Sugarloaf – "Don't Call Us, We'll Call You" (1974)

 

He said, “Hello,” and put me on hold

To say the least, the cat was cold

He said, “Don't call us, we'll call you”

“Green-Eyed Lady,” which was featured in the last 2 or 3 lines, was a big hit for Sugarloaf in 1970. 

Unfortunately, the group’s follow-ups singles were flops, and the band broke up in 1972.

Frontman Jerry Corbetta had the rights to the band’s name.  He recruited a group of replacement musicians and went on tour in 1973, opening for Rare Earth and Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show.

One of the stops on that tour was Joplin, Missouri – my hometown.  The venue for that performance was high school football stadium, which had an open-ended design that allowed my friends and I to stand outside and hear the music for free instead of shelling out $4.50 for ducats.

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That same year, Corbetta started work on a solo album for Brut Records – a new label that had been created for the Fabergé company, the manufacturer of Brut aftershave.  (I was an English Leather man myself – I was a particular fan of English Leather lime and their soap-on-a-rope.)

Corbetta talked Bob Webber and Sugarloaf’s original bass player, Bob Raymond, into rejoining him, and the planned solo effort was released as a Sugarloaf album instead.  It tanked, but their next album included a top ten single, “Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You,” which was a very clever song about the difficulty the band had getting a record contract.

“Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You” includes the sound of a phone number being dialed on a touch-tone telephone.  If you listened to the tones and worked backwards, you ended with an unlisted phone number for CBS Records – which had turned toe band down when it sought a record deal.  In addition, the recording includes brief snippets of the Beatles’ “I Feel Fine” and Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.”

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Corbetta had an interesting post-Sugarloaf career, to say the least.  

In 1974, he played on the Disco-Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes disco hit, “Get Dancin’.”  That group’s outrageous frontman, former celebrity hairdresser Sir Monti Rock III, was a regular on The Tonight Show when I was in high school – I had no clue what to make of him.

Monti Rock with Johnny Carson

Click here to see a brief documentary about Monti Rock that includes excerpts from one of his Tonight Show appearances.

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The brains behind Disco-Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes was the legendary record producer Bob Crewe, who is best known as the co-writer of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons’ biggest hits – including “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “Rag Doll,” and “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You.”  (Crewe also produced Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels, whose musical style couldn’t have been more different from that of the Four Seasons.  The man was versatile!) 

Crewe recruited Corbetta to perform with the Four Seasons in the early eighties.  Later he toured with former members of Iron Butterfly, Rare Earth, Cannibal & the Headhunters, and other sixties groups as “The Classic Rock All-Stars.”

Corbetta died in 2016 from Pick’s disease, which is a type of early-onset dementia that is somewhat similar to Alzheimer’s.

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Click here to listen to “Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You,” which made it all the way to #9 on the Billboard “Hot 100” in February 1975.

Click on the link below to buy the record from Amazon: