A SUGAR RUSH
Canadian Music Hall of Fame inducting Andy Kim in honour of his 50-year career
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,” Kim says 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. In 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 eventually would 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 1969 version of Baby, I Love You, which Barry cowrote 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, and that song 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 hit No. 1 on that same day five years later. 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.”
It’s a philosophy that has helped shape Kim’s peak-and-valley career, which saw him go from Montreal’s tenements, to selling millions of records in the late ’60s to mid-’70s to fading into near -obscurity for decades, including a bizarre period in the 1980s and 1990s where he recorded and toured under the name Baron Longfellow.
After years as an “irrelevant” artist — his word, not ours — Kim’s fortunes began to change when Barenaked Ladies singer Ed Robertson started working with him in the mid-2000s, and that led to a rediscovery of sorts.
He befriended Ron Sexsmith, Drew and others in the Toronto scene. For the past 15 years, he has hosted Christmas shows that have attracted everyone from Sexsmith to Broken Social Scene to Coeur de Pirate, Sam Roberts, Hayden, Kim Mitchell, Rush’s Alex Lifeson, Tom Cochrane, Mary Margaret O’hara, Billy Talent and the Cowboy Junkies.
Still, despite boasting a number of hits back in the day and a place of esteem among indie rockers today, Kim likely will always be remembered for co-writing Sugar, Sugar. Yes, it’s a bubble gum pop song — perhaps one of the first — but it also was covered by Wilson Pickett, Bob Marley, Ike and Tina Turner, Tom Jones and even 1970s hardcore punk-rockers the Germs.
Initially, it was a song “nobody wanted to play,” Kim says.
“It was The Archies, it was comic book,” Kim says. “In the era of Woodstock, everybody had to write their own songs. You had The Doors. You had The Beatles breaking up, playing on the roof. Man was landing on the moon. The Vietnam War was raging. There was political unrest. Sharon Tate was murdered. Manson was on the loose. And you get this song. Everything had to be a little more real than The Archies. But here we are 50 years later, celebrating the fact that Wilson Pickett had a Top 4 Billboard R&B record with it and sold a million records. Ike and Tina Turner recorded it and Bob Marley recorded it along with thousands of others.”
As for why the song connected with so many people, Kim admits he doesn’t know.
“If I understood what made it work, I’d have done it a thousand times and you would have go through 10 people to get to me on an island somewhere,” he says with a laugh. “It was inspiring, it was a moment when Jeff Barry and I got together and it was just luck.”