It was just an incredible creative community, all packed into 1619 Broadway Avenue,” he said. Or you would pop around and help them with their demo. But what was great about it was you were in your little cubicle or a room maybe 10 feet by 12 feet with a guitar and a piano and you might be writing on your own, and then someone would pop in and have an idea for a song, but needed a co-writer. “The Brill building was filled with iconic songwriters and producers, publishers and anyone who wanted to be part of the music industry. Upsetting his family and throwing his friends for a loop at the time, in the late 1960s, a precociously young Andy Kim (he was barely 16!!) left the cozy confines of familiar Montreal for the hustle and bustle of New York City, seeking not fame and fortune, but the opportunity to create memorable music alongside some of the greatest songwriters of the day such as Jeff Barry, most of who were ensconced in the legendary Brill Building located near Times Square in the heart of New York City. I didn’t know if I was a songwriter, let alone an artist, but Jeff Barry helped that dream come true by helping me write Sugar Sugar and here I am talking to you so many years later.”
All those amazing songs had come from somewhere and they were housed in this remarkable place. I was headed towards where all the songwriters I loved were, from Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich and Phil Spector to Leiber and Stoller and Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Jerry Ragovoy and Bert Berns. I just felt the amazing energy of the city. “But once you get off that bus on 42 nd Street and 8 th Avenue, which is the Port Authority, your whole world changes, at least mine did. You kind of walk around and you’re in an altered state when you’re actually living at home. And it became kind of confusing to the family and my school chums. And, to be honest with you, if I was able, I would have crawled into that transistor radio and lived there, that’s where my dream had taken me. I was always interested in how things were done on the records and who played what, and I tried to dissect what that sound was that I was listening to. “If it wasn’t for my two older brothers who had all these 45s and had the record player and had the music magazines, I might not have been so driven. I would do my homework with my transistor radio connected to me, and it was a world that I wanted to be a part of but was a world that was seemingly the furthest that you could think from Montreal,” he said. “That dream was formed by listening to WKBW and WABC out of New York at night.
Kim was a young man enamoured with music, who grew up in Montreal, listening to his precious transistor radio as often as he could to soak up the sounds of the late 1950s and 1960s, falling in love with not just the songs he was hearing, but developing a passion for possibly creating his own songs. Firmly embedded in the public consciousness since those heady days at the end of the 1960s, Kim is humbly marking the 50 th anniversary of the song – a song that still gets played (or streamed to use modern parlance) millions of times a year. Sugar Sugar was co-written by noted songwriter Jeff Barry, and Canadian Andy Kim, who had migrated to New York City to fulfill his dreams of being a songwriter, alongside the likes of his hero and mentor Barry. Written off by tastemakers at the time, and struggling to even get radio airplay initially, it seemed that the general public perhaps was looking for a song that was a momentary distraction, and escape, a tonic for the paradigm shifting and sometimes seismic cultural shifts that we happened around the world and made it a massive hit.
Instead, in an era that saw the Beatles issuing songs like Helter Skelter and Revolution, the Lizard King Jim Morrison proclaiming that ‘this is end, my only friend, the end’ and the politically charged songs of Buffalo Springfield and the Woodstock generation of musicians, Sugar Sugar was an anomaly.
#PLAY SONG SUGAR SUGAR ARCHIES SERIES#
Created to accompany a popular cartoon series called The Archies, which was based on the long running Archie comics series, the song was a seeming throwback to a simpler era in popular music, where Love Me Do, Do Wah Diddy Diddy, and Hound Dogs were as serious as pop tunes got.
Canadian songwriting legend Andy Kim spoke to Music Life Magazine about the legacy of Sugar Sugar, a Billboard chart topper that he co-wrote five decades ago.įor the latter half of 1969, there were few pop songs as ubiquitous as the upbeat, melodious and joyful track Sugar Sugar.
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