The DeFranco Family Featuring Tony DeFranco - Heartbeat - It's A Lovebeat and Save The Last Dance For Me

I hate to start off a post on a negative note, but I've got to get this off of my chest: 

I f**king HATE Tony DeFranco.

...Or to be more accurate, I hated him (past tense), once long ago, when I felt that he and his band, The DeFranco Family, directly and negatively affected my life. Let me elaborate:

As I've mentioned several times in previous posts, in the early Seventies, my family moved from Virginia to Wisconsin for my Navy-officer dad to attend graduate school in Madison, the state capital, for a couple of years. I'd spent my first couple of elementary school years in Virginia, and as such I don't think I stood out particularly. I had several friends there, mind you, and was always part of the schoolyard gang at recess, but I didn't consider myself particularly popular or noticeable.

That all changed once I got to Wisconsin. The small-town school I went to was full of mostly kids who had either lived there or on the surrounding farms for most of their entire lives, and as of yet hadn't seen much of the world. A big trip for them and their families was a day in Madison, just up the road; jaunts to more far-flung areas, such as Milwaukee or even Chicago, were almost unheard of. So when my siblings and I entered school that year (all told, there were six of us (including myself), ranging from kindergarten to 5th grade) as the "big city slickers from far away", we were instant novelties and semi-celebs in the classrooms. To my surprise, I found that I was "interesting" and popular - especially with the girls in my 4th grade class. As a youngster, I really hadn't taken that much notice or had that much interest in girls beforehand; most of them didn't like to play the rougher games that the boys used to engage in during recess. Now, during school breaks, they would race to the playground to wait for me to appear, so that one (or two) of them could link their arms with mine and spend that period walking around and being seen with me. It was all very wholesome and innocent for that time, but it was still thrilling for a young boy to get so much female attention. Not to toot my own horn, but I had it 'going on'! This situation lasted for the entire school year, much to my pleasure.

During the school break that summer, my family and I made several jaunts around the state, taking in tourist attractions of especial interest to kids, like The House On The Rock (with its amazing carousel and coin-operated automatic music machines), Baraboo (the old headquarters of the Ringling Brothers And Barnum & Bailey circus, with the town featuring several circus-related attractions) and Wisconsin Dells, where we spent a blazing afternoon sitting in the lakeside stands watching the old Tommy Bartlett water-skiing show (I looked up the weather records years later; that day was recorded as one of the hottest in state history).  We also traveled back to Virginia to see relatives for a few days, and I also got the chance to visit our old neighborhood and spend a happy day in the company of my best friend Ricky and a lot of the old gang there.

During our travels as the summer months passed, a new song appeared on the local AM stations and started getting heavy play, "Heartbeat - It's A Lovebeat" by a new teenage pop group, The DeFranco Family.

The song spent the summer climbing the charts, and by the time school was about to reconvene that fall, it was a Top Five hit.  Its sound was generic kiddie pop from that period, and in hindsight the lyrics were mainly frothy nonsense... but of course all of the young people back then liked it, including myself.  But I didn't really pay that much attention to the group itself.

As the start of the new elementary school year approached that fall, I found myself looking forward to getting back to class, to once again resume my role as the area's #1 primary school paramour.  But soon after the start, I found that my star had been eclipsed - ALL the girls would talk about amongst themselves was about how "cute" and "talented" the new group's lead singer, Tony DeFranco, was.  They would whisper and giggle to one another about him, and during recess, instead of vying for my company, they would ogle pictures of him culled from the most recent teenybopper magazine.  Suddenly, I was yesterday's news - Tony was top dog now, and how could I compete with a genuine rock star, with his sloe-eyed, sultry ‘come hither’ gaze and thick helmet of dark, wavy, young girl-attracting hair?  Needless to say, I was consumed with preteen jealousy, and began to hate this little MF with a passion for stealing my mojo.  It seemed that he and his family band appeared out of nowhere, just to personally torment me!

