A Great Lost Album From 1975

Pop quiz!  Name the group in the photo below.  No peeking.

Give up?  Here's a hint, it's the back cover photo from one of the most neglected albums of 1975.  Despite the growing scourge of disco and punk rock, 1975 was still a pretty good year for rock music.  Among the classic releases that year were Bob Dylan's Blood On The Tracks, Born To Run by Bruce Springsteen, Rumors by Fleetwood Mac, Katy Lied by Steely Dan, A Night At The Opera by Queen, Still Crazy After All These Years by Paul Simon, Physical Graffiti by Led Zeppelin, One Of These Nights by the Eagles, Young Americans by David Bowie, and Patti Smith's Horses.  Alright, 1975 was no 1969, but it was no slouch either.

As happens every year, there are some really fine albums that fall through the cracks, don't find an audience, and don't sell nearly as well as they should.  Assuming you haven't guessed the group in the photo, it's the back cover from the album Change by Spanky & Our Gang (front cover photo way down below).  Not only was Change one of the best albums of 1975, I'd argue it's pretty high up on the list of all-time great neglected albums.  Yeah, yeah, just hear me out.

New Wine Singers - first album, 1963

In the early 1960s, Elaine "Spanky" McFarlane (b. 1942) left Peoria for Chicago where she hoped to make it as a singer.  Her first paying gig was in 1962 with a jazz-based vocal group called the Jamie Lyn Trio.  By 1963, she was singing in a folk group called The New Wine Singers.  The New Wine Singers had some modest success and put out two albums of folk and protest music in 1963 and 1965.  

For the purposes of our story, The New Wine Singers are important because it was here that McFarlane got the nickname "Spanky."  Reports vary as to why, but in a 2012 interview, McFarlane says that the band liked to watch reruns of Hal Roach's "Our Gang" comedy shorts, and the resemblance between the name of the child actor who played Spanky -- George "Spanky" McFarland -- and McFarlane, was too hard to resist, so she became Spanky McFarlane.  It was also during her time with The New Wine Singers that McFarlane met multi-instrumentalist Malcolm Hale, who would later join Spanky & Our Gang.

By late 1965, The New Wine Singers had split up, and McFarlane headed to Florida.  The story goes that she met musicians Oz Bach and Nigel Pickering when they were trapped for three days by a hurricane.  They apparently hit it off, and McFarlane invited the guys to come see her in Chicago sometime. 

Mother Blues nightclub in Oldtown Chicago

Some months later, in early 1966, McFarlane was living in an apartment over a Chicago club called Mother Blues.  (It's unclear, but she may also have been working at the club).  In any case, the club's co-owner, Curly Tait, knew McFarlane and knew she was a singer, and asked if she could put together a house band to open for the headliners at his club (including the likes of Jefferson Airplane and Muddy Waters).  McFarlane quickly convinced her Florida hurricane buddies, Pickering and Bach, to come up to Chicago, and together they formed an acoustic jug-band trio, with Pickering on guitar, Bach on bass, and McFarlane singing and playing kazoo and washboard.  Since they didn't have time to rehearse a lot of songs, the group mixed in silly costumes, gags and novelty bits.

The trio called themselves Spanky & Our Gang, which was originally meant to be a joke.  After (somewhat surprisingly) getting some favorable press and attracting a local following with the name, they decided to keep it.  As word spread and the group began to play bigger venues, they brought in McFarlane's old bandmate from The New Wine Singers, guitarist and percussionist Malcolm Hale, to fill out their sound.  Soon they were in demand at the hottest spots in the Windy City.  Curly Tait signed on to manage the group.

First single, 1967

Mercury Records was based in Chicago, and pretty soon the label took notice of the up-and-coming group in their backyard and offered Spanky & Our Gang a contract.  Once the group was on board, the label shipped them off to New York to give them more exposure and assigned their NYC A&R man Jerry Ross to help polish their sound and get them ready for the studio.  Their first single (which had been rejected by The Mamas And The Papas) was "Sunday Will Never Be The Same."  It was released in May, 1967 and quickly charted, reaching #9 on the Billboard Hot 100.  Two more top 40 hits, "Lazy Day" and "Making Every Minute Count" followed in short order.  By late summer, the group added drummer John Seiter to the line up, and Mercury sent them to Los Angeles to record tracks for their first LP.  

First album, 1967

The eponymous Spanky And Our Gang album was released on August 1, 1967.  Unfortunately, as Bruce Eder writes on Allmusic, "The group's debut LP demonstrates what can go wrong, even with a group enjoying a trio of hit singles.  Though those hits are here, the album is the least representative of what the group was about and a mixed bag for fans."  

Indeed, the stylistic confusion of the material -- which included everything from the spoken-word song "Trouble" (from the Broadway show The Music Man) to a make-believe "Commercial" for pot to John Denver's "Jet Plane" to the depression-era dirge "Brother Can You Spare A Dime" -- made it difficult to get a handle on the group's style.  Historically, they've been lumped into the category of bubblegum pop, but that really just applies to their hit singles and doesn't do justice to their gorgeous multi-part harmonies and McFarlane's world-class vocals.  Unfortunately, the goofy Vaudevillian patter, the novelty songs, and the collage of "old-timey" photos inside the jacket showing the male band members in turn-of-the-century costumes with stiff, high-collared shirts, straw boaters, bowler hats, leather football helmets, and handlebar mustaches, all combine to make it difficult to take the group seriously.  

