October 3 – Undercover Alan More Than A One Hit Wonder

When you’re in a small “club” that includes Neil Diamond and Carole King, you’ve done pretty well. So then, we remember Alan O’Day today, on what would have been his 83^rd birthday. O’Day isn’t anywhere near as famous as those two, but he is among the few songwriters who’ve written #1 songs for other stars as well as themselves.

O’Day seemed set early on to live a life in music. He was playing a xylophone and making his own songs up by six, three or four years later he was playing ukulele to impress his friends at school. By high school, he was in two bands, one he started, The Shoves, influenced by his musical heroes back then – Elvis, Fats Domino, Ray Charles, Little Richard. One of his bands made it onto a local TV talent show then, and Johnny Otis took notice. He recorded a song or two Alan had written, but they didn’t end up getting released. But it no doubt gave the lad confidence in his skills in music. After high school, he got work doing music editing for a small studio in his hometown of Hollywood. Around that time as well, his then-current band, The Archers, got to tour as the backing band for Dobie Gray.

As the ’60s wore on, he started to drift away (to borrow a term from Dobie) from performing and concentrate on writing songs, one or two of which Dobie had already done. By 1971 he was a staff writer at Warner Bros., and quickly penned his first hit song, “The Drum”, which was a top 30 hit for teen heartthrob Bobby Sherman. In the early-’70s he was very prolific, writing songs recorded by artists including Steppenwolf, David Clayton Thomas, Anne Murray, Dave Mason and many more. “Easy Evil” of his has been done by several dozen artists ranging from Tony Orlando to Dusty Springfield to Long John Baldry. But his first real big break was a song he wrote when inspired by the Beatles character “Lady Madonna” and partly by a girl he knew from his childhood neighborhood who was …socially awkward to say the very least. “Angie Baby” became a #1, gold-selling single for Helen Reddy.

He’d have one more big hit from one of his songs in that time period, “Rock & Roll Heaven” for the Righteous Brothers.

O’Day recorded a solo album in ’73, but it flopped, so he kept writing. However, in 1977, WB started a division called Pacific Records. Somehow he was the only artist they signed or put out! But their one artist did well for them. His song “Undercover Angel” was a #1 hit in both the U.S. and Canada and sold past two million copies. He pretty much disappeared from the radio after that, at least here, despite recording another album in 1979, which included his own version of “Angie Baby” and one more lesser hit in Australia, “Skinny Girls”. But in North America, he’s clearly marked as simply one of the big One Hit Wonders of the decade.

Although he didn’t create many more hit records after then, he kept busy. He did music for Jim Henson, writing 100 or so kids songs for the Muppet Babies TV show, and later, music for National Geographic shows as well. He’d also collaborate with a popular Japanese composer/producer, Tatsuro Yamashita, and together they wrote several Japanese hits like “Magic Ways.”

In the 21^st Century, he’d moved to Nashville and begun working as a producer and once again had a tune that was noticed – “Nascar Crazy”, a sort of theme for that car race circuit.

His career seemed to be finding a second wind in country but sadly before it really took off, he died of brain cancer at age 72, in 2013. A one hit wonder, perhaps, but a pretty good resume for that… and one that gets him mentioned with the likes of Carole King. Not too bad for someone who was so largely “undercover” .