The DeFranco Family were originally from the Niagara Falls, Canada area; specifically sleepy small Canadian towns like Port Colborne and Welland hard by the tourist/resort city, wedged on a strip of land between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario.  The siblings (consisting of older brother and lead guitarist Benny, sisters Marisa on keyboards and Merlina on drums, younger brother Nino on rhythm guitar and kid brother Tony as lead singer), children of Italian immigrants to Canada in the 1950s, started a band (The DeFranco Quintet) with their parents' encouragement in the late 1960s, and did the local circuit, playing instrumentals and pop standards at area weddings, bar mitzvahs, store openings, parades and the like.  They weren't exactly taking the music world by storm... and even in their out-of-the-way corner of the world, they weren't considered one of the top bands in the area.  

But fortunately for The DeFrancos, luck and fate intervened.  A local talent scout stumbled upon one of their gigs, taped it, and sent the recording (along with a picture of the band) along to Sharon Lee, editor of Tiger Beat magazine.  Ms. Lee liked what she saw and heard enough to forward the material on to the magazine's founder and publisher, Charles Laufer.  For Laufer, The DeFranco Family couldn't have come along at a more opportune time.

Tiger Beat was founded in 1965 as a fan magazine targeted towards teenage girls, with a heavy emphasis on pop idols and young movie actors who girls of the era found "dreamy" (Decades later, The Simpsons did a wicked - and accurate - send-up of Tiger Beat and similar teenybopper magazines with Lisa Simpson being an avid reader of Non-Threatening Boys magazine).  The magazine was essentially a publicity flack journal, featuring wholesome gossip, contests ("Win A Dream Date With...!") and information on the popular preteen entertainment crushes of the period: starting in the '60s with the likes of The Monkees, The Beatles, The Cowsills, Bobby Sherman, and Dino Desi & Billy, and on into the '70s with stars such as David Cassidy, Barry Williams and Chris Knight from The Brady Bunch, The Hudson Brothers, The Williams Brothers, Shawn Cassidy and Leif Garrett - and of course, the two top pop titans of the early 1970's, The Jackson 5 and The Osmonds -  to name but a few.

Despite being one of the main go-to sources for pop artist news, Laufer and Tiger Beat had no direct stake in any revenues generated by the artists they promoted.  In fact, much of the data and interviews contained in their monthly 'zine were paid for by the publisher, not offered for free by the artists' managers.  And yet Laufer was in no position to complain about this arrangement; any pushback or negative press on his part would lead to an immediate curtailing of access of that particular actor or singer.  Basically, the entertainment industry had Tiger Beat by the balls.  Laufer longed for an artist he could take into his orbit to supervise and exploit outside of the influence of these talent managers... and like magic, The DeFranco Family came into his sights as his golden goose.

In the fall of 1972, Lee flew the band out to Los Angeles for a full-fledged audition with Laufer, and he also liked what he heard.  The magazine publisher quickly signed the group to an exclusive deal with his company, Laufer Entertainment, financed a debut three-song demo, and helped secure for them a recording contract with 20th Century Records.  Laufer also began some early tub-thumping for The DeFrancos in the pages of his mag, with the very first mention of the group coming in the November 1972 issue, months before any DeFranco Family product had actually made it into the music store bins.

The DeFranco Family entered United Western Recorders studio in Hollywood (the same place where Pet Sounds and "California Dreamin'" were cut a few years earlier) in February 1973 to lay down tracks for their debut album, utilizing members of the legendary Wrecking Crew as their backing band. The debut single, "Heartbeat - It's A Lovebeat" was released that May, a couple of weeks before the album of the same name hit the shelves, and immediately began climbing the charts.

The success of that single, both in the U.S and internationally, was boosted somewhat by content regulations in Canada (which mandated that stations there give maximum exposure and airplay to local artists), but was mostly due to relentless positive press for the band generated in the pages of Tiger Beat and picked up by other teen idol magazines of the period.  Hardly a month went by in 1973 where The DeFrancos, and Tony in particular, weren't featured as cover stars in Laufer's rag.  This created a groundswell of support that encouraged radio stations across the U.S. to play the song as much as possible... which simultaneously helped fill Laufer Entertainment's coffers. Laufer's investment in the group began to pay off handsomely.

