Sugar rush
Canadian Music Hall of Fame honours 50-year career of Andy Kim
CALGARY — When Andy Kim was 16, he threw caution to the wind and made his way to New York City to kick-start his music career.
It was the mid-’60s. He had only $40 to his name and not much of a plan. But New York was closer to his hometown of Montreal than Nashville or Los Angeles and he had relatives he could crash with in New Jersey. So there was at least a hint of logic at play, although this did little to placate his parents.
“It’s kind of bold as an adult looking back,” says Kim, in an interview from his home in Toronto.
“As a teenager, it was just what you were doing. You knew more than anyone else that that’s what you wanted. It retrospect, my parents were afraid of what I was doing. Luckily, I had relatives in New Jersey, which was a little ways away but was not New York City. But when you’re a teenager, you stand tall. You stand by your beliefs and nobody knows better than you.”
It would eventually pay off. Within a few years, he had somehow made his way into the Brill Building, a hit-making factory where a young Andy learned how to write songs. Alongside Jeff Barry, he penned hits such as How’d We Ever Get This Way.
His 1968 version of Baby, I Love You, which Barry co-wrote with Phil Spector and Ellie Greenwich for the Ronettes, became Kim’s first international hit as a solo artist. A year later, he and Barry wrote Sugar, Sugar for the cartoon group The Archies, which soared to No. 1.
More than 50 years later, Kim’s youthful audacity has mellowed and matured into a more philosophical stance that befits an industry veteran who will be inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in Calgary on Sunday alongside Chilliwack, the Cowboy Junkies and the late Bobby Curtola.
Kim offers both a variation of Canadian writer Basil King’s famous quote, “Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid,” and Mark Twain’s “the two most important days of your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why” to help explain his mindset as a New York-bound teenager.
“I guess, as a kid, I knew why,” he says. “I was so focused on my why. I knew this was why I was born. This was why I existed. This was what I wanted to do.”
Still, it isn’t just the idealism of youth. Kim’s days of throwing caution to the wind are not behind him.
Fast-forward five decades and the veteran musician found himself making another impromptu decision. In 2017, he received a phone call from friend Kevin Drew, a co-founder of Toronto’s Broken Social Scene who helped usher in a bit of a revival for the artist by producing his comeback album, It’s Decided, in 2015.
Drew reminded Kim that Sugar, Sugar had reached No. 1 on Sept. 29, 1969. Another Kim hit, Rock Me Gently, had apparently reached No. 1 on that same day five years later. The Broken Social Scene had a show in Chicago on Sept. 29, 2017.
“He said ‘Why don’t you fly to Chicago and live on the bus with us and do some shows with Broken Social Scene?’ ” Kim says.
“Which I did, sleeping on the bus with everybody. It’s the best experience when you just let yourself go and, as an adult, believe in the magic of love and understanding and music. It’s a crazy, crazy way to go.”