1968

For their second album, Like To Get To Know You, released in 1968, the high jinks continued with a 1920s gangster theme complete with Tommy Guns, fedoras, and Keystone Cops (on the back and inside the gatefold).  Though buoyed by two top 30 hit singles "Like To Get To Know You" and "Sunday Morning," the album was once again a confusing mish-mash of slick pop singles, a novelty song about paying bills, a terrific cover version of Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne," all topped off with Hoagy Carmichael's 1942 classic "Stardust."  Eclectic doesn't begin to cover it. 

1969

Spanky & Our Gang's third and final studio album, Without Rhyme Or Reason, was released in early 1969.  Although the album received more favorable critical reaction than their first two LPs, it didn't sell as well.  It featured only one charting song, a beautiful and powerful protest song called "Give A Damn."  Otherwise it was another hodge-podge of styles and genres, this time including hard rock, another Hoagy Carmichael period piece ("Hong Kong Blues"), alongside some signature pop ballads with beautiful harmonies.

Graphically, however, the album was a big departure.  The cover, with the band all in white with puffy shirts and peace chains, looks like a lost Fifth Dimension album.  Which might help explain why the album didn't sell so well.  I suspect that many of their fans, who were charmed by the nostalgic, retro style of the previous albums, may have been put off by the full-blown psychedelia of the new release.  In addition, the band didn't tour to promote the album because by the time it was released in early 1969, the group had already broken up.  Oz Bach left in early 1968, and then Malcolm Hale tragically died (either from pneumonia or carbon monoxide poisoning) on Halloween night.  Soon after, drummer John Seiter accepted an offer to join The Turtles, and then McFarlane announced she was pregnant and was quitting to raise a family.  Though Mercury would release a bootleg live set in 1970, Spanky & Our Gang phase one was over.

Change, 1975

Which (finally!) brings us back around to Spanky's great lost album.  In 1974, six years after the original group broke up, McFarlane decided to put together a new gang.  With her old friend Nigel Pickering -- the only holdover from the original band -- she recruited Bill Plummer on bass, Marc McClure on guitar, banjo, and steel guitar, and Jim Moon on drums.  After some touring to tighten up the band and compile a set list, the Gang (Mk II) went into the studio to cut their only album, Change, released in 1975 on Epic Records (right).

In his liner notes for the album, Jim Charne, who was head of marketing at CBS Records, writes: "I had instructions not to call Spanky & Our Gang "country" (even though they are - sort of), and instructions not to call Spanky & Our Gang "rock" (which they also are - sort of)."  In fact, the new group was very much in the style of a wave of mid 70s country rock artists like Marshall Tucker, The Doobie Brothers, The Eagles, The New Riders Of the Purple Sage, Loggins And Messina, and The Flying Burrito Brothers.

Nashville Cat and
Producer Chip Young

The details of the recording of the album are unclear.  Radio World (an industry trade publication) reported in their July 5, 1975 issue that the new Spanky & Our Gang "have signed a long-term contract with Epic Records" and have completed recording their first album for the label with producer (and noted Nashville Cat session guitarist) Chip Young (left) at his Young'un Sound Studio in Murfreesboro, TN, about 35 miles outside Nashville.  (Young had recently been working with Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge.)  

However, the credits on the jacket note that only track A1 ("I Won't Brand You") was produced by Chip Young.  The rest of the album is "Produced with Spanky & Our Gang."  I can't say for sure, but it sounds like the band at some point took the reins back from Young and did it their way.  Paul Grupp at the Record Plant in L.A. is given credit as Associate Producer, and the mixing was done at Mama Joe's Studio in Hollywood by Alex "The Turk" Kazanegras (who did a lot of work with Loggins And Messina and Poco, among others).  A photo of the test pressing for the album on Discogs shows that it was mastered at Allen Zentz in San Clemente, CA.  Epic Records was a subsidiary of Columbia, so the album was pressed by Columbia Records.

Regardless of the provenance, Change sounds great and delivers a first-rate selection of tracks by songwriters like Guy Clark, Ronee Blakley, Tom Waits, and Gary Busey (yeah, the actor guy).  In contrast to Spanky's first three albums, this time the songs fit together to create a coherent feel - ballads skillfully mixed with more up-tempo folk/country rockers that all flow together nicely.  

In addition to the core band, a long list of crackerjack studio pros and guest artists lent their talents, including legendary Nashville arranger Bergen White, banjo wizard Herb Peterson, Richard Thompson (from Fairport Convention) on piano, Jerry Yester (late of The Lovin' Spoonful) on backing vocals, the Tower of Power Horns, Juke Logan on harmonica, bass player Ray Neapolitan, and guitar ace Rick Vito.  Thompson and Yester also scored gorgeous string arrangements for several songs.  Gone are the sunshine and lollypops and the goofy gags.  The music on Change is sophisticated Americana, beautifully-arranged and tightly played, with Marc McClure's ethereal steel string guitar and the heavenly multi-part vocal harmonies floating over it all.  

If all you know about Spanky & Our Gang are the hit singles from the 1967-69 albums, you are in for a pleasant surprise and a musical treat.  I've listened to the LP three times in the last couple of days and it still raises the hair on the back of my neck.

The album has never been released on CD or re-released on vinyl.  If you want your own a copy of Change, your only choice is the original 1975 LP.  Luckily, copies are easy to come by and available (as of this writing) for less than $10 (plus shipping) in NM condition.  Cheap for a forgotten gem. 

Enjoy the music!