Los Shakers In The U.S.A. (Part Two)
Los Shakers: The Alternate Reality Project (Part 2)
In the short span of one month, Los Shakers had gone from complete unknowns to a promising new band with one top ten single already under their belt in the United States. The group’s tour with Manfred Mann and promotion across the country had ended on the 20th of December, with the group travelling back home to Argentina and Uruguay to celebrate Christmas with their respective families. By the 27th, they were back on a plane ready to commence a European tour including several countries such as France and Germany which were initially planned to occur in October before plans were moved back. For Capitol Records, whilst the first few releases by Los Shakers were impactful, their biggest release by far was their Americanised version of The Beatles’ ‘Rubber Soul,’ displaying a softer, folkier and more mature sound for the band which for some fans of the group alienated them. Many of the younger demographic not accustomed to this ‘new’ sound of The Beatles would eventually move into more simple pop-oriented records by artists such as The Lovin’ Spoonful, The Mamas And The Papas and The Monkees. With the increasingly complex and non commercial appeal of Capitol’s two biggest pop acts, The Beatles and The Beach Boys, Los Shakers were marketed to fill the gap left by those two bands of simple, catchy pop songs. Barely a month after the group’s debut album was released, on the 10th of January 1966, Capitol Records released another single. The A-side ‘Don’t Ask Me Love’ was featured on that first album but here an alternate mix appears. Unbeknownst to employees at Capitol was that the mix of ‘Don’t Ask Me Love’ was an unintended early mix of the song featuring a guitar playing the main riff as a placeholder before the correct koto was added into the recording. As the corrected mix was sent at a point too late to substitute into the album, the mix was instead released as the single. The B-side of the single was ‘More,’ a song written by the Fattoruso brothers that originally backed the ‘Break It All’ single in South America and up to that point had been unreleased in the United States. The single did moderately well, peaking at number 39 on the Billboard Top 100.
Over the following three months, pre-filmed television appearances from South America were shown on a semi-regular basis on various music programs throughout the country as the group toured the world concluding in Australia in late February 1966. In early February, plans for a second US Shakers album were underway. The remaining three tracks sent the previous November (‘More,’ ‘Everybody Shake’ and ‘Baby Yes Yes’) were the first of the tracks to be guaranteed a spot on the next album and upon reviewing the material, ‘Everybody Shake’ was deemed to be the most commercial of the material and thus would become both the group’s next single as well as the title track for the next album (the word ‘shake’ in the title was likely also a factor). A request was sent to Odeon for seven additional tracks to fill up another album, however unlike the previous album things weren’t as clearly planned as they could’ve been. First off, going through the group’s previously released masters, the two covers of ‘Keep Searching’ and ‘It’s My Party’ were never re-recorded into eight-track as only original compositions needed to be re-recorded. The twin-track tapes of those songs could not be located at that time (the tapes were eventually discovered in Brazil in the early 1970s) and thus the songs were forced to be sent in mono only. Two songs sent over ‘Baby Do The Shake’ and ‘The Longest Night,’ were severely damaged during shipping between the two continents and were unusable for the new album, with ‘Baby Do The Shake’ having to be replaced with a needle drop of the Canadian release of the group’s debut album in its original mono version as it was impossible for a new tape to be sent from Argentina within the allocated time. ‘The Longest Night’ would be held over to the following album. 'Shake In The Streets' also had its original mono recording sent on accident and for some unknown reason was never fixed to its proper stereo re-recording on any release of the album. On the 3rd of March 1966, the group’s third single ‘Everybody Shake’ backed with ‘Do Not Disturb’ was released. The single was a surprise hit compared to the group’s previous single peaking at a very respectable number twelve although many comparisons were drawn by music critics to The Dave Clark Five’s ‘Can’t You See That She’s Mine’ single released in 1964 which uses the exact same melody. Although there had been many examples of ‘ripoff’ records particularly during the initial wave of Beatlemania in early 1964, several publications dubbed Los Shakers as ‘bad knockoffs’ of the great British sound noting the group’s very British Invasion appearance of moptops and suits and their at times horrendous lyric writing which some deemed enough to dismiss the group’s talent altogether.
But to the younger demographic, the people who were buying their records and watching them on television, that’s what made them so great. Los Shakers invoked the same energy and catchy pop songs The Beatles once wrote and performed with even the same suits and moptops they all knew and loved. Thus Los Shakers became a staple of teen magazines, often with articles writing about a so-called feud between the group and The Beatles, much as how The Dave Clark Five had been The Beatles’ rivals back in 1964. The band carried some strange mystique to themselves, not being a band from either America or England, something that was almost completely out of the ordinary at that time. Yet, somehow they always remained on television despite the infrequent amount of times they ever actually stepped foot into the country. Their frequent television appearances heavily promoted the music which in turn heavily promoted the television appearances. This same business model would be expanded upon by what would become The Monkees although this project had been in progress before Los Shakers had even formed in Uruguay.
Unlike the previous album, Los Shakers were not in the country to promote their new album. They were back in Argentina busy recording material for upcoming releases, taking small breaks to do ‘Escala Musical’ appearances or brief stints of shows across the country. So whilst the album had a hit single and the group showed up on American televisions regularly, much of the material promoted was actually stuff from their debut album at times because the band hadn’t even filmed anything for their latest material. Released on the 29th of March 1966, ‘Everybody Shake’ the album originally fell to a peak of #56 on the charts, but strangely by early 1967 returned back on the charts peaking at #51 after several of the songs appeared on a various artists compilation released by Capitol. Although the group’s chart success was bumpy at best, the group started to feel the pressure of the ever changing trends of pop music and began to shift away from the very thing that gave them their audience in the United States…
Everybody Shake (29th March 1966)
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