Rediscover Records, Elgin, Illinois. The voice to which I’m only half-listening sounds familiar, but something’s off, also. I look up blankly from the records I’m riffling through and realize that I’m hearing Elton John, one of his well-known hits from the early seventies, but I haven’t heard this version before. Is it a demo? An early take? A scratch vocal? Elton sounds pretty awful, as if he’s poorly imitating someone imitating him. That, or he has a cold. I ask the cashier what’s playing. She points to the album sleeve propped on the counter.
Turns out that I’m half correct. It is Elton. And it isn’t. Elton John Rock Hits was released in 1975 near the tail end of the pianist-singer’s half-decade meteoric journey across the Top 40, but John was nowhere to be found in the studio when the album was concocted. The songs here, those that momentarily confounded me in the record store—“Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” “Daniel,” “Rocket Man,” “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me,” et al.—were performed by King’s Road, an anonymous group of session musicians and singers whose catalogue by the mid-70s was bulging. Between 1970 and 1975 they issued twenty-three albums, nearly all on the Pickwick label (their career would be finished by ‘76). King’s Road wasn’t a band so much as a hologram—a holoband, a hollow band—a one-dimensional image of a group whose sole purpose was to imitate, gamely if at times ineptly, the well-known hits of the day. King’s Road was a bad joke, a cut-rate impressionist. King’s Road was the best at being the worst.
Pickwick Records was founded in 1950 by Cy Leslie, a Harvard-educated World War II veteran who understood the dynamics of the wallet. He’d started Voco Records, an audio greeting card company that branched out to children’s albums. After further success with the Cricket label, he began issuing cheaply priced albums through Pickwick, initially based in Long Island City across the East River from Manhattan. Through the 1950s and ‘60s, Pickwick specialized in low-cost albums that were designed to move swiftly from studio to retail/discount stores to family rec rooms.
In the 1970s Pickwick began acquiring albums that had been deleted by record companies, including RCA and Motown, and proceeded to flood the market with one cheaply packaged reissue after another—think of the cut-rate Elvis albums you’ve been seeing in used record stores and thrift shops for decades. Pickwick would eventually purchase a sizeable pressing plant and enter into profitable agreements with various retailers, most notably Musicland, which agreed to hawk Pickwick products in their stores (known as “rack jobbing operations”). Thus as John Broven observes in Record Makers and Breakers: Voices of the Independent Rock 'n' Roll Pioneers, “Pickwick controlled content, manufacturing, distribution, and points of sale.” Leslie might’ve been jeered at as the “King of the Cheapies,” but he was no dummy.
In 1970, Pickwick’s Plays Today’s Pops appeared in stores, featuring the Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” Dion’s “Abraham, Martin, And John,” Ohio Express’ “Chewy Chewy,” Judy Collins’s “Both Sides Now,” and others. But who’s performing them? According to the liner notes on the back sleeve, “a group of today’s musicians taking today’s music and making it their thing.” That’s unassailable, if wildly misleading. Further elucidation follows, including the origin story of King’s Road:
Formed in the swinging summer of ’68 in London, their music bag is from all over. ‘King’s Road’ is a moving, shifting group. It swirls and reforms itself, into the frenetic patterns of today’s musical sounds. The multi talents of the group are colorful as their way out gear, and as diversified as the sounds they create. Many were classically trained, others self taught by the big beat that throbs through the boutiques & bistros the length of King’s Road, Chelsea—the centre of swingin’ London.
“This is their bag. The sounds of today made their way…The groovy feeling of being young, being now, are what today’s hip composers created in this record.” The writer signs off with that age-old query: “Dig?”
