Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs
Pop novelty and the sublime
In Flowers in the Dustbin, James Miller explained the concept of pop, as embodied in its high priest, Andy Warhol:
As much as any one person, [Warhol] personified the idea of “Pop,” his term for a kind of camp alchemy in which the mundane was suffused with supernatural potential—and mass-marketed commodities were transformed into artifacts of sublime and singular beauty.
Few things are campier or more suffused with supernatural potential than Halloween; every October I celebrate by blaring, among other mass-marketed commodities, Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs’ “Li’l Red Riding Hood.” A camp artifact, “of sublime and singular beauty.”
“Li’l Red Riding Hood” always crackles with supernatural potential this time of year; this harvest season it orbited me into lunacy. Had me howling along to the radio in broad daylight, before I noticed a full moon rising that evening.
The Hunter’s Moon, they called it.
If ever there appeared to be a cheap novelty act, it was Sam the Sham—the self-deprecating name was a joke about his supposed lack of vocal ability. Like another garage band from the mid-1960s—Question Mark (?) and the Mysterians—the frontman’s elusive name also reflected his indeterminacy in American culture at the time, ethnic and otherwise. Hauling his equipment around in a 1952 Packard hearse with velvet curtains, dressed in a turban, accompanied by a foursome gold-costumed as Egyptian royalty—an aesthetic inspired, like Iggy Pop’s bare torso, by the Hollywood pharaoh in Yul Brenner’s The Ten Commandments (1956)—the group aspired to one-hit-wonderdom with tawdry offerings like “ Joo Joo Hand,” “Ring Dang Doo” and “Wooly Bully.” The latter succeeded remarkably, landing them a spot on Ed Sullivan, and the longest-running seat on the Billboard Hot 100 at the time, in 1965.
“Wooly Bully” was a nonsensical ode to a buffalo who inspires two girls to dance. “Li’l Red Riding Hood” is something else. A courtship ritual couched in Charles Perrault’s fairy tale, it’s about as real as it gets - no childhood morals here. Sam the Sham—real name Domingo Samudio, who studied voice and opera—emits an earnest baritone that belies all the tune’s comic affectations—the treble yelps, the baahs, the Listen to mee! The song wears a smile—beginning with the first syllable of Samudio’s dripping pleased-to-meet-ya—“Why, it’s Little Red Ri-deen-Hood”—but it’s a smile at how damn sexy and sweet the song looks in the mirror. The sweetness is what’s sincere; lupus menace, male libido is the real sham. A Wolf chases the girl, aches to protect as much as seduce—or to seduce by protecting. Sings the delicacies of a romance half-imaginary and wide-open. The dance of doubt, incremental revelation, and self-projection. A wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing, with good intentions. A creature of self-control in heat. What a big heart he has, to match her full eyes and lips… The better to love her with.
I’m gonna keep my sheep suit on,
Until I’m sure that you’ve been shown,
That I can be trusted,
Walkin with you alone.
Awooo!
Little Red Riding Hood,
I’d like to hold you if I could,
But you might think I’m a big bad wolf so I won’t.
Awooo!
“Li’l Red Riding Hood”—even bad wolves can be good.
Backed by an all-new foursome of Pharaohs (the old ones quit), earning his second no. 2 spot on the Hot 100 a year after “Wooly Bully,” in 1966, Sam the Sham suffused a tired fairy tale with romantic realism, and some kind of sublime pop-chart beauty that endures to this day. He never charted again, or approached the poignancy of “Li’l Red Riding Hood.”
Not for lack of trying. In 1971 Samudio teamed up with Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records to release Sam, Hard and Heavy. Backed by Duane Allman, Elvis Presley’s Sweet Inspirations, and the Memphis Horns section, he recorded covers of Randy Newman, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Boz Scaggs, alongside original material. He won a Grammy for the album liner notes, but Atlantic never promoted the songs, so the record failed to chart. He also toured with a female backup group (the Shamettes) in Asia, and worked with Ry Cooder on the soundtrack for a Jack Nicholson film, The Border (1982).
Sam the Sham, or Domingo Samudio, was one of several garage-rock heroes to combine Tex-Mex and rock ‘n’ roll at the height of the British Invasion, who would go on to influence the next generation of low-budget amateurs in the 1970s. The Ramones and their ilk listened to the shortlist of greatest hits by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, ? and the Mysterians, and other garage-rock gold on the jukebox at CBGBs religiously. Spinning the 60s compilation album, Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From the First Psychedelic Era. They derived punk, in large part, from flowers in the dustbin, kitsch 6os garage-rock novelties.
Domingo Samudio was born in Dallas, the grandson of exiles from the Mexican Revolution. His parents supported themselves, like Johnny Cash’s family and many musicians elsewhere, working cotton fields. He made his public debut in the second grade, singing on a radio broadcast for his class. He did a stint in the Navy after high school, served six years in Panama, then returned to enroll at Arlington State College (now UT Arlington). There, he “stud[ied] classical in the daytime [while] playing rock and roll at night. That lasted about two years, before I dropped out and became a carny."
“Wooly Bully,” his first big hit, was a unique blend of conjunto, Tex-Mex rhythms and rock and pop. The bilingual count-off - “Uno, dos. One, two, tres, quatro!” - was an accident that resonated in the control booth: “I was just goofing around and counted off in Tex-Mex. It just blew everybody away, and actually, I wanted it taken off the record.” Something raw and exotic—in the countdown, in the rhythm, in the cryptic lyrics (sometimes banned for sounding sexually suggestive in their unintelligibility) about two girls named Matty and Hatty seeking a buffalo with a “wooly jaw” to teach them how to dance—probably pricked American ears newly-opened to the sounds of racial and cultural integration. The music “launched into a pulsing keyboard, bass and drum rhythm that was patterned after the traditional accordion and bajo sexto beat. With its bilingual lyrics, its Latin-based rhythm, and British rock overtones, ‘Wooly Bully’ was an exotic mix of musical influences from Europe and the Southwest that . . . placed this Texas band firmly in the international spotlight,” according to The History of Texas Music (Texas A&M UP).
