseque psych-pop of “Let Me Introduce You (To The Kasenetz-Katz Orchestral Circus)” through the Kinskian/Troggerific riffs of “Easy To Love.” There’s something profound in the way Kasenetz-Katz and their writing team pull together basic pop signifiers and create transcendent art through their endless interchangeability.

On the Hot Dog Streets

Go-Kart Mozart
On the Hot Dog Streets cover

For some Felt fans, Lawrence’s subsequent career – chintzy glam with Denim; bubblegum trash with Go-Kart Mozart and Mozart Estate – is a betrayal of the man’s capacities. They’ve got it wrong, of course, but you can understand the disappointment of a fanbase that was seduced by the regal indie dream-pop of Felt’s “Primitive Painters” when confronted with the hyper-plasticity of a song like “Come On You Lot.” But Lawrence’s genius is his ability to turn the junk of bubblegum into canny, ear-naggingly catchy songs – of sorts – that allegorise both his career dreams (he’s never become the pop star he so desperately wanted to be), the drudgery of everyday life, and the sheer weirdness of popular culture’s history.

Marshmallow Way

Marshmallow Way
Marshmallow Way cover

The two figures behind Marshmallow Way were bubblegum legends – co-writers of 1910 Fruitgum Company’s big hit, and genre evergreen, “Good Goody Gumdrops,” Billy Carl and Reid Whitelaw knew their way around a simple, easy-to-remember melody. Marshmallow Way was their plaything, a group they grabbed from the New Jersey circuit and gave a suite of songs that are in the bubblegum wheelhouse, with some unexpected soul / R&B touches – see the intro to “(Like The Love Of) Romeo & Juliet” – that elevate this self-titled album beyond much of what came to be known as the bubblegum canon. It’s a real surprise that an album this strong, this joyous, hasn’t been dug from history and reissued by a label like Rev-Ola.

Green Tambourine

The Lemon Pipers
Green Tambourine cover

The Lemon Pipers didn’t like their two hit singles, “Green Tambourine” and “Rice Is Nice,” calling the songs ‘funny-money music.’ That’s what happens when a young R&B group, who shared stages with the likes of psychedelic rock monsters like Moby Grape and Spirit, sign a record deal and get pushed into the bubblegum lane. “Green Tambourine” itself is one of the best songs from the sixties bubblegum corpus, a Brill Building write that hit #1 on the charts. The Lemon Pipers, on record, felt more ornate, liquid, with clanking pianos and sweeping strings wrapped around songs that re-route Merseybeat and psych-pop into American chart fodder. The coyness of it all has its charm, though, and you can sense the group’s frustrations with their new context in little touches, like the wah-guitar woven through “Shoeshine Boy.” They didn’t quite seem to fit with the ornate, baroque pop of “The Shoemaker of Leatherware Square,” but the songs themselves are great, the nine-minute “Through With You” is smartly ambitious, and Green Tambourine is one of the most consistently rewarding bubblegum albums.