Let’s unpack. To describe the turbulent summer of ’68 as “swinging” might be an historical inaccuracy, but we can forgive that—they were heady times—yet describing King’s Road as “moving” and “shifting” as it “swirls and reforms” smartly pegs the group’s raison d'être: they’re faceless, nameless studio musicians hired to reproduce familiar songs, and required beneath a ticking studio clock to move swiftly from one song style to the next. “Multi-talented”? Probably. Some are “classically trained,” while others are “self-taught.” Who’s to argue? We don’t know who the musicians are. As the comprehensive crowd-sourced database Discogs shrugs of the entire King’s Road cannon: “No credits anywhere.”
Presumably, Plays Today’s Pops sold well enough to warrant a follow-up. Let It Be, also issued in 1970, contained versions of Tony Joe White’s “Rainy Night In Georgia,” Santana’s “Evil Ways,” Ashley and Foster’s “House Of The Rising Sun,” the title track, and others; later that year, tracks from both albums were gathered with several new cuts for 18 Top Hits By The King's Road. Common to Plays Today’s Pops and 18 Top Hits was a front- and back-cover photo of a Carnaby-lite mod couple emerging from a paisley pink-orange-red swirl, she wearing heavy eye-liner, a fur-trimmed vest, bright red slacks, and a headband, he a goatee, a multi-colored scarf, a red jacket to match his girl’s, and oversized sunglasses in the shape of the Union Jack. (I guess his scarf was multi-coloured.)
Then came the flood of Super Hits compilations, ten of them issued between 1971 and ’73, each gathering King’s Road’s versions of current hit songs, each sporting a smilingly flirtatious young woman on the front and back covers and retailing, as the ubiquitous liner notes promise, “for just over a dollar and change.” The albums are interchangeable, a collective barometer of early- to mid-70s pop. From Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, T. Rex, and the Carpenters to Steely Dan, Wings, and the O'Jays—with Sly & The Family Stone, the Faces, and Bread among many others making noise—the artists and groups featured on the Super Hits series spanned widely disparate tastes and styles, a broad swath of Top 100 Nixon-era daylight. The albums, like many of Pickwick’s low-budget releases, were stocked in discount department and convenience stores, ready to move.
Once teenagers got past the groovy typeface and eye candy of the front cover, they didn’t have to drop the needle to learn the hard truth, they merely had to read the liner notes, as by the second album a certain “Keith Wood,” posting from Pickwick International, was pretty clear about what was going on. Before signing off with “Love & Peace,” Wood urged buyers to send him titles of songs they wanted to hear on future albums, care of an address in Long Island City. In later albums he gave shoutouts to the fans who wrote in, inevitably girls “with a little bread for a little rock,” and those names—“Vicki Mulchi in North Carolina, Debbie Kuell in Chicago, Donna Fischer in Cedarburg, Carrie Charters in Canada, Bianca Gonzalez in California,” et al.—were likely as fake as his own. (“Keith Wood?” my wife said. “Sounds like a mashup of Richards and Ronnie to me.”) His name might’ve been bogus, but his aim was true: “What we're doing on this record is to cherry pick the charts for the hits and the heavies, record them to sound just like the original high priced spread, and rush the whole works straight to you at the crazy low price marked on the front of this jacket,” adding for good measure, “Instead of spreading your bread thin to get all the goodies you're hearing on the radio, just look for the Superhit album of the month.”
On the second Super Hits, the band’s described as a “ragged, lovable talented crowd of kids” now “loosely tagged” as King’s Road. By the ninth Super Hits, the jig was up. Flatly, Keith Wood calls the band Pickwick’s “resident rip-off group.”
