Back when I was in college, I worked one summer at a comedically low-rent radio station in rural Vermont. These were the days before automation, when most stations ran by “the clock.” The clock was set by the station manager, usually, and segmented the day into sections. (I was at more than one station that had the clock up on the wall. At least once it was handwritten on cardboard.) Top of the hour: a song that defined the station and its sound. Usually the station ID, legally required by our friends at the FCC, followed. Then there might be another song, an ad break, a specific type of song at a specific time. You get the idea.

The owner of that low-rent station, who lived in the basement*, had some eccentric ideas of how a radio station should be run**, but she understood the value of the clock. After the top of the hour and the news, we usually played a new release, taken from the sampler CDs labels used to send to radio stations. I don’t remember a lot of the other details, but we also played a mix of country and pop songs from earlier eras. The station hosted a decent library of CDs to choose from, including the full Have a Nice Day box set from Rhino, 25 CDs of ’70s one-hit wonders.

This is how I gained my (honestly somewhat distressing) ability to recognize a lot of that decade’s finest processed cheese, as well as the forgotten gems. Each CD had a booklet with little essays about the songs and artists, which were usually both entertaining and informative. A little like the internet before enshittification.

Yeah, even I don’t remember what the little booklet said about Andy Kim.

Andy Kim was born Andy Youakim in Montreal, the child of Lebanese immigrants. As a solo artist, he landed on Volume 13 of Have a Nice Day with ”Rock Me Gently,” a bouncy and rather sweet love song that landed on the mixtape of songs I made from that box set when the owner wasn’t paying attention. He also landed on the Billboard Hot 100 twice in 1969: once with his solo song “Baby, I Love You” and as co-writer of one of the biggest hits of the year: “Sugar, Sugar,” which spent 22 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 and charted in 25 other countries. (No, it wasn’t big in Japan, but it did go to #1 in the US, UK, Canada, Denmark, Mexico…)

Of course, “Sugar, Sugar” was no one’s passion project. They weren’t the first artificially formed band —- the Monkees had beat them by a few years —- but there was something particularly mercenary about The Archies, whose identity was defined by a Saturday morning cartoon, The Archie Show. As in the comics, Archie Andrews had a band, and Saturday morning cartoons existed to sell stuff, so the Archies released some pop singles. (It is, I will admit, a fresher idea than just using cartoons to sell toys. Maybe Young Justice should have had a band.)

Kim and co-writer Jeff Barry (himself born Joel Adelberg, who co-write a string of pop hits including “Be My Baby,” “River Deep, Mountain High,” and Olivia Newton-John’s “I Honestly Love You”) put together a slice of simple pop perfection. It’s as deep as a layer of nail polish, but it sure is catchy. 

Barry wrote dozens of songs for The Archies during the run of The Archie Show, and “Sugar, Sugar” was actually the third single they released. DJs must have been losing patience with the whole fake band business by that time, as “Sugar, Sugar” was shopped to 1260 KYA in San Francisco as an unlabeled single by a mystery band. I’m not sure how many stations fell for that little trick, but in the end “Sugar, Sugar” got its radio play, and then some. It finished the year as Billboard’s top song of 1969. (Remember all the myths about 1969? Everyone waded through the mud at Woodstock and listened to Jimi Hendrix play the national anthem? Yeah, the top song of that year was motherfucking “Sugar, Sugar.” At least the #2 track was The 5th Dimenson’s ”Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In.” Summer of Soul has the background on that song.) The performers who comprised “The Archies” were session musicians, with Ron Dante singing lead vocals and Toni Wine and Andy Kim singing backup.

Dante and Wine also had some pretty interesting careers: Dante was the lead singer for several other cartoon-only musical acts (notably, sigh, The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan), produced Barry Manilow’s solo albums, and sang the theme song for Ricky Schroder’s Silver Spoons. Wine wrote her own share of pop songs, including “A Groovy Kind of Love,” and was one of the voices of Meow Mix cat food. No one claimed the life of a session singer was glamorous. (I actually saw her perform live once, when Tony Orlando and Dawn were one of the free acts at a county fair. If I’d known, I might have stopped and listened for another minute or two…well. Maybe. “Sugar, Sugar” is Sondheim next to “”Knock Three goddamn Times.””)

Of course, none of it would be possible without Don Kirshner, a man who got so frustrated managing the Monkees that he decided to commission a fake band that would give him less trouble. (Truly, the Simon Cowell of his time.) A successful music publisher who had three record labels at various points in his career, Kirshner had an ear for talent that has probably been overshadowed nowadays by his fights with the Monkees, but he certainly deserved his 2012 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, no matter what you think of “Sugar, Sugar.” Along with his creation of the Monkees, he was owner of three record labels, and had songwriters under contract including greats like Carole King, Paul Simon, and Phil Spector. (He also inspired a run of fake bands, from the continuing success of novelty acts like Alvin and the Chipmunks to more serious acts like Vocaloids and Gorillaz.)

Is “Sugar, Sugar” a good song? It all kind of depends on how you define “good,” right? It’s catchy, it’s well-performed, and it has an effortless pop sheen that makes it exactly the sort of song that the Archies, were they real, might release. It’’s as sleek, aesthetically pleasing, and oddly timeless as the character designs for Archie, Betty, Veronica, Jughead and Reggie (or, later, Kevin). It clearly made a lot of people happy. It’s got a nice beat and you can dance to it. Even the innocence of it all isn’t entirely sexless (think of Betty and Veronica at the beach). “Pour your sweetness over me” and “pour a little sugar on me, baby” aren’t the delightful raunch of Def Leppard, but there’s a bit of a wink there.

There’s still a certain cold calculation to “Sugar, Sugar,” though, especially if you compare it to the straightforward sexuality of “Honky Tonk Women,” the song it knocked off the charts, or the building frustration of The Temptations’ “I Can’t Get Next to You,” the song that followed it. And “Sugar, Sugar”’s lyrics match the bubblegum bounce of the music, but that means they include lines like “I just can’t believe the loveliness of loving you.” I can’t believe it’s true either, Archie. Woof. Even Riverdale, which did in fact finally get around to putting “The Archies” on the show, didn’t touch the song. And that show did damn near everything.

On the other hand, Wilson Pickett covered it in 1970 and took it to #4. Anything Wilson Pickett covered can’t be all bad.

Want more? Rolling Stone has a fun article on The Archies’ “career,” if you’d like to know more about their full catalog.

* Don’t get me started on the food that got left sitting around.

** You know those people who read in a book that the product’s name should be said four times in a thirty-second ad and insist you do that even when the product’s name is Sassy Sandy Seychelle’s Seaside Seafood Shack? Kind of like that, only the book was thirty years out of date and she may or may not have been remembering what it said correctly.