“Fuck Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young,” Banana Splits guitarist and band leader told an audience of kids at a meet & greet on the NBC TV lot in February 1969. The hippest talking dog in the country then added, “We could have called ourselves Fleagle, Drooper, Bingo & Snorky. But we’re not egomaniacal folk scrotums with cocaine noses. And frankly, we make better music.” Shouted a little girl from the audience, “Right on! Power to the cartoon people!”
Okay, so that never happened. Here’s the real skinny. For two seasons (from September 1968 to September 1970) NBC’s The Banana Splits Adventure Hour enthralled kids like me every Saturday morning. Its stars were four talking animals (not cartoon animals, guys in animal suits) who just happened to be in a rock and roll band, and whose Monkees-like slapstick antics crossed over into Three Stooges territory.
They were never as big as The Archies in the fictional bubblegum band sweepstakes, but to plenty (like me) they were far cooler precisely because they were animals, and more importantly they were WILD animals, who rode around in dune buggies (they called ‘em “banana buggies”) just like the Manson family and really rocked out on stage, with guitarists Fleagle and Drooper (a luded-out lion) doing this syncopated leg kick that was hipper than anything the MC5 was doing at the same time.
The line-up was completed by Bingo (oversized monkey with perpetual shit-eating grin) on drums and Snorky (freaky-looking elephant) on organ, although he plays bass on a period children’s lunchbox and tambourine on the cover of a Kellogg’s cereal-sponsored EP. And unlike the square-john Archies, who wouldn’t have known the difference between a postage stamp and a tab of Owsley LSD, the Splits were obviously freaks. Hippies. “Drug takers.”
Fleagle’s tongue was always hanging out of his mouth he was so stoned, and and like the rest of the Splits he sported one of those English bobby helmets that Lynyrd Skynyrd bassist Leon Wilkerson always had on his head. And his oversized bow tie had Yippie written all over it. The other three were in shades, always, Snorky in a pair of cool granny glasses, Drooper in a pair of snazzy square-lense jobbies, and Bingo in Ray Bans. Bingo also sported a happening one-button vest with an Indian feel to it. Like he’d been to that far continent to study with the Maharishi. That ever-present grin of his was the product of transcendental bliss and ace blotter acid.
Like The Archies, The Banana Splits were a front for an ad hoc team of behind-the-scenes songwriters and musicians, all working under musical director Aaron Schroeder. The industry had grown hip to the advantages of “bands” like The Banana Splits. They weren’t going to OD or hire a bastard of a manager who was going to demand contract renegotiations. They weren’t going to suddenly start squawking about wanting to play their own instruments or write their own songs. Snorky wasn’t going to grow a long beard and start bitching about how he only got one song per album. Fleagle wasn’t going to marry a Japanese performance artist and basically break up the band. As for the real songwriters and musicians behind the scenes, they were basically working for peanuts. And you didn’t even have to pay Snorky the elephant peanuts because he wasn’t a real elephant. Capitalist exploitation didn’t get any better than this.
There was only one drawback—you couldn’t hear The Banana Splits on the radio. (“The Tra La La Song” was released, but tanked.) On one hand this was fatal to their legacy, but it didn’t matter much to their teensy-weensy fan base. You couldn’t hear the Way-Outs (of Flintstones fame) on the radio either, and their signature tune (“Way out, way out! That’s where the fun is, way out!”) is one of the greatest songs ever, and their haircuts must have inspired the Ramones. For the bubblegum set TV was pirate radio, because our parents and older siblings didn’t have a clue. Except they did, because they had to put up with us running around screaming “Way out! Way out! That’s where the fun is! Way out!” And the lack of radio hits relieved the folks behind the scenes from having to figure out how to put a touring band together, which is a pity. If they’d played live the way they do on TV, The Banana Splits would have gone down in history as a kind of furry proto-Kiss.
