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Mel-o-dy 106 (A), February 1963
b/w Dingbat Diller
(Written by Nancy Noel and Adrian McClish)
Quite the change of pace, eh?
The first five records issued on Mel-o-dy Records, Motown’s little-loved fourth-string subsidiary label, had been R&B outings for the likes of Lamont Dozier (Dearest One), the Temptations (Mind Over Matter, released as “the Pirates”) and Martha & the Vandellas (You’ll Never Cherish A Love So True, as “the Vells”). None of them had sold, and so at the start of 1963, Berry Gordy turned control of the label over to Al Klein of Dallas, Motown’s sales rep in Texas and the South, a record producer who had ambitions to run a label of his own. Klein immediately set about restocking the Mel-o-dy roster, turning it – with Gordy’s blessing – into a white-oriented comedy and C&W label, aiming to pick up sales from audiences (and counties) previously uninterested in what Motown had to offer.
First up out of Klein’s bag of tricks was this… thing. Now, first impressions are that this should be a comedy record – the liner notes to The Complete Motown Singles: Volume 3 note that the “Chuck-a-Lucks” (that name alone is worth me docking two marks, I think) were a Texas group originally formed as “the Dipsy Doodlers” in the Forties.
“Wacky” comedy, especially “wacky” American comedy from the mid-20th Century, neither ages nor exports well. Faced with a record by an American group calling themselves either the Chuck-a-Lucks or the Dipsy Doodlers, my natural instinct is to run for the bloody hills, and so I freely admit that until today, I’d never actually listened past the first few bars of this. Those first few bars – cod-Latin acoustic guitars, an ersatz mariachi band – were enough to confirm my suspicions, and so I’ve never revisited it until just now.
And, um… what?
Grant me some land and a girl that I love / In a valley down in Oriente / War heroes sing, guitars echoing from the Cuban mountains to the bay / Elena, her beauty and dark eyes outshine / The lights that brighten Oriente / But guitars ceased to play, Elena’s smile went away / When the bearded ones came that day!
Well, if this is comedy, it’s comedy of the most obtuse kind – it’s a diatribe sung in the character of a Cuban refugee (thankfully, our Chuck-a-Lucks steer well clear of doing any racist comedy accents) deploring the recent rise to power of Fidel Castro, it seems to be performed completely straight-faced.
Perhaps (and I’m being pretty charitable here) it’s meant to be funny because it’s a pastiche, an approximation of how a bunch of straight-laced preppy white boys thought a Latin American folk song should sound, and the humour is meant to come either in the simplistic lyrics (the I’m-just-a-simple-peasant “bearded ones” schtick, the stuff about there being a Sugar Cane Curtain rather than an Iron Curtain – notwithstanding the fact that the term had already been coined by some actual grown-ups to refer to the land border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic running smack down the middle of the island of Hispaniola, but anyway), or just the very idea of a group of white rockabilly types pretending to be Cuban protest singers.
Either way, it’s not even remotely funny (especially in light of the very real terrors of the Cuban Missile Crisis, still extremely fresh in most listeners’ minds in the spring of 1963), and so that leads me to a third, even more horrific possibility: that it’s meant to be serious, that this is the Chuck-a-Lucks both showing their support for the people of Cuba and taking a stand against Fidel Castro in order to show him what for. Which is (a) hugely patronising, and (b) a bit like me calling out Kim Jong-Il.
Taken at face value (and I’ve no idea how else to take it), this is a horrible, cheesy whitebread pastiche of Latin music, and it has absolutely no place in the Motown canon at all. Garbage of such magnitude it almost deserves a category all of its own; for now, this one will have to do.
MOTOWN JUNKIES VERDICT
(I’ve had MY say, now it’s your turn. Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment, or click the thumbs at the bottom there. Dissent is encouraged!)
You’re reading Motown Junkies, an attempt to review every Motown A- and B-side ever released. Click on the “previous” and “next” buttons below to go back and forth through the catalogue, or visit the Master Index for a full list of reviews so far.
(Or maybe you’re only interested in The Chuck-A-Lucks? Click for more, you utter weirdo.)
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| Mary Wells “Two Wrongs Don’t Make A Right” |
The Chuck-A-Lucks “Dingbat Diller” |
Motown Junkies 
LOL
And just think. In his outstanding biography of Motown’s Detroit years, Where Did Our Love Go, author Nelson George calls the Supremes’ A Bit Of Liverpool, …Sing Country Western & Pop and We Remember Sam Cooke albums representative of “Berry’s desire for -and blindness to- the pitfalls of taking integration to the point of pandering.”
I suspect we can safely conclude Nelson was never forced to listen to this lost jewel.
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What the hell is this?
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Hard to understand why EVEN the semi-clueless and not-very-successful Mel-O-dy A & R chief, Al Klein, would release such garbage!
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Motown enthusiasts were never expected to appreciate this music…yes I said music. The Chuck-A-Lucks should never have been put into any “Motown” collection even having recorded one 2 sided 45 for the Mel-O-Dy label. The author of this post rightfully points out that Al Klein signed the group in an effort to broaden the audience of the Motown labels. But this is NOT and was never intended to be music for the vast majority of Motown listeners. It was made to appeal to the Texas / South / West audience, and the Chuck-A-Lucks / Dipsy Doodlers did just that for over a quarter century. They were primarily night club performers who had a blend of comedy and music – some serious music – some parody. They performed the parody music to their nightclub audiences and their few recordings were not all intended as parody. If you go back the time of this recording, the entire country was gripped with fear and loathing of Castro in Cuba, and the Missile Crisis proved that fear to be justified. Most of America HATED Castro. Especially people from the south. This song was written and performed as a way to convey that the magic that was pre-Castro Cuba was lost and they wanted to give hope that some day the “bearded ones” would be defeated and the Sugar Cane Curtain would be chopped down and the magic restored. It never happened as we now know and the Communists are still in control of Cuba, but back then – and you must really have been around then or be a student of history to know this – Castro was much hated by most of the US. This is not a comedy song, and the original author said he would find that to be worse than if it were comedy. I strongly disagree knowing what I know of the times and see it as a song of solidarity to those of the many thousands of Cubans who were made refugees or worse, killed, by the Castro regime. It is quite easy to take a song like this and criticize it when you look at it in context with Motown music. It is true as the original author stated that this song has “no place in the Motown canon” and never should have been placed into any Motown collection. You can criticize it as “hugely patronizing” if you wish, but you show your ignorance of the times in which it was written and the audience it was intended for. I do not claim it to be any great piece of music, but to slam it as worthless is ignorance, pure and simple. P.S. For the only recording made by the Chuck-A-Lucks of a true parody, listen to “Big Fat John” on their 1969 Shannon Records comedy album – that was truly a parody of the once popular “Big Bad John” and is truly quite humorous to this day!
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Ignorance? Yeah, I totally overlooked how grateful the people of Cuba and the wider Cuban diaspora were that some tourists released this piss-poor scribble in solidarity with their plight.
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They should’ve chucked out the Chuck-a-Lucks. Wow … combining right wing politics with appallingly bad music … definitely needs a negative number for the rating. Just the name of the band warrants that. (Of course, now you’re probably going to tell me that this actually sold well in Appalachia or something).
The irony here is many layers deep. First of all, thanks to US policy dating back to the 19th Century, Cubans had consistently had it much worse economically and had been subjected to more corrupt and authoritarian dictatorships before the revolution. I’m not a fan of Castro, but he was inarguably the least evil ruler Cuba had ever had at that point and we (by which I mean the USA) were largely to blame for the string of vile, corrupt, racist, puppet dictators who preceded him.
Second, as I’ve pointed out, a large proportion of the musical ideas in rock and r&b are directly derived from Cuban music, which had its most commercially viable decade in the US in the 1950s. The revolution, the missile crisis, and the embargo served the purpose of completely isolating Cuba from the US. We forgot all about Cuban music – Cuba was just that scary place where the Russians may have been hiding nukes. As such, if it was in Spanish, it became “salsa”, and if was in English it became rock & r&b. But under the hood, it was Cuban music. Heard it Through the Grapevine is Cuban to the core. The idea of a thematic hook bass riff and the idea of an even, non-shuffle groove – neither was part of North American music until it was introduced by Chano Pozo via Dizzy Gillespie in the 40s (e.g., “Manteca”) and taken to the bank in the 50s in the form of mambo and chachachá – thus bleeding into rock and r&b to create the music we think of as non-latin/non-jazz pop.
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Tony Moore? Are you also Kevin Moore? I, myself ended up getting a second user name on this website, when I logged on from my other computer. The same thing happened to me on You-Tube.
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yup – I was trying another computer to see if it was more comfortable to spent long hours in front of
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Do you have a third name: All Klein???
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Do you have a third name: Al Klein???
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Ha! Ha! I’m sure you are kidding. But, in case not, NO, I am not Al Klein, the Texas-based ex-Motown Distributor, sales manager and director of Mel-O-dy Records. And he is no relation of mine. Although Carole King (birth name, Carole Klein), may be a distant relative.
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Of course I was kidding. Impressed with the Carole King possibilities.
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Now that I know this song wasn’t intended as a mocking song, but as a political solidarity statement, I’d STILL rate it at “1”. I don’t like it’s sound, nor the way it is sung, and I never cared about lyrics. I DO agree that Bautista and the other US puppet rulers’ regimes were worse for the people of Cuba than was Fidel Castro. I’m no fan of Communism, nor am I a fan of right wing dictatorships, nor ANY government, for that matter, other than, perhaps village councils. I’m no fan of Human beings. I would hope we could limit the Human population of The World to a few hundred thousand, having seen what they have done to this planet. But, my rating of music is totally based upon how it sounds to me. The lyrics almost never have any bearing upon how much I like a song, and the reasons for songs being written would never affect how much I like it.
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If this song is 1/10, will the blogger invent negative notes for Vanity’s ‘Under The Influence’ or Bruce Willis’ cover of ‘Respect Yourself’,which are both Motown records ? (Sorry for the lucky people who had forgotten them !)
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Bruce Willis on Motown??? Glad I turned off the radio in 1967, and stopped buying records in 1972, and only listen to pre-1972 music including vaulted vinyl unreleased. I guess Berry Gordy’s great success with Motown allowed him to afford to go for the record of the most weird novelty releases.
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I remember reading that Bruce Willis insisted on signing to Motown because he wanted to be on the same label as his favourite artist, Stevie Wonder. In all honesty, Bruce’s album was better than I expected, and on “Under the Boardwalk” backing vocals were provided by the Temptations.
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Mr Willis has four singles coming up when we finally get to the mid-1980s, towards the endgame for independent Motown and for this blog. As 144man said, it wasn’t *quite* as terrible as it might have been.
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