It can also be argued that another huge factor in The DeFranco Family's success in 1973 came from filling the market void left by mistakes and misfires made by the two reigning "family" pop bands of the period, the aforementioned Jackson 5 and Osmonds.  After six hit albums in just three years, The Jackson 5 sound was getting a bit old and tired.  Plus, lead singer Michael's voice began changing in 1972, forcing Motown management and the band's songwriting team ("The Corporation") to find/craft songs to fit this vocal shift. The group was enormously dissatisfied with the songs chosen for their next album, and all of the brothers had begun writing their own material with the hope of having some of their songs included. But Motown actively prevented them from recording any of their own material.  The resulting album, Skywriter, containing nothing but label-mandated music, was released in March of 1973.  While it sold relatively well (2 million copies worldwide), it was the first Jackson 5 disc to miss the Top Ten, peaking at #44. The entire situation left the Jackson family extremely unhappy as to how they had been treated by the label. The Skywriter situation was one of a number of factors that led to The Jackson 5 leaving Motown two years later.

As for The Osmonds, they were sort of in the same situation as The Jackson 5, having cranked out four albums in rapid succession (within two years) and also dealing with lead singer Donny's changing voice. But the difference between the two bands was that The Osmonds got more musically ambitious with each album, because their label made some allowances for them to include their own material.  Phase III, released in early 1972, retained a lot of the bubblegum pop sound that put them on the map in the first place, with hit songs like "Down By The Lazy River" and "Yo-Yo".  But it also included smatterings of genuine hard rock.  Their subsequent album, Crazy Horses, released in October of that year, their first with every song penned by a band member, all but completely dispensed with pop sounds - believe it or not, but it is truly one of the great early '70s hard rock albums. Listening to it nowadays, you can't BELIEVE that these five clean-cut boys from Utah recorded it - it's that raw, nasty and good. Both of The Osmonds' 1972 albums made the Billboard Top Twenty.

With that wave of critical and popular success behind them, The Osmonds then made a curious move. Being devout Mormons, some of the older band members were coming of the age to go off on year-long church missions, which would derail their entertainment careers. The band thought that, rather than placing the group on hiatus while on religious duties, they would be better served and reach more people through their music.  To this end, in June 1973 The Osmonds put out an ambitious album called The Plan, described as "a Mormon concept album with prog rock aspirations" (the album name is taken from The Plan Of Salvation, a key tenet of the Mormon faith).  All of the songs (recorded in a variety of genres) relate to aspects of Mormonism.  While some saw it as an sincere and ambitious attempt to celebrate their religion and expose it to the masses, many critics viewed it as straight-up proselytizing. The disc was significantly less successful than their two preceding releases (The Plan peaked at #58 on the Billboard 200, and two singles released from it both only reached #36), and in hindsight can be viewed as the end of The Osmonds' chart dominance. The band never put out another album that made the Top Fifty.

So for The DeFranco Family, in many ways the timing of their entry onto the market was almost perfect. Their 1973 was full of hit songs, sold-out concerts, TV appearances (they were on American Bandstand a record nine times) and widespread teen adulation. But it wouldn't last.

After "Heartbeat - It's A Lovebeat" went Gold that fall (and subsequently Platinum by Christmas), the second single from the debut album, "Abra-Ca-Dabra", also made the American Top Forty by the end of 1973.  This was enough to drag their Heartbeat - It's A Lovebeat release up to a peak of #109 on the album charts.  While "Abra-Ca-Dabra" was still on the rise, the label pushed the group back into the studio to record their follow-up, another disc full of poppy, lightweight teenager love songs, along with a cover of the early '60s Drifters hit "Save The Last Dance For Me".  The resulting album, also titled Save The Last Dance For Me, failed to stimulate much excitement in the market, only peaking at #163, but the cover song itself was fairly successful, making it into the Top Twenty by May of 1974.

At this point, timing, which had worked to The DeFranco Family's advantage the year before, began to work against them. Family pop groups, both real (like the Jackson 5 and Osmonds) and fake (The Partridge Family and The Brady Kids) began to fall out of favor beginning in 1974, concurrent with the rise of disco.  The Jacksons were the only one of those groups to quickly adapt to the times and the new sound, reentering the Top Twenty album charts with their September 1974 disc Dancing Machine, with the album's title track becoming a smash hit (#2 Pop, #1 R&B) that touched off the "Robot" dance craze of the mid-70s. The DeFrancos weren't equipped musically to make that transition, hence the poor reception of their second album. But 20th Century Records failed to recognize this shift in the music market - instead blaming the failure of Save The Last Dance For Me on the producer of their two albums.  The label fired him and selected as his replacement longtime music industry insider (and future Lieutenant Governor of California) Mike Curb to oversee the group's career.

