Gemini - Take Her Back

I occasionally post things that I can tell you next to nothing about and hope someone will stumble upon my post and be able to offer more information. Such is the case with this single by Gemini. Despite some creative googling, I can't even offer a release date for this single.

Here is what I can tell you: The A-side, "Take Her Back," was written by famed bubblegum tunesmiths Bo Gentry and Joey Levine. The flip side, "Ann" was written by Paul Naumann and Kenny Laguna. The record was produced by Gentry and Naumann and released on Forward Records (F-129). (You could play all kinds of "six degrees of separation" games on this release.) Whether any of these people were involved in the group Gemini, or if Gemini was a real group and not just a temporary studio conglomeration, I can't say.

The pedigree of those involved can be heard in the music, which is pleasant if nothing earth-shattering. The best way to describe it is bubblegum meets the Beach Boys' Sunflower album, although to my ears the slightly disco-ish strings on "Take Her Back" date the song to significantly later than Sunflower. If I had to guess, I'd say this was released around 1974. Any further info about this all-but-forgotten single would be greatly appreciated.

Kasenetz-Katz Singing Orchestral Circus

If you ask people what the most important live musical event of the sixties was, you are likely to get a variety of responses. No doubt the majority of people would say Woodstock. Others would say Monterey Pop, Altamont, The Beatles at Shea Stadium, or Dylan going electric at The Newport Folk Festival in 1965. All of those people are musical ignoramuses who don't know what they're talking about.

The most important musical event of the 1960s was the Carnegie Hall Concert put on by music impresarios Jerry Kasenetz and Jeff Katz featuring 46 bubblegum musicians creating a first-of-its-kind rock and roll orchestra. The Kasenetz-Katz Singing Orchestral Circus brought together The 1910 Fruitgum Company, The Ohio Express, The Music Explosion, Lt. Garcia's Magic Music Box, The Teri Nelson Group, J.C.W. Rat Finks, St. Louis Invisible Marching Band, and 1989 Musical Marching Zoo onto a single stage for a never-to-be-repeated performance.

The performance was recorded for a proposed LP, but the resulting tapes were judged to be too mind-blowingly awesome for public release, so the music was re-recorded by studio musicians with fake crowd noise added. The results of that re-creation were released on this LP.

These tracks come to you courtesy of the archives of a radio show that ran on Elon College's WSOE-FM in the late eighties and early nineties called "Bird's Multicolored Bubblegum Implosion." At a time when most college radio D.J.s were spinning the likes of The Cure and The Smiths, and the more adventurous were playing Dinosaur Jr. and Beat Happening, Tim ("The Bird") Hitchcock was playing The Kasenetz-Katz Singing Orchestral Circus and Giant Crab. The show acheived such legendary status that it is still a major topic of discussion among students at Elon to this day.

Bohanna (Levine/Resnick)

[songs re-posted 02/18/2011 by request]

This is a pretty weird single. Bohanna was a non-Super-K Joey Levine/Artie Resnick project. Levine and Resnick produced a number of singles during the late 60s under a variety of monikers outside the Super-K fold (Up 'N Adam, Jet Stream, Rock Candy Mountain, Gideon, The Salt, Pattie Flabbies Coughed Machine, etc.), but never experienced anything near the kind of success they had with Kasenetz and Katz. (Though Levine would eventually become involved with Reunion, who had a huge hit in 1974 with "Life Is a Rock (But The Radio Rolled Me)," a song that would later serve as obvious inspiration for R.E.M.'s "It's The End of the World (As We Know It)" and Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start The Fire.")

As far as I am aware this single was the only release under the Bohanna moniker. "Jamaica" is a propulsive bubblegum diddy about getting stoned on the beach in Jamaica and having a liaison with a mermaid. "Nightime Lady" is a bluesy garage rocker about picking up a prostitute in order to dress up in her clothes. (At least I think that’s what these songs are about, if anyone can propose reasonable alternate interpretations, I'm all ears.)

Joey Levine

Dragon Tales has to be one of the most odious children's programs ever produced. My four-year-old son runs screaming from the room whenever it comes on. I assume this is because he is as turned off by the show's inane moralizing and poor animation as I am. I am convinced that this sort of sanctimonious, politically correct kid's programming is what turns children into hard-hearted conservatives when they grow up.

So anyway, the show basically blows, and mercifully my son doesn't want to watch it. So why the heck can't I get its damned theme song out of my head? Simple: It's because it was written by Joey Levine, and the guy is some kind of evil genius who can put things in your head that never, ever come out. If you need proof of this look no further than the fact that he wrote the music for the "sometimes you feel like a nut" Almond Joy/Mounds commercial. You probably haven't heard that in a quarter century, but it's running through your head right now, isn't it? Yeah, I thought so. Levine wrote dozens of other commercial jingles that are permanently lodged in your subconscious as well, but I won't tell you what they are because you'll start to go crazy.

More importantly, Joey Levine was also a prime mover in the bubblegum revolution of the late sixties. "Yummy, Yummy, Yummy," "Chewy, Chewy," and dozens of other bubblegum hits flowed from Joey's pen, and his nasal, proto-punk vocals were featured on many of the smashes from the Buddha Records hit factory. Bubblegum got zero critical respect at the time, but in retrospect it was an important simplification/reduction of rock music at a time when it was starting to become pretentious. Punk was a later such simplification that owed much to bubblegum music (the late Jeffrey Hyman claimed he re-named himself "Joey Ramone" in tribute to Levine, and the Talking Heads, Dickies, Ramones and others covered bubblegum hits).

Here is a sampling of some of Levine's less-known handiwork, "I Enjoy Being A Boy In Love With You" was performed by The Banana Splits, but written by Levine (I hate to burst anyone's bubble, but Bingo, Fleagal, Drooper and Snork combined wrote less than 25% of The Banana Splits material, and most of that was album filler). "Quick Joey Small" was featured on a Buddha Records Bubblegum sampler called The Kazenetz-Katz Super Circus. Why haven't more bands covered "Quick Joey Small"?