Cover illustration of Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, August 1922
I remember first hearing about the Ohio Express in an interview with REM's Michael Stipe - he claimed that the band and particularly their hit song "Yummy, Yummy, Yummy" were a bigger musical influence on him than the Beatles or the Beach Boys. That made an impression on me as a teenager, and you can imagine how puzzled I was when I first heard "Yummy, Yummy, Yummy" on oldies radio. It was just some corny bubblegum pop song! Which, I guess, was Stipe's point. Disappointed as I was at the time, I find that, returning to the Ohio Express now as someone who loves late-'60s bubblegum, there's a lot more to this group than their little song about having "love in [your] tummy."
The Ohio Express were an actual group at one point, but it's hard to get good information on how the band turned into an anonymous brand for generic pop music. They may have their roots in the Rare Breed, a group of garage rockers from NYC that had a single on Nuggets. They signed with Buddah Records under the name the Ohio Express in 1968 - at that time, Buddah was making a name for itself through the shrewd and workmanlike skills of its resident hit-makers Kasenetz and Katz. During that year, the Ohio Express recorded two records and, by the end, the original band had been replaced by two units - a touring band who made money performing under the Ohio Express name, and a group of session musicians recording hits with songwriter Joey Levine. The details on how this happened are sketchy - some of the band's early songs are credited to "D. Kastran" and "J. Pfahler" without explaining whether these are pseudonyms for actual band members Dean Kastran and Jim Pfayler. Interestingly, the very last songs the "band" recorded were done by a different group entirely, the guys that went on to form the band 10cc.
The band's first album, Ohio Express, was made during the first transition period, and it's a schizophrenic-sounding affair as a result. The album opens with "Yummy, Yummy, Yummy", one of the best bubblegum singles from the era, written and sung by Levine, backed (I assume) by the Buddah Records session players. The second song, "Winter Skies", is a nice bit of sunshine-pop a la the Association, with a different vocalist. This is followed by "Into This Time", which is a trippy psych-rock number that almost sounds like a different band entirely, featuring a yet another different lead vocalist. This forms a kind of pattern for the album as it bounces from Levine's pop singles ("Down at Lulu's" being the album's other hit) to weirdness like "First Grade Reader" (featuring lines out of a "See Dick and Jane" primer sung with goofy mock-menace).
Ohio Express's most anomalous track is one of my favorites as well, a psych-pop song called "Turn to Straw" that sounds different from anything else on the record. The lead singer sounds almost like Donovan, and the song is laden with standard "out there" vocal effects and lots of backward-masked sounds. It has a cool melody, though, and wouldn't sound out of place on a collection of legit psych-rock singles. As a whole, though, the album almost plays like a compilation record, with a thin common thread running through the songs' sounds to give it a little coherence.
The CD I bought also contains the second Ohio Express record, Chewy Chewy, but it's a less interesting release. By the time it was assembled, the band had been completely reshaped by the Kasenetz and Katz hit machine, so it primarily features Joey Levine singing generic bubblegum songs, some of which are note-for-note remakes of songs that were already hits for the 1910 Fruitgum Company. And the songs are interspersed with terrible jokey "skits". It's too bad that the Ohio Express didn't manage to keep its hybrid status between bubblegum, psychedelia, and garage rock, which made for a much more interesting mix.
"Turn to Straw" by the Ohio Express
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