Andy Kim - “How’d We Ever Get This Way?”
The Brill Building crowd didn’t let their brand of assembly-line pop hitmaking die quietly with the ascension of “serious” rock in the mid-to-late sixties. The stalwart commercial music establishment instead fired off a fusillade of spectacularly well-written and produced material in the last few years of the decade, aiming their sights at the prepubescent television generation, who were, felicitously, raised with a fully-developed sweet tooth for junk culture. Dismissed as purveyors of so much dumbed-down pabulum by anyone who desired to stay hip (much as the leading lights of the nascent rock ‘n’ roll movement in the fifties were written off by any college student with a Dave Brubeck album), the torch-bearers of simple, joyful pop music resorted to clever cross-promotional tactics in delivering their newly-monikered “bubblegum” to the right audience. Enter music-themed TV shows, 45s on cereal boxes, et al. While contretemps resulting from delusions of excessive musical talent associated with the likes of Michael Nesmith were eventually solved by the advent of fictitious cartoon bands (the Archies, Josie and the Pussycats) - not to mention fictitious costumed bands (the Banana Splits) and fictitious bands made up of chimpanzees (The Evolution Revolution of Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp fame) - The Monkees in the meantime did much to lend buoyancy to many a flagging pop songwriting career.
Jeff Barry, who had helped manufacture the classic girl group sound with his then-wife Ellie Greenwich, benefitted dramatically from the smash success of a couple of Neil Diamond-penned tunes he produced for the Monkees (“I’m a Believer,” “A Little Bit Me, a Little Bit You”), which also aided Diamond’s burgeoning career as an artist, then helmed by Greenwich/Barry. It also didn’t hurt that everything Diamond wrote at the time was pure gold. After a rash of brilliant Diamond singles, Barry parted ways with both Diamond and Greenwich, found a new collaborator in Montreal-born Andy Kim and launched a record label called Steed. Kim came on the scene equipped with suave, Humperdinck-esque good looks and a penchant for catchy, effervescent little tunes. The duo quickly began work on material for both the launch of Kim’s solo career and Don Kirschner’s post-Monkees marketing venture, the Archies. While “Sugar, Sugar” has become Kim/Barry’s most well-known collaboration, Kim himself delivered the goods on a consistent basis with his Steed singles, as evidenced by the pure bubblegum bliss of “How’d We Ever Get This Way?”.