The members of this house con band may be lost to history, but they toiled within a long-standing tradition. (Lou Reed, pre-Velvet Underground, worked as an uncredited songwriter and studio musician on a couple of Pickwick and its subsidiaries’ albums in the early- and mid-60s. And funnily enough, before he hit it big and inspired re-recordings of his own hits, Elton John labored, without credit, on many soundalike compilation albums released in the U.K. in the late-1960s and early-70s.) Session musicians have routinely been stripped of their identities, their names absent from labels or sleeves, their hard work and gifts distinguished only by the music itself. Even at massive databases such as AllMusic or Discogs, the latter of which exhaustingly documents the names of recording personnel, sessions musicians depend on the kindness of labels to provide proof of their existence. For every group of studio musicians such as the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, the Wrecking Crew, the Funk Brothers, or The Nashville A-Team, some of which many members have become well-known and rightly celebrated (if not always compensated fairly), there are countless unnamed backing singers and instrumentalists, paid by the hour, who’ve shuffled anonymously in and out of studios. These musicians, on the clock in large and small studios, recording a film score or an advertisement or for a hopeful nobody, on 48 tracks or four, master the arrangements of songs that aren’t theirs, contributing their expertise and chops with the expectations that their input won’t showily intrude, won’t run against the grain of the song as the writer or writers present it. A session musician has a clear job to do.
King’s Road’s trade was far murkier. Like the mood ring or the pet rock, they were very much a product of their era. Their charge wasn’t to play songs, exactly, but to reproduce them. They weren’t a conventional cover band, nor were they a tribute outfit. They didn’t write and perform original songs that milked a fading trend in the hopes of commercial relevance. (Think of forgotten, late-era-Beatlemania groups, KISS’s 1997 “grunge” album, and the like.) King’s Road weren’t deceitful scammers, as their game—“Played and sung like the original hits”—was clearly emblazoned on the front and back covers. The songs themselves weren’t counterfeits, out to fool the ear in the way that a seasoned forger dreams of bilking an art dealer out of millions. I can’t locate the many members of King’s Road. If I did I’d ask them where their own artistic ambitions fit in the Cy Leslie/Pickwick assembly line, whether inside another’s Top 10 hit they felt, and either resisted or indulged, an urge to express themselves creatively, a vocal manner or a guitar line echoing the original’s language but written in their own hand.
Few would pay a hefty admission fee to a museum that hangs only reproductions of art—Painted and framed like the original O’Keeffe!—yet Pickwick found a way to attract an audience hungry for product by capitalizing on both the shifting sands of Top 100 and the surging album market, marrying the two at low-cost. Because the label wasn’t compiling original songs, it didn’t have to pay for the privilege of doing so, dodging millions of dollars in licensing and copyright fees. Pickwick seemed to simply duck the lawyers for as long as it could. Infamous for operating with a low-budget mentality, label executives discovered a gray area somewhere between securing copyright permissions and paying out mechanical royalties to release cover songs. Hence the spate of Super Hits in your local discount store, an inexpensive boon to parents on the hunt for birthday presents for their moody teenagers. As Keith Wood enthused on the back cover of album after album, Pickwick delivered a “lotta rock for a little bread.”
In Record Makers and Breakers, Broven notes that Cy Leslie’s budget volume business “was shunned by serious record collectors,” but that “their narrow niche was not his concern.” The latter’s true enough; in a 2005 interview, Leslie explained that Pickwick’s goal was to “keep a good reputation; that’s important,” yet first and foremost was “to keep overhead as tight as you can.”
Yet despite—or because of—its shoddy elan, Leslie’s product has not gone ignored by collectors down the years. One such fan is Shelley Pierce, a longtime DJ at KMSU at Minnesota State University, Mankato. She owns more than two hundred such soundalike compilations, mostly on Pickwick (similar records have been issued on Springboard, Modern Sound, and Mountain Dew Records, among other labels). “I started picking them up for the covers. There are so many things to love about these records.”
The labels clearly did not pay for the rights to release them and they would slightly alter some aspect of the song to get away with it. But at the same time they strove to sound as much like the original as possible. I love hearing the bad imitations as much as the really good ones. If they were at a loss for how to sing a hard part or hit the high notes they would give it off to a guitar solo instead or even have a woman sing it instead of a man.
A favorite moment of deception for Pierce occurs on a soundalike song of Yoko Ono’s, where the band approximated her singing style…with a trumpet.
