The Orlando Phenomenon – Boy bands and bad girls made to order (II)

As prevalent, the crossover pop star continues to have enormous appeal, and with current technology – from television to the internet – and a little luck is even easier to manufacture. Marcucci had his finger on this particular pulse as well, when he mentioned actor-turned-singer Sal Mineo. An actor who can sing, a singer who can act, or an actor who can carry a tune well enough that studio wizardry like the autotuner (which takes out-of-tune vocals and puts them into key electronically) has a big advantage over a person who only acts or sings, as working in several markets can have a synergistic effect on his or her career.

Several 1950s actors like Ed “Kookie” Byrnes had their one hit record. And the Mickey Mouse Club spun off TV stars Annette Funciello to Christina Aguilera. Not to mention the media phenomena that are Jessica and Ashlee Simpson – the latter of whom was embarrassed in front of a live, national TV audience when she tried to lip synch to the wrong track on Saturday Night Live. Oddly, it didn’t seem to hurt her career too much – being the butt of jokes kept her in the spotlight. Her sister stayed there as much due to her talent (and other assets), as to her tabloid-worthy exploits and relationships. The more media they can hit, the more marketable they seem to become.

Actors who can sing became extremely important to both television and records as the rock era took hold. With the success of the Beatles in 1964, both on records and in the movies, and especially with the ratings they drew on The Ed Sullivan Show, naturally TV sought to bring them to their audience in an effort to garner those kinds of ratings on a regular basis.

When the Beatles wouldn’t commit to doing a television show of their own, TV producer Bob Rafelson took a page from Marcucci’s playbook: he recruited four young actors who could sing and turned them into the Monkees. Rafelson then enlisted music publisher Don Kirshner to give the band a musical identity. Paired with some of the best songwriters of the day (Neil Diamond, Carol King, Jerry Goffin, etc.), the actors became a pop phenomenon almost on par with band they emulated.

This led the producers of an animated series based on the long-running popular comic book Archie to call on Kirshner to supply music for the cartoon’s fictional teens. The Archies revealed something that independent rock and roll knew but the corporations were still clueless about: 8- to 11-year-olds liked popular music.

Although the musicians who played and sung as the Archies were not kids themselves, they definitely appealed to kids. Their song “Sugar, Sugar” sold 3 million copies, and Billboard named it the #1 single of 1969. Not bad, considering “real” groups like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Temptations all topped the charts that year, too. Not bad, also, for a group that didn’t actually exist.

This led to an entire movement in popular music geared toward the demographic that has come to be called the “tweens”: 8- to 12-year-olds. Its songs became known as “bubblegum music,” because they were sweet and sticky and ultimately insubstantial. Many of the bubblegum bands originated on television shows – the Partridge Family, the Banana Splits, and Lancelot Link, a band made up of lip-synching chimpanzees (Ashlee Simpson, anyone?) Of course, there were real studio performers behind them. While it didn’t exactly rule the charts, bubblegum had a substantial sales impact and made people like Artie Ripp, whose Kama Sutra records (despite the – ahem – adult connotations of its name) sold millions of singles to kids through the late 1960s and early 1970s.