🚢Yacht Pop Anchors #6: Flo & Eddie, It Bites, Todd Rundgren & Utopia

⚓Like Yacht Rock, but with more octane, more harmonies, infinitely hummable melodies, and some jangly guitars: If power pop had teeth and a Mach 5 motor.

As it often does in our ear-candy ocean of rock’n’pop, the dynamism runs deep in this trio of songs that coulda/shoulda been hits. It’s doubtful record companies did little more than tolerate these songs on an album, much less think they’d Top any 40!

I wouldn’t be the first to assert their general corporate cluelessness in that regard! Start your own ‘70s Top 40 AM radio station with these, and own your day-part and rock your station’s Arbs!

Flo & Eddie, “Let Me Make Love to You,” 1975

Turtles in the ‘60s (with hits like “Happy Together” and “She’d Rather Be With Me”) turned into Mothers (of Invention) at the dawn of the ‘70s. With Frank Zappa’s London concert injury in 1971, Mark Volman (Flo, short for Phlorescent Leech) and Howard Kaylan (Eddie) decided to make a go of a career as “themselves,” resulting in a contract and debut album with Reprise/Warner Bros. Records in 1972 (including several former Mothers).

Speaking of contracts (particularly restrictive ones), the one they signed with White Whale Records in 1965 that resulted in their string of Turtles hits, prevented Volman and Kaylan from using the name “The Turtles,” as well as their own names, in a musical context…hence the birth of Flo & Eddie!

In a 1987 talk show, the two talk about their poor, early-career business decisions in the video below.

Two albums on Reprise led to two albums on Columbia, 1975’s Illegal, Immoral and Fattening (from whence “Let Me Make Love to You” comes) and Moving Targets the following year.

Flo & Eddie, by 1975, knew and hung out with everyone in the L.A. record-biz firmament. They even had a radio show, “Flo & Eddie by the Fireside,” on local FM-er, KMET, that regularly featured rock and pop stars as guests.

When they recorded Illegal, Immoral and Fattening (old friend from their Turtles days, Joe Wissert producing), one song was (literally) singled-out, by Columbia, to be the single from the album (as was Albert Hammond’s and Mike Hazlewood’s “Rebecca”)….“Let Me Make Love to You” (written by Kaylan & Volman), brimming with the glorious and tightly-packed pop exuberance that ruled the airwaves…in the ‘60s, but sadly, seemed archaic and foreign amid 1975 AM playlists.

On that song…and only that song on the album…did the following play: Lee Sklar (bass…you’ll hear his story on the session below), former Zappa and Journey drummer, Aynsley Dunbar (drums), Ian Underwood (again Zappa, keyboards), and SoCal session mainstay, Danny “Kootch” Kortchmar, guitar. The arrangement packs so much into its 2 minutes and 19 seconds! Swirling strings and triumphant horns are all conducted and arranged by veteran producer/composer, Nick DeCaro.

The Robbs had many singles with Mercury Records (and other labels) in the mid-’60s, but recorded only one album, in 1967.

Dee Robb

Perhaps the bigger story, though, is this song’s hand-picked engineer just for this session, Dee Robb (née David Donaldson), who was part of the Turtles-adjacent mid-’60s pop/folk/harmony 4-piece group, featuring a trio of Donaldson brothers (Wisconsin’s The Robbs, shown above, with Dee featured as the group’s lead singer/guitarist) who recorded for Mercury.

In fact, they took over the house band chores from Paul Revere & the Raiders on Dick Clark’s afternoon dance show, Where The Action Is, and were an inspiration for The Ramones to adopt identical surnames.

Plus, the Donaldson Brothers’ newly-opened recording studio, Cherokee Studios, christened in 1972, was used for recording the song.

Dee Robb (r) with Barbara Bach and Ringo, at the Cherokee board.

Bassist, Lee Sklar, from his YouTube channel, talks about working with Flo & Eddie, and at about the 3:10 mark, he begins sharing a story about his band opening for The Turtles at a Sunset Boulevard club in 1969, as well as the recording of “Let Me Make Love to You”:

Lee mentions (above) the ‘70s Midnight Special appearance he did with Flo & Eddie, as they sang “Happy Together”; sans entering on angels’ wings, here’s that video, with Lee barely visible behind Mark, and between him and the 3 gal singers. Click here.

Here’s the video I promised where Flo & Eddie talk about blowing major business decisions in their mid-’60s start with The Turtles. The guest host is comedian George Carlin, who’s sitting in for the just-fired Joan Rivers, from her Fox network late night talk show, The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers.