The enduring mystery of the nameless personnel has enthralled Pierce, as well. “I’ve rarely found a record that actually has credits of any kind. A few might have photos of some players, but no names. Or if there were names they were clearly made up names. Why? If they included the actual names of the musicians would that be a giveaway to consumers that it wasn’t the original artists? Was it a simply cheaper to pay the musicians a set price and send them on their way?” She wonders if they might’ve been too embarrassed to admit that they played on these knockoffs. “I honestly don’t think we’ll ever find out.” album
Pierce is also drawn to the fact that these records were “straight up con jobs.” A record store employee in Mankato, she’s continually amazed that these albums, with their dated covers and of-the-era panache, manage to dupe unsuspecting buyers. “Just the other day someone was buying what they thought was the Grease soundtrack, but it was actually sung by a soundalike group called The Cruisers.” She remembers being nine years-old and coveting the Star Wars soundtrack for her birthday. “My mom went out and bought the first record she saw that had Star Wars on the record sleeve, without paying too much attention to the artist. In this case it was Meco, not John Williams.”
Yet poignantly, the deception didn’t matter much: “I was a kid and it sounded like the Star Wars music I remembered from the film. Perhaps the audience for these kind of records were kids as well? Or those who weren’t too picky and didn’t have the money to spend on the real deal? I suppose it was all of these.”
At a theater in my town last month, Liverpool Legends, a Grammy-nominated Beatles tribute band, performed their “The Complete Beatles Experience!”. The group was allegedly fashioned by none other than George Harrison’s sister Louise Harrison, who handpicked the four musicians and actors herself. “Each member of the group is so close to the originals,” she gushed in a press release, “that I often feel like I’m transported back in time with the lads.” I didn’t go. But I’m not churlish about such things. I understand the appeal and nod respectfully at the endurance of the highly lucrative tribute band circuit, the nights of genuine pleasure offered fans who want to ride back in time to whatever mop-topped, befringed, or mulleted world those songs and those singers created, and these tributes revive, for them. No guilty pleasures there.
The time machine appeal of the Super Hits albums is something different. Hearing the songs, I’m taken back to a time in cultural history when deception met dollars, when your not-really-favorite-hits were dished up by a smiling woman in a halter top. When I was a kid and Pickwick’s Super Hits Volume 10 and The Beatles 1962-1970 ended up in my family’s suburban basement, I rejoiced. The Pickwick Beatles album appeared the same year the Apple label released the epochal “Red” and “Blue” Beatles compilations, their arrival a seminal moment in my music life, and millions of others’. Pickwick’s compilation was clearly a cash-in. It bizarrely extended into the Beatles’ members’ solo careers, its fourth side including versions of “Maybe I'm Amazed,” “My Sweet Lord,” and, fantastically, John Lennon’s emotionally painful “Mother”. Yet it and its generic front- and back-cover art design are perversely dear to my heart. My brothers and I knew within seconds of dropping the needle that we weren’t listening to the Beatles. The deceptiveness of it was unnerving but mostly hilarious, and not absent a dose of adolescent melancholy. “Listening to King’s Road,” I wrote here a decade ago, “I felt unnamed pity for the musicians even as I was making fun of them…. What was meant to sound like earnest tribute and celebration fell on my ears as desperate and embarrassing. This much I understood as the album spun around and around: King’s Road were the weary substitute teachers of pop music.”
I pouted as a kid when listening to the Edgar Winter Group’s “Frankenstein,” the Who’s “Pinball Wizard,” and Steely Dan’s “Reeling in the Years” on Super Hits Volume 10—imposters all—and yet I’m surprised at how decent are many of the soundalikes, especially those that I’m hearing for the first time. Sly and the Family Stone’s “Family Affair” and Isaac Hayes’s “Theme from Shaft” from Volume 4 are much looser and funkier than I would’ve ever imagined, the musicians syncopating with some style, evoking the grooves and vibe of the originals. And on the second volume, the version of Cornelius Bros. & Sister Rose’s slinky, irresistible “Treat Her Like a Lady”’s not too shabby either, the band sliding under the snug arrangement with ease, and T. Rex’s “Hot Love,” though the singer’s overmatched by Marc Bolan’s original vocal—who wouldn’t be?—evokes that band’s spacey glam and smiling, heavy-lidded sensuality in ways that honor the song’s uniqueness, not simply imitate it.
