A few days ago here, I introduced some of you to Big Daddy, one of my favorite musical groups. Several of you have admonished me for not recounting the Big Daddy legend so here it is…
In August of 1959, the group — which played the kind of music most groups played back then — was booked on a USO tour of Southeast Asia. Someone made a wrong turn and they wound up missing in action…captured by Laotian revolutionaries and abandoned by the United States which then had a non-interventionist neutral policy towards the region. There was also no one at the U.S. State Department who cared a lot about rock 'n' roll bands or thought it would be a shame if one disappeared forever.
They were held captive for decades…but returning U.S. troops passed on rumors and eventually in 1983, a Special Forces brigade made a daring rescue and our heroes finally returned to American soil. They had missed all that happened to music in the intervening years and didn't like what they now heard on the radio. Convinced that contemporary youth would appreciate the classic sound, they began "fixing" current tunes, rendering them in the only good style of music…the style of the fifties. And that's pretty much the story of Big Daddy as it was told in the press releases for their albums.
Here's another example of them at work. This is what they did to the Michael Jackson song, "Billie Jean."
But before we get to that: Reader William Pelletier tipped me off to something wonderful. Though Big Daddy's albums and CDs are all out of print, Amazon sells an MP3 digital download of Cutting Their Own Groove for a mere ten bucks, or you can buy individual tunes for 69 cents each. This is a very good album and you can order it — or just preview samples of its songs — over on this page.
End of plug. Here's the Big Daddy version of "Billie Jean."
