POP-A-LOOZA: What If THE ARCHIES Had Been A Real-Life Band?

Each week, the pop culture website Pop-A-Looza shares a post or two from my vast 'n' captivating Boppin' (Like The Hip Folks Do) archive. The latest shared post is "The Archies: An American Band," my fanciful answer to the question: What if the cartoon bubblegum group The Archies had been a real-life band?



In our sometimes-mundane and sometimes-fascinating reality, a recording entity billed as The Archies made actual records, including the # 1 hit "Sugar Sugar." Rather than the fictional combo of Archie, Betty, Veronica, Reggie, and Jughead that appear in comics, on TV, and in my make-believe history of the group, the flesh-and-blood purveyors of that Riverdale sound were assembled by Don Kirshner and fronted by lead singer Ron Dante. I interviewed Dante in 1997 as part of my extended history of bubblegum music, and lemme tell ya, Ron Dante is one of the nicest, most gracious performers that it's ever been my pleasure to interrogate. I never spoke with the late Don Kirshner; some would say he was also a nice guy, and some would say he was not. The truth's likely in the middle. I wrote about Kirshner's clash with The Monkees here.




Other than the make-believe back story I concocted for Riverdale's finest, I haven't written much about the original Archies characters. One thing I did write was an appreciation of Archie Meets Ramones, a superb 2016 one-shot comic book that merged the worlds of Arch and his gang and Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, and Tommy with magnificent results. I also wrote about Riverdale, The CW's stab at making the familiar characters edgier 'n' stuff for a jaded modern audience. Pfui. But I was initially intrigued by the concept, and I wrote two pieces about the series around the time of its 2017 debut. I'm no longer interested in the show, but those two pieces remain for posterity: Riverdale and Riverdale, And Graded Expectations. Bang-Shang-A-Lang.



I wrote "The Archies: An American Band" in, I think, the late '90s or thereabouts, and it originally appeared in a fanzine called Angst & Daisies. Other than an awful 1980s humor piece purporting to be a Rolling Stone interview with a debauched and dissipated Archie Andrews (an embarrassingly puerile piece I submitted to National Lampoon, whose editors had the good sense to reject it outright), the Angst & Daisies piece was my first real attempt to fabricate a rock group's history. I returned to that concept with A Brighter Light In My Mind, my extended imagining of a world where my favorite power pop group The Flashcubes received the acclaim and adulation they should have had in the late '70s, and a piece about a make-believe 1976 Beatles reunion concert. Off on a tangent, there's also "Home Of The Hits," my 2019 short story about the record industry. And the hits just keep on coming.





And the hits start with "The Archies: An American Band," the latest Boppin' Pop-A-Looza. I'm gonna make your life so sweet.


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