Crazy Elephant: The 1960s band who pretended to be Welsh in a bid to top the charts
Rick Rubin once delivered a message about music where he said that the success of what you make is irrelevant; it’s the process that you should be focusing on.
“Living life as an artist is a practice. You are either engaging in the practice or you’re not,” he said, “It makes no sense to say you’re not good at it. It’s like saying, ‘I’m not good at being a monk’. You are either living as a monk, or you’re not. We tend to think of the artist’s work as the output. The real work of the artist is a way of being in the world.”
When applying this mindset to commercial success, it shouldn’t matter whether your music charts or not, so long as what you have released is an honest reflection of you as an individual. However, as we all know, there are some artists who would wholeheartedly disagree with Rubin’s sentiment, as they want as many people as possible to hear their music and for it to rise to the top of the charts.
In fact, there are some people who disagree with his sentiment so much that they’ll pull ridiculous PR stunts in a bid to get more ears on their music. There are a lot of artists who tried to shock audiences into attention, as they would put on extravagant live shows in a bid to really get everyone listening.
Alice Cooper was famously one of the most shocking stage performers out there. People would go to his gigs without any kind of understanding of what they were going to come across. He had made a character for himself, and it meant that people everywhere would love to listen to his music and go to his gigs in a bid to see what he might come up with. This helped a great deal when it came to selling records.
One of his most famous stunts came when a chicken walked on stage, and he threw it into the crowd, a seemingly harmless act, but the papers the next day reported that Cooper had torn the head off the chicken and then drank blood from its newly decapitated body. When Cooper asked his manager to tell the world the truth, he said no because the news was helping him sell even more records.
A good story can help peddle music, there’s no doubt about it, but some acts really push the boat out when it comes to trying to have something new and authentic about them. One of the best examples of this was the band Crazy Elephant, who pretended to be Welsh in a bid to top the charts. Well, they did a little bit more than that, actually.
The story that Crazy Elephant sold was that they were Welsh coal miners who hadn’t seen the sun in four years. It gave their bubblegum pop songs a bit more depth and led to people everywhere thoroughly enjoying the music that the band wound up putting out. Their song ‘Gimme Gimme Good Lovin’ managed to reach number 12 in the US and UK charts in 1969.
It goes to show, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. While being sun-deprived Welsh coal miners might not have the same ring to it as ripping the head off a chicken and drinking its blood, it still all led to record sales, so who cares?
