John Fred & His Playboy Band – "Judy in Disguise (With Glasses)" (1967)

 

Cross your heart

With your livin’ bra

Apparently this line – which refers to the famous (and heavily advertised) line of Playtex bras – raised eyebrows at certain radio stations.

I could wax poetic at length about the Playtex “Living Bra” advertisements in the women’s magazines that my mother and grandmother subscribed to when I was just a lad:

But this month’s 2 or 3 lines posts are supposed to be about the newest group of inductees into the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME.  So I’m going to save my fond memories of those ads for another day.

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I used to own the 1967 John Fred & His Playboy Band album, Agnes English – which included the band’s #1 hit single, “Judy in Disguise (With Glasses).”

I found it in the three-albums-for-a-dollar cutout bin at Grandpa’s, a discount store in my hometown.  (Grandpa’s was a really low-budget store.  It made the typical Dollar General look like .)

I sold Agnes English and most of other LPs a few years ago.  THAT WAS A HUGE MISTAKE!  Just because my albums took up a lot of space and I hadn’t listened to them since the last millennium – I don’t even own a working turntable – was no reason to get rid of them.

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John Fred Gourrier, Jr. – who was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on May 8, 1941 – formed John Fred and the Playboys when he was only 15.  

Several months before he turned 18, they recorded a single titled “Shirley,” which reached #82 on the Billboard “Hot 100.”  The band performed the song on Alan Freed’s ABC-TV show, The Big Beat, and was subsequently invited to appear on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand.

But his Catholic High School basketball team was hoping to win the state championship that year, and Gourrier chose to turn down American Bandstand rather than miss one of their games.

The Playboys’ next few singles failed to chart, so the group’s record company cancelled their contract.  The band broke up after that.

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After graduating from college in 1963, Gourrier reformed the group.  They released singles on several different labels over the next few years, but all of them were flops.

John Fred & His Playboy Band – the group had modified its name in order to avoid being confused with Gary Lewis and the Playboys – had two regional hits in 1967, but neither one got much airplay outside of Louisiana.

Gourrier’s group finally hit it big with “Judy in Disguise (With Glasses),”  The record’s title is a play on the title of the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”  It’s also a mondegreen of sorts – John Fred supposedly thought John Lennon was singing “Lucy in disguise with diamonds.”

“Judy in Disguise” knocked “Hello Goodbye” out of the top spot on the U.S. pop charts in January 1968, and it stayed at #1 for two weeks.  The record also was a #1 hit in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Germany, South Africa, and Switzerland, and made it to #3 in the UK, Canada, and several other countries.

John Fred Gourrier and finally got to appear on American Bandstand – nine years after he turned down the original invitation.

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John Fred & His Playboy Band never came close to replicating the success of “Judy in Disguise.”  Their next single peaked at #57, and the four other singles they released in 1968 failed to chart at all.

The band kept trying, but their subsequent releases – including one titled “Silly Sarah Carter (Eating on a Moonpie)” – went nowhere.  The group finally threw in the towel in 1970.

Elvis and John Fred Gourrier

Click here to listen to “Silly Sarah Carter,” which sounds almost exactly like “Judy In Disguise.”  

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John Fred Gourrier spent most the seventies on the road, then became a record producer and an advertising jingle writer.

He became seriously ill after undergoing a kidney transplant in 2004.  After a long hospitalization, Gourrier died at Tulane University Hospital in New Orleans on April 15, 2005.  He was 63. 

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Gourrier loved baseball as much as loved music.

His father had played 3B and OF for several Louisiana minor-league teams in the early 1930s, and Gourrier played the sport in college, helping his Southeastern Louisiana University team win Gulf Coast Conference titles in 1962 and 1963.

From his obituary:

[Gourrier] coached youth league baseball for 29 years and, beginning in 1995, became the volunteer head coach of Catholic High School's freshman baseball team.  The life lessons taught by John Fred to scores of young men through his coaching left a lasting impression. 

One of his proudest accomplishments combined his lifelong passion for music and sports when he wrote and recorded "Baseball At The Box" for the LSU baseball team, coached by his good friend, five-time national champion coach Skip Bertman. 

Bertman once said that John Fred sent him more great baseball players than anyone else.

Former LSU baseball coach Skip Bertman

Click here to listen to “Baseball at the Box,” which is based on the well-known Danny and the Juniors’ hit, “At the Hop.”  (The song’s title is a reference to Alex Box Stadium, which was the home field of the LSU Tigers from 1938 to 2008.) 

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Everything about “Judy in Disguise (With Glasses)” – which was co-written and co-produced by Gourrier and his bandmate, Andrew Bernard – is terrific.  

It’s surprising to me that they never came up with another hit single.  I guess they put everything they had into “Judy in Disguise.”

I think the record is very deserving of being included in the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME.  It shouldn’t be punished just because it’s a one-hit wonder – after all, a goodly number of the very best records from the golden decade are one-hit wonders.

 

Click here to listen to “Judy in Disguise (With Glasses).”

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