The Foundations get $250,000 advance on unmade album (1969) The Foundations – Baby, Now That I’ve Found You, performed on Top of the Pops (UK – 1967) MORE: About Motown Records, the musical hit factory behind dozens of hit songs But the New York audiences had resoundingly disagreed.Īnd The Foundations, gold records and all, climbed aboard a bus for a series of one-nighters - still trying to prove something. “We did it because we’re the biggest thing since the Beatles,” Harrod boasted. The group took seven pages in an issue of Billboard magazine, a trade publication - more in one issue than veterans of the record business could recall for any other group. Meantime, Harrod’s typewriter has been clicking out page after page of “They’re not really one-hit wonders” copy. “But the Copa was what we wanted in the first place,” Harrod said. “I think the underground audience tends to be very intolerant,” lamented bass guitarist Peter McBeth, “It’s the hardest type of audience I ever played to.”īut if the underground scene was not where The Foundations were at, neither was the Copa crowd. The Foundations, despite their record sales, pinned largely on the two hits, had been able to please audiences at neither. Strange, because the Copa is the symbol of the nightclub entertainment “establishment” - the Fillmore the symbol of popular music’s “underground.” They played an emergency fill-in at the Copa that night. Next day, Harrod was contacted by officials of New York’s Copacabana night club, whose atmosphere is perhaps as different as night is from day from the Fillmore. The seven Foundations accepted a gold record in their dressing room for “Build Me Up Buttercup,” then walked on stage where “they just absolutely bombed,” according to their public relations manager, a former British newspaperman named Rod Harrod.ĭON’T MISS: Meet music legend Stevie Wonder, who started his music career at age 13 Then, last month, The Foundations returned to the United States for a series of engagements starting in New York.įirst stop - the Fillmore East, Mecca for the name and not-so-name of rock, blues, etc. To add to the group’s troubles, disharmony had set in with the lead singer, and a mutual agreement to replace him had been reached.Ĭolin Young was selected from 200 applicants, and the group made a second single, “Build Me Up Buttercup.”ĪLSO SEE: The Mamas and The Papas: How the group’s harmonies were a huge hit They were a racially-mixed group - one of the first to achieve success - and had sold a gold record quantity of “Baby, Now That I’ve Found You.”īut an earlier American tour ended in failure, to the tune of several thousand dollars. The Foundations, a group whose records have sold as well as any British group since the Beatles, have a collective identity crisis that has continued through a series of hit records and into the group’s present second American tour.įive months ago, The Foundations were nowhere. – AJWįoundations rock group facing an identity crisisīy Allan Parachini – Simpson’s Leader-Times (Kittanning, Pennsylvania) May 14, 1969Ī lot of young people are trying to find themselves these days, and you can add to this congregation The Foundations - financially a success, but still with lots of problems. While The Foundations went their own ways and faded into the mists of history, the music remains - and sounds just as good as it always has. They first found success in 1967 with the song “Baby Now That I’ve Found You,” which went to number one on the UK Singles Chart, plus as reached the top 10 in the US.ĭespite the hit, less than a year later, lead singer Clem Curtis left the band, suggesting that perhaps some of the band’s members weren’t putting in as much effort after they had a hit.Īfter auditioning 200 singers, the group settled on vocalist Colin Young, then promptly turned things around, and, in 1968, released what is arguably their most well-known hit, and also featured below - “Build Me Up Buttercup.” That song was written by Mike d’Abo (of Manfred Mann) and Tony Macaulay.Īfter scoring one more hit in 1969 - “In The Bad Bad Old Days (Before You Loved Me)” - the band parted with their management at the beginning of 1970, then broke up completely near the end of the year. Except it wasn’t.ĭespite sounding like they were products of the Detroit music machine, The Foundations were actually formed in London, and consisted of members from the West Indies, Britain, and Sri Lanka. The Foundations burst onto the music scene in the late 1960s with a fantastic soul sound that was straight out of Motown.
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