![]() ![]() But in the Bizarro world of Sonny and Fudge, the dangerous exchange of limited ideas is reaching critical mass. In a better part of the world, The Beach Boys, the Byrds, the Beatles, the Stones and Dylan are all sending each other secret messages through their LPs and coming up with great masterworks like Pet Sounds and Sgt. Before lithium voiced VF singer Mark Stein and the boys kick into “Bang Bang” proper, they stick in a few verses of “Ring Around The Rosy.” For real! Sonny Bono must’ve been either honored or insulted by his Atco labelmates’ grafting of a nursery rhyme to his composition because on his only solo LP Inner Views, he responds by singing “Ring around the rosy/ Your Dad is getting nosy/ Your Mom is cooking sturgeon/ Your sister’s still a virgin” twice during in his twelve minute Vanilla Fudge tribute “I Just Sit There”. That debut Vanilla Fudge album included a cover of Cher’s 1966 hit “Bang Bang” which carried the germ of two horrid albums to shortly follow. Hadn’t the Beatles’ beloved old biddy been through enough without being dug up again by the Fudge and stretched out on a rack for eight torturous minutes? ![]() Take the band’s excruciating version of “Eleanor Rigby” on their debut album. More often than not, the group’s elongated agonizing over when to start and end a song resulted in musical Chinese water torture. Sometimes the results could be exhilarating, as in their melodramatic remake of the Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hanging On” and their spooky take of Dusty Springfield’s “The Look of Love”. No, the Fudge weren’t satisfied until they beat a song senselessly with a rock until every last drop of life oozed out of it. Unlike the previous company, the Fudge weren’t content with merely covering tunes. ![]() Drop the needle anywhere on this record and you can’t believe what you’re hearing.įollowing in the footsteps of other New York organ-based bands like the Rascals and the Vagrants, the Vanilla Fudge specialized in radically reconstructed versions of the day’s popular hits. In a time where Sonny really could use some hip credibility, Vanilla Fudge’s The Beat Goes On LP, which featured countless nauseating revisions of his 1967 hit song, wasn’t doing him or Cher any huge favors. Back in 1968, Sonny Bono’ s sole solo mio LP Inner Views (Featured last week in this column) flopped so ignominiously that it even took Cher’s solo career down with it. This week we look back on what many scholars, music critics and anyone who’s ever heard it consider to be the worst psychedelic album ever made. Suspect Record: The Beat Goes On by Vanilla Fudge ![]()
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