Some moves are so cool, so fucking, fucking cool, that you can hardly fucking believe how fucking cool they are, they’re so fucking cool. Such was the case with Andy Kim, the Canadian pop star and Neil Diamond doppelganger whose single “Rock Me Gently” topped the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 in 1974. Then, in 1976, despite the fact that his career was flourishing, Kim vanished. As in disappeared, poof!, off the face of the earth. But since we still had Neil Diamond, who had the same face and the same hair, as well as Barry Manilow, who had the same hair and the same taste in awful suits, and both were bigger stars anyhow, hardly anybody noticed.
Then in 1980 a new figure emerged on the Canadian pop scene, one bearing the simultaneously mysterious and ludicrous name of Baron Longfellow. Is that the coolest fucking name in the world or what? Nowadays a name like that wouldn’t so much as raise eyebrows, but in 1980? In 1980 people took notice, because a name like Baron Longfellow was completely unthinkable.
Then it came out—as it was bound to, as even the most cursory glance at the swarthy Lothario with the abundant head of black hair in the white disco suit on the cover of Baron Longfellow’s eponymous debut was enough to give the game away—that Longfellow was none other than Andy Kim.
Who for some unfathomable reason had decided he no longer wanted to be Andy Kim, but rather a guy with a name that made him sound like the mad scion of a royal family, who drinks Brompkin’s Cocktail (i.e., a variable amount of morphine, 10 mg of cocaine, 2.5 ml of 98% ethyl alcohol, 5 mL of syrup BP and a variable amount of chloroform water, given to terminally ill patients in excruciating pain) from a human skull for breakfast and holds fantastical Sadian orgies in the perpetual twilight of the ancient velvet tapestry-bedecked rooms of his moated castle nestled amongst the werewolf-infested Verruckteberg Mountains.
It would have all been so perfect had Baron Longfellow’s music been even half as inexplicably weird as his name. Alas, Baron Longfellow’s two LPs can only be described as kennels for sub-par Diamond dogs. Or to put it differently, collections of schmaltzy doggerel. Take “Amour,” which opens with the Baron accompanied by just a piano but soon explodes into a superextravaganza of strings, horns, thousands of voices, and for all I know a phalanx of King Tiger tanks. Longfellow has a king-sized voice, but unlike his alter ego Kim, whose “Rock Me Gently” had a more relaxed, almost Southern California feel, Longfellow is what the Germans call a Schlager artist, i.e., a singer of sugary romantic ballads with an overblown, easy-listening vibe.
“If hearts are just like flowers,” he sings, “As fragile as the hours we spend/Let’s hold on to this memory/And never let this moment ever end.” And hearing this you’ll either want to vomit or you’re a romantic sap, and Baron Longfellow might just be your cup of treacle.
Unfortunately he’s not mine, and I honestly mean that, because I really, REALLY, wanted to like Baron Longfellow. Because anybody who changes their name to Baron Longfellow is my kind of fellow. And because I really do love “Rock Me Gently.” And because he actually co-wrote “Sugar Sugar” for The Archies.
The Baron has since changed his name back to Andy Kim and continues to make music, and he recently played a Canadian tribute show to Lou Reed, where he sang “Sweet Jane.” And nailed it. Seriously. He doesn’t oversing it or turn it into treacle—he just gives it the respect it deserves. Driving a Stutz Bearcat, Jim, that’s the way I like to imagine Baron Longfellow. He could have been the coolest rocker ever, but alas, he has Neil Diamond’s face and Barry Manilow in the marrow of his bones.
I would like to thank Martin de vries for providing the inspiration for this story.
