Vanilla fudge songs cracked#
Vanilla fudge songs professional#

Out that fall, it went gold as it sailed to #6 on Billboard’s pop album listings, sticking around for an amazing 80 weeks. The band’s eponymous debut album, also produced by Morton, was a different story.

Vanilla fudge songs cracked#

Atco pressed up “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” and it cracked the pop hit parade in July of 1967, though it only climbed to #67. It really was named after a scrumptious flavor of ice cream that the female lead singer of a Long Island group called The Unspoken Word loved. But The Pigeons name itself would be flying the coop.Īpt though the allusion may be, rechristening the band Vanilla Fudge in early ‘67 had nothing to do with the band’s skill at revamping R&B material. Morton was a persuasive presence he had several labels bidding on the band, and Atco Records–the same Atlantic imprint that had made stars of everyone from The Coasters and Bobby Darin to Ben E. “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” grabbed Shadow’s attention, and he checked the band into a recording studio and produced the master in one take. Basille invited Morton to The Action House to check The Pigeons out. Phil Basille, their manager and owner of a Long Island nightspot, The Action House, where the band often headlined, knew George “Shadow” Morton, the mastermind behind The Shangri-Las’ rise to fame. Appice was playing with another outfit, and the band must have been impressed with his thundering beat because he was drafted into the ranks straightaway. The Pigeons made their final personnel adjustment near year’s end, bidding Brennan adieu in favor of drummer Carmine Appice, born Decemin Staten Island, N.Y. Their spectacular rearrangement of “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” was worked out onstage the night they heard it.

Stein and his cohorts heard the song as a slow, majestic ballad with plenty of drama. That grandiose concept would be put to the test on “You Keep Me Hangin’ On ” it was one in a string of pop/R&B chart-toppers by Diana Ross and her Supremes under the direction of Motown’s prolific creative trio Brian and Eddie Holland and Lamont Dozier.

Stein cites The Vagrants as a primary influence on his own group’s approach. While sharing a bill at The Eye on Long Island, the band was blown away by guitarist Leslie West’s band, The Vagrants, which specialized in expanding the songs of other artists into gargantuan productions. By early ‘66, The Pigeons had built an audience base up and down the East Coast without benefit of recording, although eight songs they laid on tape mid-year eventually saw light of day on a Wand LP, While the Whole World Was Eating Vanilla Fudge, credited to Mark Stein & The Pigeons. The Pigeons’ set list mostly consisted of R&B covers, and they sometimes backed stars such as The Shangri-Las and Patti LaBelle & The Blue Belles. Further reinforcing the family ties, Mark’s father was their booking agent. That cemented the first lineup of The Pigeons, who tightened their attack by rehearsing on the Bogert family’s front porch in New Jersey. Lead guitarist Vince Martell, a Navy vet born Novemin the Bronx and recently returned from a stint in Key West with a band known as Ricky T & The Satans Three, was recruited through a local agent. Finding inspiration in the dynamic organ-based soul-rock of The Young Rascals (their Felix Cavaliere was Stein’s musical hero), the hottest band on the New York circuit, Stein and Bogert gave the Showmen their notice and put together their own band, drummer Joey Brennan also switching allegiances. When the band’s bassist was drafted, Tim Bogert, born Augin New York City, came into the equation. Stein started playing piano when he was a wee lad of four, tried his hand at squeezing the accordion for a brief minute, and made a doo-wop 45 as Mark Stevens & The Charmers before settling in behind the organ and joining a local outfit, Rick Martin & The Showmen, that gigged regularly on the bustling New York club scene.

Vanilla fudge songs professional#

Lead vocalist and keyboardist Mark Stein, born Main Bayonne, New Jersey, had plenty of professional musical experience despite barely being out of his teens when the band burst onto the national scene in 1967. Very few of them recast a song entirely in their own image the way Vanilla Fudge did with the Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.” The powerhouse rock quartet’s inspired remake of the Holland-Dozier-Holland-penned anthem slowed the tempo down radically, with one creative foot planted in the era’s psychedelic movement and the other pointing to the advent of heavy metal hovering just around the corner. A lot of rock bands covered soul hits during the 1960s.