Fans of The Banana Splits’ proto-math rock theme song “The Tra La La Song (One Banana, Two Banana)” will know they pumped out one of the most chewy chewy bubblepunk anthems of the era. What they may not know is that The Banana Splits also played hard-hitting garage rock, sunny California pop and, surprisingly, looked to James Brown and Company for inspiration, producing classics like “Doin’ the Banana Split” and the keep-it-simple “Soul.” They were no Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids (a CBS cartoon band that would come along in 1972) when it came to one cartoon nation under the groove, but who was? Their “Stage Fright” is as good a song as The Band’s!
1968’s Decca Records LP We’re the Banana Splits captures the Splits in all their eclectic glory. Details on song credits are sketchy. Barry White wrote “Doin’ the Banana Split,” soul singer Jimmy Radcliffe contributed “Soul,” “I’m Gonna Find a Cave” and several others, while Al Kooper contributed “You’re the Loving End” and Gene Pitney cooked up “Two Ton Tessie.” Songwriters Ritchie Adams and Mark Barkan are said to have sung “Wait Til Tomorrow,” “We’re the Banana Splits,” and “The Tra La La Song.” David Mook (who co-wrote the theme songs for Chuck Barris’ The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game) produced. As for the musicians involved, your guess is as good as mine, although I like to think Bob Dylan was involved and that Bingo played drums throughout. He wasn’t and he didn’t.
The most important thing to be said about We’re the Banana Splits is that the bulk of its songs are too sophisticated to be lumped in with your typical bubblegum fare. A great bubblegum song sticks to your ears as effortlessly as gum to the bottom of a school desk. You hear it once and you know it, and more importantly you have to hear it again. Immediately. They’re crack for kids, and more addictive than bubblegum itself. This is not the case with the songs on We’re the Banana Splits. They’re good songs, but not 1,2,3,A,B,C children’s rhyme simple. Does that make the album a failure? It’s a question worth asking.
Take Al Kooper’s “You’re the Loving End.” Cool song, great horns, excellent soul vocals, but the sentiments are adult sentiments and there’s no instant kiddie karma. Frankly, the goddamn thing wouldn’t have sounded out of place at Woodstock. The same goes, surprisingly enough, for “We’re the Banana Splits,” which was originally slated to be the band’s theme song until wiser heads prevailed. It’s catchier than Kooper’s contribution, but too much is going on, and the tag line “We’re the Banana Splits, yeah” gets buried in all the commotion. It needed someone to tear it apart and simplify it. It’s not particularly smart but it’s too smart by far.
And so it goes. “Wait Til Tomorrow” is sun-dazed, harpsichord-infused Mamas and the Papas fare, and while such songs weren’t exactly poison to kids (I was enthralled by “Windy” at bubblegum age) the 1910 Fruitgum Company’s “1,2,3 Red Light” this one isn’t. The very pop “Don’t Go Away – Go-Go Girl” holds up but doesn’t pop in your face. That said, it has something kids of the era were immensely intrigued by—namely go-go girls. Thanks in large part to Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In’s Goldie Hawn, and that lazy dance she’d do in a bikini with dayglo graffiti painted on her body, who wasn’t enthralled? My dad was enthralled! My sister was enthralled (although she turned out to be a lesbian)! What did it all mean? My dad knew, and my sister may have known, but all prepubescent me knew was I was mesmerized, and a song cashing in on the go-go dancer craze definitely had kid appeal.
Pitney’s country-flavored “Two Ton Tessie” was also musically a bit too adult but the novelty lyrics are a winner—what kid isn’t amused by the idea of a two-ton woman, and curious as to why someone would want to put their arms around them? If they COULD put their arms around them? But it’s no insta-bubblegum classic, that’s for C&W sure. The psychedelic R&B number “I Enjoy Being a Boy” is certainly strange, and kids would have enjoyed the lysergic lyrics and weird touches, but what does it mean? I don’t remember hearing it but I wouldn’t have related to it—I loved candy, sure, and my GI Joe, and Sgt. Fury comics, but being a boy? I wasn’t a boy, I was a kid, and not just any kid, but a kid who was going to grow up to kill Nazis!
