Toomorrow - Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth book

By Kim Cooper

Still not over the Monkees debacle by 1969, Don Kirschner joined forces with Harry Saltzman of the James Bond franchise to develop a manufactured pop band that could star in motion pictures.

The cherry-picked act ultimately consisted of British keyboardist Vic Cooper (formerly of Tom Jones' band, and sax player for Chris Farlowe and Johnny Kidd), black Philadelphian Karl Chambers on drums (Gladys Knight, Stevie Wonder), Georgia thespian Ben Thomas on lead guitar, and a chirpy Anglo Australian gal singer named Olivia Newton-John. They more or less played themselves in the film Toomorrow, written and directed by Val Guest.

Synopsis: In grand British tradition, the members of Toomorrow are students in an arts college. Livvy wakes her bandmates/fellow borders with instant coffee and fried egg sandwiches before they all head down to campus for a big day of sit-ins. The flower covered car that Livvy drives is a kind of micro Mystery Machine: they tow a wagon behind with their instruments inside.

Meanwhile, in a relic filled house in the middle of Hampstead Heath, self-proclaimed anthropologist John Williams (Roy Dotrice) steps onto his front lawn and is lofted up on a shaft of light into a tapered crystalline spacecraft that looks like a hyperactive bead. After some pretty cool psychedelic transporter effects, Williams peels off his human flesh and gives a status report to his alien superiors while lounging in an inflatable lawn chair. Although Williams claims that after 3000 years of monitoring he still has nothing to report, his boss says they've discovered a healing frequency being generated by young earthlings.

The aliens desperately need to find the source of this tone, since their own crappy electronic music no longer gets them off. They show some snippets of Toomorrow rocking out inside a diamond-shaped floating module, and send Williams back to earth to locate the group.

Conveniently, the band are also Londoners, and Williams is able to meet them during a protest/jam session in the school cafeteria. When the principal (a British Mr. Weatherby) shuts off the power, Toomorrow take the unctuous alien up on his offer that they use his conservatory as a practice space. They are desperate to play, having scored an eight minute (!) slot in that evening's pop festival at the Round House.

At Williams' palatial digs, the band is startled by the lifelike stuffed Neanderthals in his foyer, but are set at ease by his groovy sound system and accommodating manner. They practice while Williams secretly records them.

When the group is sucked up into space and given a quick lesson in galactic musicology, they refuse to travel to the aliens' planet to teach them how to get down, insisting Toomorrow's music only means something when they're playing for their human fans. The band is allowed to escape in a pod, while the aliens plot to transport the entire Round House audience at the moment of greatest intensity in the group's performance.

On return, the naïve band rush to Williams' door, not realizing he's set them up. Numerous hijinx ensue, involving Vic's strained relationship with his ballerina girlfriend Amy and numerous birds jealous of stud Benny's attentions. Benny romances his foxy music professor to get inside the locked-down college, kissing her while his bandmates sneak out with their liberated instruments.

Meanwhile Amy has dumped Vic, and he doesn't want to play the gig. Williams is desperate to get Vic onstage, since it's his home-made synthesizer that's the secret to the vibrations. Remembering Vic's vocal appreciation of a curvy set of hips on a record jacket, Williams conjures up a generously proportioned alien in humanoid form-with long blond fur. This is Johnson, a conically awkward sexpot who finds human sexuality hilarious, especially after Williams treats her to an afternoon of dirty movies in Soho. The only problem is that to Johnson, all human males looks alike, and she approaches each one with a jaunty Vic Cooper? and a lusty leer. Needless to say, Johnson causes a lot of trouble, plates are tossed around by angry girlfriends, and Livvy appears in one scene with an nasty unexplained gash on her elbow.

Ultimately the whole band makes it to the show and blows the audience away. And sure enough, at the moment of musical climax a great beam of light shines down on the venue, lofting everyone up into space...

... and Livvy's alarm clock goes off again, just like at the start of the film, leaving you to wonder if it was all a dream.

While an enormous amount of money was obviously spent on the project-at a recent screening at the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles, Newton-John recalled numerous flights between England and the States, including one where she arrived to find no one knew why she was there, so they gave her a Florida vacation - the film and record tanked.

It's unfortunate, because the movie is funny and inventive and the songs (by Archies writers Mark Barkan and Ritchie Adams, who also produced) are solid post-hippie pop. Lyrical sentiments like if you can't be hurt/you can't be happy and show me the way to Happiness Valley illustrate the unthreatening sweetness of Toomorrow's sound, which is like a less funky and infantile Archies. And Karl's drumming style owes so much to Jughead's that it's impossible to watch the band and not picture him wearing that weird little hat.

Bubblegum fans should peel an eye for the super-rare 1970 Toomorrow album (UK RCA LSA 3008/US Sire 97012), or better still see the movie, if they get the chance.

Editor's note - in another part of the book a review of the Grease track:

24. Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta You're The One That I Want (1978).

Fake-romance '50s-revival post-Captain/Tennille schlock-duet at the height of disco, from an unarguably lame flick. An amazing record; trust me.