Seeing the success the band had with their last hit single, Curb began pressuring The DeFranco Family to rely solely on cover songs for their subsequent releases. The band strongly resisted, and after a couple of Curb-produced attempts to record them as such (with cover singles of "We Belong Together" in 1975 and "Venus" in 1976) that flopped, the DeFrancos terminated their recording relationship with 20th Century Records and their managerial relationship with Laufer and Laufer Entertainment.  Other labels weren't exactly lining up to re-sign them, so The DeFranco Family put together a touring show and went out on the road for a couple of years, playing county fairs and less-than-packed Vegas houses before finally throwing in the towel in 1978.

Tiger Beat never stopped trying to promote the DeFrancos (and milking every possible dollar they could out of the group) during the two years (1974-76) they were circling the drain; as late as the fall of 1976, more than two years after their last chart appearance, Tony DeFranco appeared as a magazine cover star.  But by that time, the group's brief months of glory and once vast and rabid fan base were far behind them. Too bad. Of course by then, I'd moved on from Wisconsin and elementary school, and the fortunes and fate of The DeFranco Family weren't high on my list of concerns. It was too far in the past and too far removed for me to feel any satisfaction at the comeuppance / downfall of a teen idol who seemingly stole my playground buzz a couple of years earlier.

After the end of their recording career, all of the DeFrancos settled in California and began various careers in film and television production, education and other endeavors.  Tony DeFranco is now a very successful high-end Southern California real estate agent with Sotheby's International Realty. All of the siblings are happy and settled in their lives, and remain close - which frankly is a refreshing thing to hear, after so many horror stories about former entertainers sliding into the abyss of poverty and self-destruction. Good on them. Tony, I hereby forgive you.

And here's something for me to give to YOU: both DeFranco Family albums put out by 20th Century Records at the periods indicated:

• Heartbeat - It's A Lovebeat, released in May 1973; and
  
• Save The Last Dance For Me, released in the spring of 1974.

These discs were hard as heck to track down; to the best of my knowledge, the albums have been out of print since the mid-1970s, and neither of them were ever subsequently released on CD. 

This isn't burningly important or technologically innovative music, and I doubt you'll ever see it honored the Rock Hall of Fame anytime soon. But for those of us of a certain age, these DeFranco Family tunes will take us back to a time in our rapidly receding pasts when there was still seemingly enough innocence and wonder in the atmosphere to popularize lightweight poppy AM radio paeans of young love like these being offered. And if you're not old enough to recall those times, at least have a listen and get a chuckle as to what your parents and/or grandparents thought was 'hip' and 'cool' in the early Seventies. Either way, enjoy, and as always, let me know what you think.

Please use the email link below to contact me, and I will reply with the download link(s) ASAP:

Heartbeat - It's A Lovebeat: Send Email
Save The Last Dance For Me: Send Email
 

...And on a final note, here's a thumbs-up on this post from the man himself (heh... I'm such a sneaky little stinker!):

 

The Keane Brothers - The Keane Brothers

I wrote in an earlier post that I spent my last year of high school in Monterey, California, after my Navy-officer dad was transferred there from our previous home in Massachusetts. As I mentioned, that first summer on the Monterey Peninsula, and that first month of school starting that September, were rough and depressing for me - up until a music-related incident occurred there that changed my whole attitude and outlook on the area. I began enjoying California more and more, and got involved in several activities - the track team and drama club at school, and my after-school job at nearby Santa Catalina (a private girls school) - that brought me a host of new friends.

One of my new buddies, Wayne, was a fellow member on the track team (he ran middle distance; I was a sprinter). Originally from Southern California, his family had moved to Monterey in the late 1970s, a couple of years before mine. In addition to the sports team, Wayne was also in a couple of my classes, and he quickly became part of a group I regularly had lunch with, either in the school cafeteria or at the pizza place in the nearby downtown area (I commented in an earlier post how flabbergasted I was at how open and liberal California schools were, compared with what I had been used to all my life in Eastern schools).