Domingo Samudio’s curriculum vitae is remarkably similar to that of another garage-rock prodigy from Texas who shares his initials: Doug Sahm. Best known as the leader of the Sir Douglas Quintet (a name designed to capitalize on the British Invasion craze), this Sahm was also on the radio by age eight. He also fronted a group called the Pharaohs. And he owed much of his diverse musical education to growing up in San Antonio, Texas:
The Alamo City had always been an ethnically diverse community, beginning with the first Spanish settlers . . . Because of its remarkable ethnic mixture, San Antonio was far less rigidly segregated than other Southern cities in the 1950s, and it became the first major urban area in the South to desegregate its public school system following the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown vs. [the] Board of Education . . . Many of the city’s musical venues were also fully integrated and welcomed musicians and patrons from all racial backgrounds, allowing them to mingle freely and exchange musical ideas and traditions.
— History of Texas Music
That included the members of the Sir Douglas Quintet, two of whom were Mexican Americans dressed like British mods, pumping out conjunto and bajo sexto rhythms on “She’s About a Mover,” which also reached the Top 15 in 1965, alongside “Wooly Bully.”
It doesn’t get much campier than this medieval television stage set.
Another group, known as ? and the Mysterians, which included members from both Texas and Mexico, had a number-one hit in 1966 with the pop-rock song “96 Tears.” Similar to “Wooly Bully,” “96 Tears” had a driving keyboard backbeat that was reminiscent of the traditional conjunto accordion and bajo sexto rhythm but also featured guitar and vocal that were influenced by rock & roll. Although ? and the Mysterians disbanded in 1968, “96 Tears resurfaced as a hit again in the 1980s, when it became the signature song for Tex-Mex punk rocker Joe “King” Carrasco.
—HTM
Before that, “96 Tears” was inspiration for punks, and glam rockers, in 1970s New York. As recreated in this vignette from George Pelecanos and David Simon’s 2017-2019 HBO series The Deuce, in which bar owner James Franco tries to wrap his head around the house band’s recycling of mid-sixties sounds, an act promoted by his younger business partner and girlfriend.
(“What’s it all mean Mikey?” — "I don’t know, but I kinda dig it.”)
The critical organ that functioned as the driving “conjunto accordion” rhythm of “96 Tears,” and the Sir Douglas Quintet’s “She’s About a Mover” was… an electric organ: the Vox Continental. An almost toy-ish early synthesizer with a thin, bright, ersatz sound, most famously employed by Ray Manzarek of the Doors. Sam the Sham utilized a shinier sound yet, on a Farfisa Organ, the Pharaohs’ electric “accordion.”
As testament to pop art’s uncanny ability to become ‘art,’ Manzarek’s Vox Continental rests among other pop musical artifacts on exhibit at the Met.
In The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years, Greil Marcus described the Doors, who had their own run-in with the Andy Warhol Factory, in terms of visual commodity. Their song “Twentieth Century Fox,” he says, “was less a song than a Lichtenstein: pop art.”
Trying to define pop culture, Marcus toyed with the phrase “the folk culture of the modern market”—“Pop culture is a culture in which people tell themselves, and tell each other, stories about the modern market.” As an example of the reciprocal relationship between commodification and art, he illustrates: “After all, in terms of the market, car songs [say, “Little Deuce Coupe”] are part car, and cars are part car song. You hear them in the car.” Telling ourselves “stories about the modern market” doesn’t just mean wanton commercialization, however…
. . . it means an unknown station playing unknown music, until both turn into secrets everyone wants to tell. The modern market is a field of rumors and tall tales, promises and threats, warnings and prophecies: as people talk, pop culture is landscape and the change of the seasons, war and peace, the clearing of forests and the building of cities, religious revivals and moral panics, wealth and poverty, adventure and discovery, sex and death, citizenship and exile.
As proof, consider Sam the Sham, Domingo Samudio, the grandson of Mexican revolutionary exiles and child of cotton workers, rising to the Ed Sullivan show and top of the Billboard charts. Look at ? and the Mysterians—the sons of migrant farmers who became part of the American grain, and their “96 Tears”—a break-up song that became my father’s “draft song,” in his storytelling—because his draft number happened to match the count of lover’s tears in the title, and being called-up to war would occasion the same. Look at me, sixty years later, moonstruck and howling like a lovesick wolf to “Li’l Red Riding Hood” in the car the weekend before Halloween.
That is the real magic of ‘pop’: the staying power of the supposedly ephemeral, once it becomes ingrained in storytelling and emotion. In Marcus’ punchline:
The joke culture has played on certified pop artists is that what they thought was transient, ephemeral, certain to disappear—comic books, 45s, LPs, advertisements—have all lasted. They are stored in expensive art books and CD boxed sets; they are immediately accessible online anywhere in the world.
Echoing Miller’s claim about the “supernatural potential” of mass-marketed commodities “transformed into artifacts of sublime and singular beauty,” Marcus says, “They cast spells now just as they did thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years ago—and perhaps the purest, simplest, and most complete of all pop art works are about this casting of spells.”
Amen. And how-ooo.
Oh thank you! Now you have replaced Warren Zevon's Werewolves of London (Ah-hoo!) with Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs 'Lil Red Riding Hood (how-ooo!) in the earworm that has been playing in my head since Halloween.