But many King’s Road attempts miss the mark. Though it’s rude to poke fun, it’s also too fun not to. Consider the Rolling Stones’ “Tumbling Dice.” The singer’s take is howlingly inept, and the lyrics are wrong—so wrong that one wonders if they were transcribed by a dude who was tripping while lip-reading Jagger through snowy television reception. The lyrics on Exile on Main Street were notoriously difficult to figure out, so I think King’s Road just said, Screw it, we’ll write our own (which are also tough to figure out, so I guess they went for verisimilitude of a sort). And while it’s unfair to expect any group of musicians to match the well-worn, in-the-pocket groove of sounds caught in that humid basement in Villa Nellcôte, King’s Road, with their cardboard guitars and plodding arrangement, seems to have aimed for a bar-band-on-a-dare vibe, not that the stakes were particularly high.
Sadly, I’ve yet to come across Pickwick’s Excerpts From The Rock Operas in the record store wilds, a 1973 double album on which King’s Road offers selection from Tommy, Jesus Christ Superstar, Hair, and Godspell, but I did recently reacquire The Beatles 1962-1970, and I urge you to track down a copy, as it’s a model of the genre. King’s Road comes off sounding like somewhere between a Beatlemania cast rehearsal and a half-committed soundcheck by Sire Records-era Flamin’ Groovies. On several tracks— “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” “Get Back,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “My Sweet Lord,” one or two others—the singers fairly approximate the lead Beatle singer, but what’s glaringly absent is that ineffable spark the Beatles created as they played. The probability of a group of session musicians capturing that is so laughingly remote that my instinct is to feel as if the whole thing’s a send-up. The harmonies in “Please Please Me” and the famous opening chord of “A Hard Day’s Night,” are merely copied, in “Hello Goodbye” the psychedelic mischief only hinted at, the arrangements throughout the album so wooden and unimaginative as to suggest a first-take/best-take work ethic burdening a band with little time for rehearsal.
The true oddity here is Lennon’s “Mother,” a song so harrowingly personal and complexly dark that it beggars belief the track was even on offer to King’s Road, let alone selected for the album. Lennon wrote “Mother” after intense primal therapy sessions with the psychotherapist Arthur Janov in an attempt to purge himself of his grief, anger, and pain of abandonment. Though faithful to Phil Spector and Lennon/Yoko Ono’s minimal production-arrangement, including that haunting reverb, King’s Road’s version pales, and is poorly sung, a sonic equivalent of a spot-lit teen actor puffing his chest to emote adult stuff. I can only imagine each potential singer clearing his throat and pointing to the others when this song came up for recording—who’d want to tackle a performance so raw and private, not to mention infamous and epochal? (Interestingly, “Mother” has been covered several times, by Barbra Streisand, Shelby Lynne, Lou Reed, David Bowie, and others.) I don’t know who the singer is, of course, and my embarrassment for him is relieved somewhat by his decision to not try and match Lennon’s anguished and cathartic screams during the fade, opting instead for a few affected moans. He didn’t need the therapy, I’m guessing.
By the end of the decade, the writing was on the wall. In 1977 Pickwick was purchased by the American Can Company. (A manufacturer of tin cans, the irony, given the “inside of a tin can” quality to King’s Roads’ recordings, fitting.) American moved the corporate headquarters from Long Island City to Minneapolis, Minnesota, and sold its assets to PolyGram the same year. PolyGram folded Pickwick for good in 1983.
