THE OUTSIDERS – Original Story
Tom King and his brother-in-law Chet Kelley of the Starfires came up with a gem called “Time Won’t Let Me”, a near-perfect amalgam of Motown and Merseybeat that even 45 years later is one of those songs that I never get tired of hearing. Under pressure from Capitol Records, the band changed its name to the Outsiders and had a string of Top 40 hits over the mid-1960’s like “Girl in Love” and “Respectable” that, sadly, are almost completely overshadowed by their biggest hit, “Time Won’t Let Me”. They released a total of four albums in the 1960’s, all quite good; even the fake “live” album somehow works. Until Chicago came along with their Roman numeral series, the Outsiders had perhaps the most boring series of album names of the time: Besides the first that was named for their hit song, Time Won’t Let Me – and was originally going to be called simply The Outsiders – the others were Album #2, The Outsiders In and Happening Live!. Their recordings had judicious use of horns and paved the way for other bands like Blood, Sweat and Tears, the Buckinghams and Chicago that were more heavily dominated by their brass sections.
The Outsiders broke up at the end of the decade but almost immediately reformed – actually, there were two bands called the Outsiders for a time: one in Los Angeles headed by Sonny Geraci, and the other back in Cleveland led by Tom King. King won the lawsuit over the use of the name, so Geraci changed his band’s name to Climax. This new band had an even bigger hit in 1972 than “Time Won’t Let Me”: the Number One song “Precious and Few”. With the addition of this song to his Outsiders output, Sonny Geraci is clearly one of the best white soul singers of the 1960’s.
Several years ago, I looked up the Wikipedia article on the Dutch band the Outsiders – one of the truly great rock bands of all time and maybe the very best from a non–English-speaking country – and happened to click over to their American contemporaries, also called the Outsiders, only to discover that there was just a stub (in other words, a few sentences with basic information like bandmembers’ names, major hit song, etc.). With over 1¼ million articles in Wikipedia at that time (it is significantly above three million now – and that is just in the English Wikipedia), it hadn’t occurred to me that I would have an opportunity to work up an article on a well-known group, so I started in.
(February 2010)