When Rivers challenged Fox executives, who wanted to fire her husband, Edgar Rosenberg, as the show’s producer, the network fired them both on May 15, 1987. This clip, then, is from a show the following month. Flo & Eddie also sing their Turtles #3 hit, “She’d Rather Be With Me” (their 1967 follow-up to their #1 smash, “Happy Together,” produced by Joe Wissert); both songs were penned by Garry Bonner and Alan Gordon:

“Rose Marie,” 1988

It Bites: Hard as they may be trying, there’s no disguising their “home” decade! Clockwise from bottom left: John “Top Hat” Beck (keyboards, vocals), Dick Nolan (bass, vocals), Bob Dalton (drums), and Francis Dunnery (guitar, lead vocals).

It Bites: Uniquely described as a British progressive rock and pop fusion band (formed in Egremont, Cumbria, in 1982), and best known for their 1986 single, “Calling All the Heroes,” which resulted in a Top 10 UK Singles Chart hit, and of course, went criminally unheard in the States.

We swerve off course just a tad to hear what merging a mid-’70s melodic-with-narrative Trick of the Tail-era Genesis with the ‘90s power pop deftness of Jellyfish might whelp: Clever without being alienating; catchy without being cloying:

Initially fronted by Francis Dunnery, the band recorded three studio albums before splitting in 1990. The band eventually reformed in 2006 with new frontman John Mitchell replacing Dunnery, recording two further studio albums before going into hiatus circa 2014.

My unlikely story of seeing It Bites open for Jethro Tull in L.A. in 1989 follows. The picture just below? Two gentlemen who appreciate a little wit and humour in their past prog proclivities: Tull’s Ian Anderson with It Bites’ Francis Dunnery:

Back to “Rose Marie” (from their 1988 Once Around the World album, produced by the band, Mark Wallis, and Steve Hillage): During this time-frame, Dunnery also gained some press attention for his invention of the Tapboard, an instrument based on two paired guitar necks and using a ten-finger tapping technique to create exceptionally fast and clear melodic runs and chording.

Dunnery out-Eddies Van Halen, here, as he features this technique following “Rose Marie”’s bridge. This YouTube content creator impressively executes Dunnery’s double-tapping style (however, without the Tapboard, or placing the guitar on his lap as Dunnery often does) on the song’s solo:

A rare, 8-minute documentary on the recording of It Bites’ Once Around the World 1988 album, with interviews with Dunnery and engineer/producer, Mark Wallis:

Utopia, “Set Me Free,” 1980

Kasim Sulton, multi-instrumentalist: With guitar and keyboards already in his arsenal, he mainly played bass for Todd Rundgren's Utopia (1973-1976), which later became, simply, Utopia after '76. With "Set Me Free" (writing credit attributed to Utopia, as they had all agreed. But, Kasim wrote this, and, surprisingly, not about a romantic relationship! See below for more!). Kasim sings lead and plays electric piano on this, a pop song worthy to stand proudly among Todd's pantheon of stellar pop tunes!

Official video for a song released a year-and-a-half before the 8/1/81 advent of MTV:

Utopia had only one U.S. Billboard Top 40 hit: Kasim’s “Set Me Free” from their best-selling album, Adventures in Utopia (late 1979), peaking at #27 in early 1980. As for the song, its persistent tempo jauntily marches through verses and choruses, has a well-composed bridge that features a scalding sax solo, and even has a the standard pop song modulation shortly after!

Master-craft songwriting vibes must come a little easier if you’re in the same band as a veteran hitmaker and eventual Rock Hall-of-Famer, Todd!

Songfacts lays out the songwriting origin: “The song sounds like it’s about an interpersonal relationship, with the guy asking the girl to cut him loose so he can move on with his life, but it’s really about Sulton’s professional life:

“All four members of Utopia were signed to Bearsville Records (distributed by Warner Bros. Records) not just as a band, but individually as well. Sulton desperately wanted to do a solo album, but was rebuffed by Bearsville, so he wrote this song about wanting to be released from his contract.

Albert Grossman chatting up Dylan in 1965, in the backstage area of the Newport Folk Festival.

“In our interview with Sulton, he explained: ‘[Bob Dylan’s 1960s manager, and Bearsville founder] Albert Grossman actually said to me, ‘That’s fine. You’re more than welcome to go. That’ll be $50,000 and 15 percent of all the royalties that you’ll ever make for the rest of your life.’ And I freaked out and I wrote ‘Set Me Free’!”

Couldn’t you please just set me free,
You get your fun just hurting me;
If this is how it’s going to be,
Just set me free just set me free.

But you refuse to set me free,
And you deny me of my needs;
You have me under lock and key,
Just set me free just set me free.

-Kasim Sulton

Shortly after the song’s release, this 1980 concert in Columbus, Ohio: Kasim, lead vocals and bass, Todd Rundgren, vocals and guitar, Roger Powell, vocals and keyboards, and John “Willie” Wilcox, drums: