History
The birth of bubblegum is generally dated from the success in 1968 of The Lemon Pipers' "Green Tambourine", 1910 Fruitgum Company's "Simon Says" and The Ohio Express' "Yummy Yummy Yummy", but music critics have identified novelty songs including The Dixie Cups' "Iko Iko" and Patti Page's "(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?" as possible precursors.
A breeding ground for the genre has also been found in the field of 1960s garage rock, the songs of which shared an overriding simplicity with bubblegum. Garage and bubblegum groups were also both generally singles acts. Several garage punk bands, including Shadows of Knight, later recorded bubblegum tracks, while Ohio Express, one of the major 1960s bubblegum bands, began their recording career with punk-rooted tunes.
Between those two camps emerged Florida group The Royal Guardsmen, who scored a US No. 2 hit in 1966 with their novelty hit "Snoopy Vs. The Red Baron", and The Fifth Estate, whose 1967 song "Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead" reached No. 11 in the US.
Tommy James and the Shondells are also seen as a major influence, with such songs as 1964's "Hanky Panky", 1966's "It's Only Love", and 1967's "I Think We're Alone Now" and "Gettin Together", as is Tommy Roe, but critics are divided on one possible major bubblegum band prototype: The Monkees. Although the band began as a prefabricated, fictional rock group concocted to sell records and TV advertising time, the band later staged a coup and wrested creative control from their creators.
Read more about this topic: Bubblegum Pop
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man’s judgement.”
—Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)