Radcliffe’s “I’m Gonna Find a Cave” is a total winner of a song—a Farfisa and fuzz bass-fueled garage rocker that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Nuggets compilation. Has a Mitch Ryder vibe, a Yeti-heavy bottom, and some great screaming. Pity he doesn’t make the whole caveman thing more explicit—the singer doesn’t come out with that “I’m gonna be your ever-lovin’ caveman” until close to the end. The Kinks’ “Apeman” was the first real commercial pop song I ever loved, because who isn’t fascinated by apemen? As it is kids were probably left wondering WHY the singer was so hot on finding a cave, whereas if he’d said he was a caveman right up front buy-in would have been instantaneous!
There are some others, but the noteworthy ones are “The Tra La La Song (One Banana, Two Banana)” and the pair of straight-up soul numbers. The Banana Splits were a true one-trick pony—you have to look hard to find anyone familiar with any Splits song but “The Tra La La Song.” My own brother was an official (lifetime!) member of The Banana Splits Fan Club, and as such “entitled to all the privileges, considerations and secrets” of the club, and he searched his memory for another Banana Splits song in vain.
Because only “The Tra La La Song,” with its Ebola infectious melody, nonsense syllables, simple math, and rapid-fire listing of the band’s members names goes off like a flashbulb between your ears, leaving you with a Polaroid image of the song that you’ll carry around with you forever. You hear it, you never forget it, it makes you happy. You carry it around with you forever in your head the same way you do Ohio Express’ “Yummy Yummy Yummy,” only it’s better in a sense because you can’t hear it without seeing The Banana Splits, those four freaks, while nobody sees the Ohio Express when they hear their song.
The soul numbers don’t pass the sticky, sticky test, but they’re some mighty fine product when you consider their source—a TV band of guys wearing animal suits. Call them Furry Soul. Although I could be wrong about “Doin’ the Banana Split” not passing the bubblegum test, because watching the episode in question on YouTube just now I read a viewer comment that went “For over fifty years this song has been going around my head having heard it just the once when I was five or six.” Just the once! It’s a dance song for a pretty cool dance (watch the episode) that unfortunately didn’t catch on, and not only does the snippet include some far out psychedelic visuals, it features go-go dancers! As for the song it’s funkier than any chicken I’ve ever met, and I like how the singer ends it by singing “They’re doing it in Texas! They’re doing it in New York City! They’re doing it in Boston! Yowwwwww!”
“Soul” opens with some great horns and a scream, and has a less urban feel. Message: You can’t buy it. You can’t even borrow a cup of it from your neighbor. And you ain’t got it if somebody has to tell you what it is. Saxophone solo: fat, blurting, great. The singer name drops such soul legends as Ray Charles, James Brown, and Otis Redding sitting on the dock of the bay, and even throws in Yogi Bear because if Yogi don’t have soul, who does? I’m not sure everybody would have agreed; equating James Brown to Yogi Bear could just have been what inspired an angry Gil Scott-Heron to write “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” Then again, Gil puts down Green Acres in the song. The guy had no sense of humor.
We’re the Banana Splits is a very hip artefact from a lost time—childhood. It’s a strange thing—a bubblegum album with only one true-blue bubblegum song on it, an album cobbled together by a crew of guys who had no knack for writing catchy kids’ songs and couldn’t help but write more “adult” material. The Sweet had more bubblegum in their elbow than these guys had in their entire bodies. But what you get instead is just as cool, because what they basically did was turn The Banana Splits into the bubblegum avant garde. The Velvet Underground practically. You listen to these songs and you realize The Banana Splits, unlike their cartoon counterparts, really COULD have played Woodstock. The were loads smarter than Country Joe & the Fish, and loads more fun.
How do you grade an album like this? How do you make sense of The Banana Splits, for that matter? They were on the air at the same time that the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius was dissolving like brown acid into Altamont and the Tate-LaBianca murders. Throw in Vietnam and widespread racial unrest and America was in the throes of a collective bad trip. The Banana Splits were a good trip, for kids, furry freak brothers in polka dot dune buggies smoking banana peels and spreading zany vibrations. For the prepubescent set, at least, the Age of Aquarius was still in business.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
