Hudson Brothers - Hollywood Situation

Time gets a little blurry the farther back I try to go. Events get mixed up, and the placement of where the actual memories go is a little like playing with one of those puzzle balls where you try and fit weirdly shaped blocks through matching holes ... they are always a few blocks you can squeeze through whatever opening you want with a little effort.

As a kid I remember watching Sonny and Cher, and I'm not sure this was where I first saw the Hudson Brothers, but I do remember their TV show, and later their Saturday morning variety show. Heck, kids today will never know or appreciate the excitement the new season would bring when a new crop of cartoons would debut. Dang who'd a thunk that Speed Buggy would be cool? I still had my Gumby and Pokey bendable toys and by Billy Blastoff set so I was pretty content.

Then through the magic of K-Tel, I got to have "So You Are a Star" and it was magic. To say I loved and still love that song is an understatement. The brothers had attained a degree of teenybopper success, but I didn't care. It didn't relegate them to the Donny Osmond pile. To me they were goofballs who played rock and roll and given my love of The Monkees, and even the Banana Splits (yeah, that was always a hard one to reconcile, but they were a band) that was enough for me.

Hollywood Situation starts out incredibly strong, and the first side is vintage pop magic and is actually much stronger than I expected it to be. So how come no one remembers them? The question would answer itself after the first song on side two when the brothers took a hard turn when "The Adventures of Chucky Margolis" brought the album to a screeching halt. It was a live sketch, the kind that was funny on TV, but not in the middle of what was turning into a pretty excellent record. It's not like this was sequenced to be at the end of the record - nope, right there in the middle of the second side. 

The album cover didn't help either, the brothers all clad in white three piece suits with their cravats looking like an act Lawrence Welk would introduce to great fan fare and the old ladies in the cat eyed glasses would politely clap and make clucking sounds of approval.

The guys were pretty funny make no mistake, but by the same token they were good musicians too, and they crafted solid power pop infused with Beatlesque harmonies and an added dash of glam that was really evident in the album's closer "Razzle Dazzle" a song that sounded like something off Gary Glitter's Glitter from a couple years earlier. Yeah, let's not get started on Gary Glitter ... and that was such a great album ... and now it just feels wrong to listen to anything by him.

While I am still really drawn to "So You Are a Star" there is no shortage of great material on the record. The first side in particular is all killer. The second side too would have been really enjoyable had the band sequenced the comedy sketch to come at the end, rather than derail the album.

I'm really glad I found this, and the band really did deserve better. They're mostly remembered now, if at all, as a variety show band who wore silly outfits and were as vanilla as vanilla could be and for a little while were teen heart throbs.

Too bad. They were the real deal, they just couldn't figure out what they wanted to be and in the process they were left behind and forgotten. I guess that in a nutshell is a Hollywood situation.