Review: Pour A Little Sugar On It: The Chewy Chewy Sounds of American Bubblegum 1966-1971

The world “bubblegum” conjures up sticky-sweet candy that tastes good in the moment, but can rot your teeth if you enjoy too much of it. Maybe that’s why there’s so much division around the style of music, first popularized around 1966 and enduring into the early 1970s, known as bubblegum.

Pour A Little Sugar On It: The Chewy Chewy Sounds of American Bubblegum 1966-1971 chronicles a musical movement, taking us back to the time of catchy confections for our ears, with band names like The Peppermint Trolley Company, 1910 Fruitgum Co., Salt Water Taffy, The Raspberry Pirates, The Lemon Pipers, The Cherry People, and The Marshmellow Highway. But bubblegum was never necessarily a genre, it was more of a style and approach, so there's bleed into other territories like psych and sunshine pop. As such, this collection also includes tunes by The Beach Boys, The Monkees, Mama Cass, and even The Velvet Underground. 

What is “bubblegum” anyway? In his booklet introduction, disc curator David Wells explains that bubblegum was a reaction to the ever-increasing complexity and depth of pop music at the time. By 1966, the two-minute pop song was becoming a thing of the past as bands moved away from simple love songs and into more varied, heavier territory. Bubblegum was an attempt by both musicians and record executives to maintain the business of two-minute pop songs for a young—often pre-teen—audience and keep those 7-inch record sales going. The approach was calculated: focus on song titles that revolve around things kids like, such as candy and games. Keep the lyrics simple (lots of doo-doo-doos and la-la-las) and never let the song go beyond 2 1/2 minutes. 

This is the realm of Don Kirshner, early Neil Diamond, Boyce and Hart, Tommy Roe, and Ron Dante—a man who is so represented on the collection that he feels like one of its patron saints. Dante was the voice of multiple bands that didn’t really exist—at least not outside the studio. The Archies—the cartoon band based on the popular comic book—is arguably the most well-known here, with the track “Sugar Sugar” not only serving as the most popular track on the album, but the one that also provides the collection’s title. Dante was also the voice of The Cuff Links—another “band” that was mostly session musicians and crafted in a studio—but he’s here as a solo artist, too. For a decade or more, Ron Dante was the voice of McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and easy, breezy, sing-a-long pop. For more insight into Ron Dante’s career, please see my full interview with the multiple-award-winning icon. 

The carefully-crafted commercial nature of bubblegum makes it an easy target, but that’s not to say that the music doesn’t have integrity. After all, not everyone can write a catchy two-minute pop song that sells well and gets radio play. As such, Pour A Little Sugar On It offers a window into a time when this kind of music offered respite from a musical scene that was becoming progressively more mature as it dealt with social unrest, substances, and sex, none of which were appropriate musical topics for the under-12 set.

Pour A Little Sugar On It presents 91 tracks spanning three CDs—roughly four hours of music in total. I’ve been a fan of Cherry Red’s Grapefruit label for years now because they offer incredible curation, making each disc feel like a playlist that was put together by an expert guide. We start with hits, then go deeper…and deeper…and deeper until we’re in a foreign land of unrecognizable obscurities that even the most ardent music fan likely hasn’t heard. But fear not, we’re never far from the path and as the collection comes to a close, we end up right back where we started, with feel-good music that we know well and that has us tapping our toes and singing “Bang-Shang-A-Lang.”

Case in point: Disc 1 starts with “Simon Says” by 1910 Fruitgum Co., which is immediately followed by “Yummy Yummy Yummy” from Ohio Express. That’s followed by “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You” courtesy of The Monkees, who are followed by The Archies, who are followed by Paul Revere and The Raiders. An hour later, The Archies wrap up the disc, and we've heard a lot of the hits and tracks we might expect. But the second disc kicks off with Tommy James & The Shondells’ “I Think We’re Alone Now,” an unconventional pick. We then take a detour to “Indian Lake” with The Cowsills, hear “How She Boogalooed It” by The Beach Boys, visit a “Girl on the Subway” with The Cherry People,  and by the time we get to “Valleri,” it’s not the well-loved version by The Monkees, but a more obscure rendition from The Pineapple Heard, which was rushed into record shops before The Monkees version was available. After that, we hear about “Banana Man” from The Knack, but it’s not the same Knack behind “My Sharona,” it’s an earlier act that was pushed by Capitol Records to exploit the highly-marketable Beatles sound. A decade later, long after the original Knack had dissipated, Capitol created another band with the same name, which went on to superstardom. 

And so it goes, track after track, as we follow Alice down the candy-colored rabbit hole, emerging into a land of cartoon characters, cereal mascots, and syrupy sing-alongs. Despite its overtly-commercial nature, most of the music has had remarkable staying power over the decades, and it’s still highly-listenable over 50 years later. What really emerges from this CD box set is the jam up and jelly tight artistry behind the songs, which still set toes a-tappin’. These Jingle Jangle rhythms have lost none of their pop power in the intervening years. In fact, they’re catchier than ever.