The death knell for the soundalike records, and for King’s Road’s career such as it was, had tolled a few years earlier. After the Super Hits compilations dried up in 1973, Pickwick issued a few more “played and sung like…” albums, one each of Neil Diamond, Simon & Garfunkel, Neil Sedaka, and Elton John (including the record that baffled me momentarily in the record store), and a couple of TV show themes, before the line ended, and with it a certain of-the-era Zeitgeist. “I suspect these kinds of records came to an end when the record business started to pay attention to paying for the rights to record the songs,” Pierce says. “Perhaps there was a ten year loophole that soundalikes took advantage of? I'm afraid this will all remain a mystery unless someone in the record business who was involved with soundalikes decides to share their experiences,” adding, “In the meantime I will just keep collecting them and enjoying the crazy covers.”
As reported by Zaria Gorvett for the BBC a few years back, anatomy researcher Teghan Lucas, equipped with a public collection of photographs of U.S. military personnel and the assistance of colleagues from the University of Adelaide, studied the faces of nearly four thousand people, “measuring the distances between key features such as the eyes and ears. Next she calculated the probability that two peoples’ faces would match.”
What she found was good news for the criminal justice system, but likely to disappoint anyone pining for their long-lost double: the chances of sharing just eight dimensions with someone else are less than one in a trillion. Even with 7.4 billion people on the planet, that’s only a one in 135 chance that there’s a single pair of doppelgängers. “Before you could always be questioned in a court of law, saying ‘well what if someone else just looks like him?’ Now we can say it’s extremely unlikely,” says Teghan.
It seems to me that the Super Hits albums buck those slender odds. Badfinger, Neil Young, the Bee Gees, Carole King, the Doobie Brothers, Jim Croce, Harry Nilsson, Bread, et al.—haunt your local record stores and thrift shops and you’ll find spirit doubles of them all, ghostly doppelgängers, other Selves of songs. They sound uncannily close to their twin strangers, and yet something’s not quite right in the performance.
Shopping for her suburban family of eight in the 1970s, my mom chose to buy knockoff sodas rather than name-brands. Thus, I grew up on Cragmont Cola, Safeway supermarket’s house brand, not Coke, which nearly all of my friends drank. Yet I grew to love Cragmont. If I were to taste one now I’d likely reel with nostalgia for an ideal childhood. I think about what it might have been like had I grown up, pre-Internet, on a remote outpost somewhere, a thinly populated island, or a one-light town in far northern Greenland, wherever radio and commerce and pop culture would perish on their way to, and the only records I owned were a few Super Hits albums that made their way to my local one-stop shop. If all I knew in my life were King’s Road songs, would I have loved them? Would they have moved me as profoundly as so many of the original songs have, changed my life in countless ways, given me hours and hours of deep pleasures? Raised on the merely adequate, I might have become a different person, less robust, undernourished, and yet unaware that I was subsisting on a meager, lesser diet, the Super Hits albums soundtracking my life in shades of grays. Fortified by King’s Road, I might’ve taken fewer risks, offered only lukewarm advice to friends and strangers, shied away from pursuing that girl, shrugged my shoulders at a sublime sunset.
Then I imagine myself at Rediscover Records in Elgin hearing for the first time not Pickwick’s Elton John cash-in album, but Honky Château or Goodbye Yellow Brick Road or Madman Across the Water, astonished by the differences, but maybe scoffing lightly, finding Elton’s songs fussy or baroque, his band too busy, Paul Buckmaster’s arrangements over-the-top. Would the store around me gradually, without my barely taking note, brighten, the world outside waiting for my deliverance into a more authentic, rich life? Or would I prefer the ersatz, content in my sentimental love for the off-key singing, pedestrian arrangements, and dull musicians of the songs that scored my adolescence? King’s Road were the million-sellers in an alternate universe. I raise a Cragmont Cola to them.
Joe Bonomo's most recent books are Field Recordings from the Inside (music essays) and No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing. He blogs at No Such Thing As Was and you can visit him at @BonomoJoe.
Photo provided by author.