As I recall, it was during one of these noontime pizza parlor sessions with the guys that we started talking about the cartoons and other shows we liked when we were younger. We yammered on about old Saturday morning shows like Super Friends, Hong Kong Phooey

and the stalwart Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show, which had anchored CBS's cartoon schedule for years (BB/RR would ultimately air on either CBS or ABC for more than four decades, one of the longest network runs in history). The talk then shifted to the old weekday after-school shows that used to air; everyone there professed a love of Speed Racer and other great Japanese-made children's programs from the Sixties (During my first year living in Annapolis, Maryland as a kid, WDCA Channel 20 out of Washington, DC used to air a two-hour long block of

shows - Speed Racer, Marine Boy (my personal favorite), Ultraman, and Johnny Sokko & His Flying Robot - hosted by the channel's popular mascot Captain 20. During that time, there would be practically tumbleweeds rolling down the neighborhood streets; just about every kid in the neighborhood would be inside, watching those shows!). And we found that we all enjoyed Star Blazers and Battle Of The Planets.

When I mentioned that I used to be a big fan of the mid-Seventies revival of The Mickey Mouse Club, a few of the guys began to laugh and razz me a little. But Wayne stopped all of us cold with the following declaration: "I was almost ON that program." He then provided us with some info and insight on his early life: while living in the Los Angeles area, he'd been a fairly active child actor!

As a small boy, he expressed interest in acting with his parents, who responded by enrolling him in speech, music and drama classes, and taking him to casting calls for the many TV commercials being filmed in the area. He appeared in a few TV ads, mostly for local merchants. His folks helped him acquire an agent, who began looking for more lucrative opportunities for Wayne in television and movies. But nothing of that larger scope and reach ever seemed to pan out for him. When he was eleven, his agent made one final all-out effort on his behalf: he entered him into a nationwide search for child actors to host The New Mickey Mouse Club, scheduled to begin airing in early 1977. The casting call attracted thousands of hopefuls along with Wayne; according to him, he made it very far into the audition process. He claimed to have reached the next-to-last group of kids (the final two dozen or so contenders) before he was finally cut. That pretty much ended his adolescent acting days, and his family moved north, away from the hub of that sort of activity, shortly thereafter.

Of course, half the guys thought that Wayne was BSing all of us, but he backed up his claims with further questioning. The only host I remembered from the program was a black kid named 'Pop' Attmore; Mickey Mouse was the last role he had in a brief early-70's child actor career (he also appeared on the "Kelly's Kids" episode of The Brady Bunch a few years earlier). When I asked Wayne about him, he responded instantly: "Billy? Yeah - he was kind of a dick!", and regaled us with some of Attmore's actions during the audition process. And Wayne claimed to still have the mouse ears the Disney people gave him and the others in his penultimate group; a couple of weeks later, he brought them to school to show us. Yes, he could have just acquired them during an earlier visit to Disneyland... but by then I was fairly convinced his story was true.

However, the thing Wayne said that clinched my belief in him was "I had the same agent as the Keane Brothers." Holy flashback - I'd almost all but forgotten about those guys! The Keane Brothers were a short-lived preteen pop group out of Southern California who achieved some mid-70's national recognition (including a network TV program) without the merest shred of chart success or any remote semblance of an expansive fan base.

The story of Tom Keane (born 1964) and John Keane (born 1965) begins with their father, Bob Keane. The elder Keane was a long-time record producer and label owner who, through a series of bad breaks and insanely bad luck, never quite made it into the big time. To wit:

• In the mid-Fifties, Keane entered into an oral agreement with a Los Angeles businessman in setting up his first label, Keen Records. As the A&R man (Artists & Repertoire, i.e. talent scout), Keane did all the legwork
  
  and quickly came across a demo cut by a gospel singer, Sam Cook, trying to break into pop music. He signed the artist to a long-term deal, and the demo of "Summertime" b/w "You Send Me" was pressed as the label's first
  
  release, under the singer's new name of Sam Cooke. The B-side eventually reached #1 on the Billboard charts in late 1957, making Keen Records a fortune - but Bob Keane never saw a nickel of it. Since he didn't have a written contract, his businessman "partner" screwed him over, and ruthlessly forced him out of the company.

