for Sunday 17th July 1966

Dallas Frazier may not have been a name familiar to Big L listeners, but he was and is a very successful songwriter.

Dallas either wrote, or co-wrote with producer Kim Fowley (information on this varies) the novelty song Alley Oop. Issued for contractual reasons under the name of The Hollywood Argyles, the single was a huge hit on both sides of the pond, becoming a US #1 and a UK #24 in July 1960. The song was covered by many groups, including the Beach Boys, Brian Poole And The Tremeloes and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.

In 1965, Charlie Rich scored a Hot Hundred smash with another of Dallas's songs, Mohair Sam, and later both Engelbert Humperdink (1967) and Elvis Presley (1971) reaped the massive benefits of recording There Goes My Everything.

Dallas always found greater success as a songwriter than as a singer. According to Brian Long's book The London Sound, Dallas Frazier's first UK release, Elvira, a minor US chart entry (#72), had been a climber in the Fab for May 29th 1966. As Alan Field did not note having heard the disc as a climber that week, it is quite possible it had been scheduled to be one, but for some reason the single never made it out to the Galaxy. Such anomalies between Fab listings typed in Curzon Street and what actually made it to air, were quite common. (See Brian's notes on the subject.) Whether or not the disc was actually played on Radio London, Elvira, like Just A Little Bit Of You, also failed to migrate from the climbers to the chart. Fifteen years later, however, Elvira was riding high in the Hot Hundred, winning the Oak Ridge Boys a gold disc.

Hugely-respected in the world of country music, with his songs being recorded by the likes of Willie Nelson, Brenda Lee, Charley Pride and Merle Haggard, Dallas has been honoured with an entry in the Nashville Songwriters' Hall of Fame www.nashvillesongwritersfoundation.com. In 1988, he retired from songwriting to pursue a religious calling.

A Hollywood Argyles album containing Alley Oop (Lute 101) is now so collectable that prices as high as $1,750 have been asked for it on the Net! The album cover shot of the band is extremely surreal, with photographs of the heads of most of the members apparently having been pasted on to the bodies of a bunch of completely different men, dressed in shiny gold suits! Possibly, this very strange move was necessitated by the contractual problems with record companies.

At that sort of asking price, (higher than much of the Beatles' collectable material) you can't help wondering if the vendor is ever going to be able to grin from ear-to-ear as he counts a huge pile of dollar bills, and thinks, "Look at that cave man go".