The Tokens — “Animal”: Brace for the Obscure (60s rock)! — December 13, 2023

THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD

1,046) The Tokens — “Animal”

This crazy, wild, frisky song belongs in a zoo or on a Kim Fowley (see #89, 449) album. Wait, is there are difference? But an A-side?! I am not surprised that it flopped! Wikipedia tells us that “In 1968, The Tokens (see #66, 923) released the experimental ‘Animal’ intended to serve as lead single for a self-produced album entitled Intercourse. However, the single flopped and Warner Bros. Records rejected the album due to its uncommercial nature and sexual overtones”. (Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tokens) 

As to Intercourse, “Mitch Margo was going through a dark personal period; he then drew on his recovery for the Tokens’ 1968 album, Intercourse, a humanist song-cycle similar to the Beach Boys’ Friends[.”] (Bob Stanley, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/501HDJBygnrqPLnYgV0Zzzx/the-tokens-and-the-rockin-berries) Margo “became infatuated with psychedelia, particularly the Beatles’ horizon-expanding Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the dreamy Beach Boys harmonies on Pet Sounds. . . . [H]e persuaded his bandmates to follow his lead and record a trippy album titled Intercourse[.]” (Steve Marble, https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-mitch-margo-20171201-story.html) Tom Moon adds that:

The Tokens spent much of the ’60s trying to move away from “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” and doo-wop in general. The five-piece experimented unsuccessfully with folk, and then in 1967, primary songwriter Mitch Margo (dazzled by the horizon-expanding works of The Beach Boys and The Beatles) began working on an attempt at contemporary pop. He wrote breathless torrents of psychedelic imagery . . . and surrounded them with violins and mellotrons as well as guitars. And, crucially, he employed The Tokens’ distinctive harmonies more sparingly.  

https://www.npr.org/2007/01/24/6969184/the-tokens-a-one-hit-wonder-goes-pop

Desertcart adds that:

Though The Tokens are best remembered for their international smash hit “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” . . . they did much more… [P]roducers, writers, publishers and label owners, they had a long string of hits in all those roles… “Intercourse” is a full on Softpop song cycle, inexplicably turned down by their then-label Warner Brothers, and released in an edition of 200 copies on their own BT Puppy label for contractual reasons… [F]ar from their Doo-Wop roots, The Tokens delivered an album pitched somewhere between Pet Sounds and Sergeant Pepper, with all the production and arrangement tricks that implies. . . . [N]o wonder Warner’s were dumbfounded!… and no wonder collectors have been going nuts and paying silly sums for this album ever since!… The Tokens show not only every cult Softpop group, but many superstars just how it’s done… with the wicked tongue-in-cheek touch which they were justly famous for.

https://luxembourg.desertcart.com/products/61340382-intercourse

Finally, Cub Koda:

[W]hat we have here is the great lost Tokens album, recorded in 1968 and promptly turned down by Warner Bros. To fill a contractual obligation, a few hundred copies were pressed up — in a slightly altered form — and the album pretty much remained an interesting catalog sighting before its CD-era reissue. What we also have here is a White doo wop group delivering an album that falls somewhere between Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper’s. No wonder Warner didn’t know what to make of it; previous attempts by other doo woppers at updating their sound produced some of the most laughable examples that the genre has to offer. But everything on here works in a very organic manner: all of the songs follow a neat continuum and could easily be termed as a humanistic song cycle, each one surrounded by late-’60s Beatlesque production values . . . . Trippy, loopy, and totally of its time, classic doo wop this is not; great, however, it is.

https://www.allmusic.com/album/intercourse-mw0000176757

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