Friday, March 31, 2017

It's Drink O'Clock: Chocolate Hair/Sugarloaf - Two Hit Wonder

The band "Chocolate Hair" came out of nowhere in 1970 and scored a hit with the now classic Green Eyed Lady...

...Just before the album's release, however, the legal department at Liberty [records] suggested the name Chocolate Hair might be taken as having racial overtones. The bandmembers agreed to change their moniker to Sugarloaf, the name of a mountain outside of Boulder, Colorado, where Bob Webber resided in an A-frame house...

And the rest is history. Green Eyed Lady by Sugarloaf is a mainstay on oldies/classics radio stations.

BUT there is more...

Eventually Liberty decided to drop all their artists and Sugarloaf was in limbo in 1973 as Jerry Corbetta signed to Neil Bogart's Brut Records label, which Bogart had created and distributed, via his Buddah Records imprint, for the Brut Fabergé company.

The next album, I Got a Song , released in late 1973, was started as a Corbetta solo record but ended up becoming Sugarloaf's third album when Webber and Raymond rejoined Corbetta, with drummer Larry Ferris, to play on the album and once again began making live appearances. This iteration of Sugarloaf played a spot on The Midnight Special that aired on April 19, 1974.

But after Brut folded, the group's future was once again in question as Corbetta and Frank Slay bought the album back from Bogart and went to a friend's recording studio in Denver in 1974 to record a new song, "Don't Call Us, We'll Call You", with session players Paul Humphries (drums), Max Bennett (bass), Ray Payne (guitar) and a group called the Flying Saucers (Jason Hickman, Mikkel Saks and David Queen) on harmony vocals. This song was notable because it contained a practical joke at the expense of CBS Records, which had just turned them down for a recording contract. The song includes the sound of a touch-tone telephone number being dialed near the beginning and ending of the song. Those numbers were an unlisted phone number at CBS Records in Manhattan ("area code 212" stated in the song) – coincidentally a public number at the White House as well (different area code). In addition, the recording includes snippets of the guitar riff of The Beatles' "I Feel Fine," Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" and a line of dialogue from disc jockey Ken Griffin imitating Wolfman Jack (who would later perform the song live with the group on their Midnight Special appearance) stating the call sign of a radio station ("Stereo 92" in the nationwide release); numerous tracks of this line were cut to match local markets. "Don't Call Us...", written by Corbetta along with John Carter, was released in November 1974 on Slay's Claridge Records label and after it took off and peaked at No. 9 in April 1975, the I Got a Song album was quickly re-released under the new title of Don't Call Us, We'll Call You with the hit single added in place of another track, "Easy Evil". But the album stalled out at US No. 152 on the Billboard Top 200.


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