The massive number one The Tokens begged not to be released: “We were embarrassed”
To make well over a million dollars from a single song is living the dream. To be able to retire, abscond from the limelight, and sit back and sip on a constant drip-feed of royalties is a fantasy a fair chunk of the world’s working population have had at one time or another. At no point in that dreamy ponderance do you consider that you might have once pleaded for your pop hit to be cast to the ash heap of history.
However, that’s exactly what happened to The Tokens. Novelty songs have always promised a fair chance of cash, even if the cultural cache might be null and void. After all, ‘Macarena’ sold around 11 million, ‘My Ding-a-Ling’ was Chuck Berry’s only US number one, and ‘Baby Shark’ proves that the trend is still prevalent. But one of the biggest songs to assert the case for the commercial potential of almost purposefully crappy pop songs was ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ by The Tokens.
At the time, ‘Please Mr Postman’ sat at the top of the charts, delivering Tamla their first hit. There was an erotic edginess to the charts and all the twisting therein. This made The Tokens rather nervous about their out-of-place and definitively uncool offering about a slumbering big cat.
The doo-wop group from Brooklyn were just kids caught up in the wave of unfurling rock ‘n’ roll. But with Philip Margo only 19 years old and his younger brother Mitch only 13, they hadn’t quite honed their chops enough to write to a definitive genre just yet. So, the group had to take what they were given, especially now that their former leader, Neil Sedaka, had left.
So, the young Tokens found themselves lumbered with a shot at remixing the Solomon Linda classic ‘Mbube’. Their reimagining of the 1939 hit hardly screamed ‘revolutionary’. But to Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore, it did scream ‘hit’. The group, which consisted of the Margo’s alongside Hank Medress and Jay Siegel, had already secured a sniff of success when their self-penned original, ‘Tonight I Fell in Love’, which peaked at 15th, but their best (and worst) lay ahead.
When Hugo & Luigi signed the band to RCA, they figured that they were perfect to offer up the definitive version of the ‘Wimoweh’ track that they had long since suspected might have legs in it. So, the young group, fresh into their first major contract, gave it their all. And that soon irked them. This certainly wasn’t the sort of thing that seemed hip, but as the charts have continually proved, there’s always space for something distinctly cheesy.
Sensing long careers ahead, the Margo brothers, in particular, grew tetchy about the potential release. “We were embarrassed by it,” Phil Margo later recalled, “and tried to convince Hugo & Luigi not to release it.” In a strange way, this only made the producing duo more certain that they had their hands on a hit – if the band were bothered, then surely that meant that the song was not an easy one to ignore.
That logic proved perfectly reasonable. The track topped the charts for three weeks, disrupting the rise of rock ‘n’ roll with its easy, novelty charm. In time, it would sell around 3.5million copies and crop up in countless forms of media, granting the contributors plenty of royalties and sync cash.
But it did perhaps shepherd The Tokens away from a career under the spotlight. Instead, they decided to become producers themselves, crafting hits – cheesy or otherwise – that they didn’t have to pose on a poster for.