• Keane set up a new label, Del-Fi Records, in 1958, and had some minor successes early that year with a couple of the imprint's singles releases. That May, he received a tip that a teenaged performer from nearby Pacoima, known locally as "the Little Richard of San Fernando", would be playing a weekend matinee show at a theater in the valley. Keane went to see this kid in action, and was so blown away by his performance that he immediately invited him over to audition at his basement recording studio. By the end of the month Keane had signed the seventeen-year-old Richard Valenzuela to Del-Fi, who through Keane's
  
  recommendation changed his recording name to "Ritchie Valens". Valens' first single, "Come On, Let's Go" (co-written by the singer and label head) was released in July to great acclaim, and by the autumn of 1958, Valens was a major star. Keane served as his manager, booking appearances for his charge at locations across the United States and arranging performances on television programs (including American Bandstand) and movies (Go, Johnny, Go!). With the release of "Donna" b/w "La Bamba" in late December, Valens' fame shot into the stratosphere, and it seemed that Keane had made up for his earlier
  
  mistake with Keen Records. Both his and Ritchie's future looked bright and limitless... right up until February 3rd, 1959, when Valens was killed in a Iowa plane crash while on tour (along with Buddy Holly and The Big Bopper, the "Day The Music Died"). Keane had been associated with Ritchie for all of nine months.

• After Valens' death, Del-Fi Records limped along for many years, releasing a lot of music by surf bands (including The Lively Ones and The Surfaris), Frank Zappa (some of his early recordings), and Chan Romero, who had a late-50's hit with "Hippy Hippy Shake". But Keane wouldn't find his next big star until 1964, when the label signed The Bobby Fuller Four. The band recorded eight singles and two
  
  albums on Del-Fi, including the late-1965 smash hit "I Fought The Law" that shot the group to stardom. But once again, fate intervened... group leader Bobby Fuller was found dead, soaked in gasoline, in his mother's car outside of his Hollywood apartment in July 1966.

The circumstances behind Fuller's death - whether suicide, murder or misadventure - have never been fully explained. But Fuller's death led to the imminent demise of the group, and subsequently that of Del-Fi Records - the label shut down in 1967. Bob Keane then entered a new career far removed from the music business, selling burglar alarm systems to his celebrity friends. That was his main focus until the early Seventies, when he discovered that his young sons Tom and John had developed natural musical ability on their own. Seeing them as his entree back into production, Keane began actively coaching and promoting his progeny's talents.

The boys began small, playing at shopping malls, store openings and the like in Los Angeles and surrounding areas. With their father's drive, backing and industry experience, they began expanding their horizons and looking beyond local success - not that the boys were necessarily concerned with that. By all indications, they got into music because they genuinely enjoyed it, and weren't obsessed with becoming stars. Their

first studio effort, the single "Sherry" b/w "God Loves Little Girls", was released in 1976, when the boys were twelve and eleven years old, respectively. This lightweight, bubblegummy record did relatively little here in America, reaching only #84 on the Billboard charts. But it was a Number One hit in Canada, and got them noticed south of the border here in the States. Their first self-titled LP was released shortly thereafter in early 1977, and Tom and John began making well-received appearances on shows like Dinah, The Tonight Show and - yes - The New Mickey Mouse Club to promote it. On the strength of these features, Bob Keane negotiated a deal with CBS for the boys to host their own prime-time variety series, to air on the network during the summer of 1977 in the timeslot for Wonder Woman, then on seasonal hiatus.

As for why CBS would take such a chance and provide relatively unknown performers with substantial airtime, you have to remember that in the Seventies, the networks routinely scheduled short-run summer replacement comedy/variety shows headlined by fresh talent as an alternative to reruns, to retain viewership while their regularly-scheduled series took time off. These shows were relatively inexpensive to produce in comparison to the programs they were subbing for, and early 

on, some of them became hits. Hee Haw, for example, started out as a summer replacement for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1969; the show ended up running for nearly a quarter-century. And Sonny & Cher also began that way, as a 1971 seasonal replacement for Ed Sullivan; it proved so popular that it led to the performers' long-running prime time series. In the first half of the 1970's, The Carpenters, Melba Moore, Jerry Reed, Helen Reddy, Tony Orlando & Dawn, The Hudson Brothers, Mac Davis and The Manhattan Transfer all headlined their own short-lived summer TV variety showcases. All of these met with varying degrees of success, but none of them proved to be the runaway hits that the network hoped for, and none were picked up as a regular season series.

