Sugar Sugar

The quintessential Los Angeles band of the sixties has to be the Archies. So L.A. that they don't really exist at all except in their fabricated little two dimensional cel world. Like the Monkees but actually much flatter.

I always liked the sound of this bubble gummy cut. Ron Dante is the male voice of course. But I have always loved the female vocalist who I assumed was black. Until I looked it up a few years ago and discovered she was actually a white girl from New York, Tony Wine. Wine had been writing songs since the age of 8, sang backup for Willie Nelson and Gene Pitney and wrote Groovy kind of love and Candida amongst others. Great voice.

Interesting notes on the song from Wikipedia:


"Sugar, Sugar" is a pop song written by Jeff Barry and Andy Kim. It was a four-week 1969 number-one hit single by fictional characters The Archies. Produced by Jeff Barry, the song was originally released on the album Everything's Archie. The album is the product of a group of studio musicians managed by Don Kirshner. Ron Dante's lead vocals were accompanied by those of Toni Wine (who sang the line "I'm gonna make your life so sweet"), Andy Kim, and Ellie Greenwich. Together they provided the voices of the various Archies using multitracking. Ray Stevens, the comic singer, provided the hand claps to the song[citation needed].


The Archies' "Sugar, Sugar" was the 1969 number-one single of the year. It spent four weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 from September 20, 1969 and eight weeks at the top of the UK singles chart. The song lists at #63 on Billboard's Greatest Songs of All Time.[1] It also peaked at one in the South African Singles Chart.[2] On February 5, 2006, "Sugar, Sugar" was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, as co-writer Andy Kim is originally from Montreal, Quebec.


The song was earlier offered to The Monkees, although additional rumors that it was recorded using session musicians with Davy Jones providing all the vocals, but never released, are false. Don Kirshner has said that Mike Nesmith put his fist through the wall of the Beverley Hills hotel refusing to do "Sugar, Sugar."[3] Jones confirmed that Kirshner had offered it to them, but stated they turned it down, and he never recorded it.[4] The band thought it seemed cheesy and at that point they were looking to mature their sound. However, Monkees archival expert Andrew Sandoval has suggested that the band may instead actually have been offered a tune called "Sugar Man", but with the passage of time the parties involved simply mis-remembered it as being "Sugar, Sugar", in large part because it made a better anecdote.