Twelve Top Hits--The Toppers, and the Toppers. Plus, The Toppers.

Yet another Tops Records 12 Top Hits.  Don't ask me how many of these they made, because the very thought is terrifying.  And, for once, we have a group of kids who honestly look like they're having a blast.  The two dancers are overdoing it a bit, but better to err on the side of looking too happy than "When is this shoot going to be over?" Every entry in the 12 Top Hits series had the same four-digit number with an L prefix--L1510.  And one of my life missions has been to discover some consistent pattern to the suffixes used by Tops.  In a logical universe, Tops would have used suffixes in sequence--as in, 1 for the first LP in this series, 5 for the fifth, 9 for the ninth, and let's get groovy and drunk for the night.  Sorry--I got caught up in some 1949 rock-the-house lyrics.  But, really, the logical and simple thing would have been a digit for each LP in the series.  But logical and simple were not words in the cheap-label vocabulary.  These outfits were determined to make life harder for future pop historians that it should be.  They did a good job.

Tops' catalog suffixes didn't happen in any pattern I can recognize as a pattern, and they usually varied from side A to side B on a given issue.  Totally nuts.  But on this L1510, we actually have the same suffix on both sides: L1510-A24 and L1510-B24.  Typically, "A" and "B" are not employed as part of the actual catalog numbers, but this is Tops, and it had no set system beyond using the same cover art over and over, so we'll overlook this.  Yes, amazingly, "24" on both sides, with 24 possibly meaning the 24th release in the L1510 series, which is well within the realm of probability.  It looks like Tops goofed up and did something in accordance with logic.  Anyway....

This is a lively and memorable set, but as usual there are the exceptions: specifically, Bobby Sox to Stockings and There Goes My Baby, both performed with a lack of enthusiasm which borders on the last moments before dozing off.  Of course (and this is just my opinion), it would be quite difficult to put across There Goes My Baby with much passion, since the thing hardly qualifies as a song--its more like stitched-together phrases falling over one another atop a cliche chord pattern of early r&r: I-vi-ii-V.  "Sketchy" is the best word, I think, that describes the song and its arrangement.  To Tops' credit, this fake does manage to catch much of the lackluster quality of the original.  There Goes... is not so much an excuse for a song as the absence of one.  And Bobby Sox to Stocking (a silly Venus rewrite) is sung with an amazing lack of energy by Alex Carey, as if he'd just woken up from a nap in the studio.  Or maybe it was dawning on him, just as he was putting this on tape, that a singing career was not for him.  It's possible he was on the verge of leaving the studio, but someone persuaded him to do the track before quitting.

Way better is an acceptable cover of Tallahassie (sic) Lassie, which can be forgiven for not capturing the incredible energy and power of the original (Tops lacked both budget and desire, I'm sure, to make a knockout knockoff); an extremely good Tiger--one which (Tiny-Compliment Alert) features a better singer than Fabian and manages to rock superbly, the out of tune guitars actually helping the effect; a lovely Lavender Blue (a fake of Sammy Turner); an excellent Along Came Jones (and my brain confuses all three Leiber-Stoller Coasters songs together--Charlie Brown, Yakety Yak, and this one); and fine fakes of Personality and Lipstick on Your Collar.  The Battle of New Orleans, on the other hand, doesn't leave a powder burn on the great Johnny Horton hit, and in fact qualifies as plain lousy--but fun-lousy.  It's memorably terrible.  It's as if the singer, chorus, and background musicians were instructed to achieve the reverse feel of the original--"Perform as if you're inside a phone booth and the folks in the adjoining cubicles asked you to please keep it down."--Tops.  Maybe this fake was intended as an apology for our War of 1812 victory.

"The Finest in Top Hit Entertainment"--Front jacket.  Well, maybe not, but this is a fun edition of the Lord-knows-how-many-they-made 12 Top Hits series, the cover filled with writing (and the label covered with typed-upon stickers) that I artfully cloned out.  I even had to cut and paste "...The Toppers" where it had been covered by correction tape, or something similar.  No one said documenting dime-store LP history was a waltz in the park.

To the faker's dozen (minus a 13th track):





DOWNLOAD: 12 Top Hits (Tops L1510-A24/B24)

Lee