Looking for a guaranteed winner, in 1976 CBS scheduled a summer show starring The Jacksons, who at that point had fallen on hard times; their string of big Motown hits had dried up two years earlier, and they were in the midst of a protracted dispute with their label that led to them leaving Motown for Epic Records in 1975. The network figured that their stardom and youth appeal would draw eyeballs, and despite Michael Jackson's trepidation regarding what the show would do the the band's image and sales, the

group signed on. CBS's calculations were spot-on - The Jacksons garnered huge ratings that summer during its four-week run (my family and I never missed an episode), so much so that the series was picked up as a mid-season replacement in January 1977 following Good Times. But the program got spanked in the Nielsens by the Top 20 hit show The Bionic Woman, and was off the air by March of that year.

The Jacksons was pretty much the peak of the summer replacement format; by then, the genre was becoming increasingly dated and passe. But CBS gave it one more shot in 1977, scheduling summer variety shows with Marilyn McCoo & Billy Davis Jr. (formerly of The 5th Dimension), one-hit wonders The Starland Vocal Band (a program which featured the talents of a then-unknown comedian named David Letterman), the mime duo Shields & Yarnell... and The Keane Brothers. The Keane Brothers Show began airing that August, for a half-hour at 8:30 pm on Friday. I watched every one of the four shows, as I was fascinated that two kids exactly my age had come so far. Here's the show opening:

The format was standard variety-show hokum, with Tom and John interacting with their various guest stars from the world of prime time TV (like Betty White and Sonny Bono) in lame comedy routines, interspersed between the duo performing a couple of songs off of their then-sole album. The boys were fresh-faced, professional and engaging on TV, and you could see that they had some genuine musical talent. Tom could whale on the keyboards, and exhibited a great set of pipes - at times belting out a song with abandon, sounding preternaturally like a preteen Elton John. His brother John was a virtuoso at the drum kit, and was no slouch in the vocal department himself.  But the material they performed (almost all of the songs on the album were written by the two of them) was abysmal, even judging it by the standards of Seventies pop - their music made The Bay City Rollers seem like The Sex Pistols by comparison.

Here's what I regard as the nadir: their on-air performance of "Amy (Show The World You're There)", a 'tribute' to Amy Carter, the nine-year-old daughter of the newly-elected U.S. President Jimmy Carter - I think the lyrics are absolutely HYSTERICAL:

If anything, this tune could serve as The Keane Brothers' ironclad entry into the Unintentional Comedy Hall of Fame.

The Keane Brothers Show aired its fourth and final episode on August 26th, 1977. This also signaled the end of the networks' experiments with summer replacement variety shows; it would be eleven years before CBS tried again, with The Smothers Brothers in 1988. And with that seemingly came the end of the Keane Brothers as a pop act - after that summer, they seemed to fall off the face of the Earth, and I don't recall hearing another thing about them again. In a very short time, the duo became a vague and distant memory. I assumed they'd moved on from music after they reached their teens... but I was incorrect.

The Keane Brothers continued to perform and record for another five years. Their second album, the disco-influenced Taking Off, was released in 1979. In the early '80s, the boys added a couple of new members (including future Chicago bassist Jason Scheff) and changed their band name to Keane (not to be confused with the future Britpop band of the same name). Keane put out two pop LPs on CBS/Sony, a self-titled album in 1981 and Today, Tomorrow and Tonight in 1982. All of these releases went exactly nowhere.

Since that time, both brothers have continued their careers in music. Tom found success as a songwriter, churning out well-received tunes for the likes of Chaka Kahn, Jermaine Jackson and Patti LaBelle. And John established a lucrative career scoring hit television shows, including The Amazing Race and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. They both still do session work on occasion, and over the past twenty years, each has released a couple of solo albums that were all received with resounding crickets.

It's been many years since I'd seen or thought of my old friend Wayne; he only recently came to mind again when I was browsing through an old high school yearbook. And in thinking of him, I recalled his connection to The Keane Brothers, and began seeking some of their music out. Needless to say, most of it has long been out of print here in the States (a couple of their LPs were reissued on CD in Japan in 2011). But I managed to track down their debut album. Again, it's no Grammy Award winner... but it's still a nice and amusing dollop of innocent adolescent pop music from that long-ago decade, the Seventies.

Here's The Keane Brothers, released on 20th Century Records (a subsidiary of 20th Century Fox Film Corporation) in January 1977. Enjoy (if you're able), and as always, let me know what you think.

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