On this date in 1960, Chet Clubb won an old record lathe from Morris “Bo” Bogerman in a poker game. Bogerman rarely bothered with the contraption, but he knew how to use it, whereas Clubb didn’t. On the spot they agreed to form two record labels. The first was Gent, which specialized in the then-lucrative stag record genre. With such titles as “Ifs, Ands & Butts,” “Spank You Very Much,” and “Hang Me Up Before You Go-Go” (famously re-recorded with sanitized lyrics by Wham in 1984), Gent mastered the sonic equivalent of blue movies.

Bo and Clubb formed the second label, Clubbo Records, merely as a front for Gent. Stag records straddled a gray legal area when it came to obscenity. In order to stay safe from vice squad raids, artists would enter the Clubbo Studios off of Manhattan’s Washington Square Park. If some undercover cop came sniffing around, looking for dirty records, Chet would show and play the officer nice clean 45’s by the likes of Pat Boone, Fabian, and Tuesday Weld, all bearing the Clubbo label. Of course, these artists recorded for rival companies. But in their spare time, Bo and Chet would slap their own label onto the records of their competitors. Since most cops didn’t know anything about rock and roll in 1960, they couldn’t tell one artist from another--just as nowadays many couldn’t tell the difference between Jay Z and Nas.

The operation worked well for awhile. But the raunchier mainstream rock got, the less the raincoat crowd wanted to hear the type of sleazy second-rate sounds that Clubb and Bo excelled at. So Gent closed its doors in 1963 when the bottom fell out of the stag market, to speak. But Clubbo continues to this day. As it celebrates its 50th anniversary, I’d like to reminisce a bit about the label, and its now-famous motto, “Music to believe in.”

Because of its setup with Gent, Clubbo didn’t have a real flesh-and-bone artist until 1962. At the time, Chet didn’t really have any intentions of using the Clubbo label to record an actual artist. But geeky Clipper Cowbridge (left) won his recording contract fair and square playing poker against Bo Bogerman, who never really mastered the game. Ironically, Bo’s lost bet wound up saving the company from insolvency. Cowbridge struck gold right off the bat with “Soda Pop Shop.”

Figure 1. “Soda Pop Shop” excerpt



While Motown promoted itself as a family company, with Uncle Berry treating such stars as the Temptations and Supremes like little nieces and nephews, Bo believed that sex was a far more cohesive force that could really bond the label together. Consequently, he made it company policy to screw his artists early and often. The working conditions were terrible. The studios weren’t soundproofed (if you listen carefully to some of their discs from the late-1960s, you can actually hear student protesters from NYU demonstrating in the background). They continued to use that ancient record lathe until after Bogerman’s death in 1982 (Bo insisted it gave him luck; apparently in everything but poker). Even worse, it’s the only record label in which artists paid mechanical and publishing royalties to the company for every record sold (it should be the other way around). Consequently, hit records forced Cowbridge and other Clubbo artists into bankruptcy.

Furthermore, Bo liked to pit white artists against black artists and vice versa, a practice that really came to head in 1979 after the chart success of “Black and White TV,” recorded by Maurice and Joanne Tarkington Green, an interracial husband and wife disco duo better known as Decoupage (right). The couple never really got over the stress, and ultimately turned to alcohol, drugs and cross-dressing for solace.

For me, the worst thing about Clubbo was that Chet and Bo squeezed every bit of juice they could out of their songwriters by re-recording the same tunes over and over, thus cutting down on the administrative costs involved with issuing billing statements for royalties. This was the case for the song “Yeah, Yeah, No, No, No” written and originally performed by Marilyn Kaye in 1965. The company gave it to folk rocker Aura Gold to record in 1973, and to fading porn star Laryssa Foxxx in 1985. Hard up for money, and looking for corporate sponsorship from outside the music industry, the label issued another version in 1993, but that’s just too painful to talk about here.

Figure 2. (l.-r.) Marilyn Kaye, Aura Gold and Laryssa Foxxx


Figure 3. Excerpts from the 1965, 1973, 1985 and 1993 versions of “Yeah, Yeah, No, No, No”



I chose “Yeah, Yeah, No, No, No” as an example, because of my personal involvement with the 1985 version. It was the first time I had ever produced a record on my own. I have to admit being a bit jumpy at first. There would be moments when I’d monumentally screw something up, and apologize profusely to Laryssa. But being in the porn trade so long, she had become a really good sport. She didn’t mind, so long as she had a mirror, razorblade, and enough blow to last the session. Instead of hiring musicians, I decided to step-time program the entire instrumental track, including the drums, using Mark of the Unicorn software, a first-generation Mac, an electronic kit brain, and about three miles worth of MIDI cables.

My version of “Yeah, Yeah, No, No, No” sold a total of eighteen copies--which was good, because, as a grad student living on a small TA stipend, I couldn’t really afford a hit. What really hurt, though, was the criticism. As Rolling Stone characterized my efforts:

The slide in quality accelerates when we reach Laryssa Foxxx‘s version of ‘Yeah, Yeah, No, No, No.’ What possessed Clubbo to shoehorn this sad, introspective song into a dance-club format? Or have it sung by the terminally annoying Foxxx, whose Clubbo deal followed a prolific porn career? Also odd: Laryssa’s porn persona was a clean-scrubbed, girl-next-door type, yet the cover of her sole Clubbo LP, Wild Love, features the artist wrapped in a hideous cavegirl getup and that tiredest of phallic symbols, a big snake. The percolating synth-pop arrangement feels phoned in, and Foxxx’s pesky vocal performance has less range than Yorgi’s one-stringed konservnaya banka.

That was the most positive review. And I had to admit, it was right. What’s worse, it was all my fault. I should’ve known better than to step-time the instrumental tracks. I should have known better than to equalize Laryssa’s vocals on the high side, making the tinny coke-edged tinge in her voice more prominent than it should have been. I should’ve known better than to let anyone nag me into the project in the first place. Most important, I should’ve known better than to break my promise never to work on a Clubbo project again.

That’s right. I had a prior association with the label. Wouldn’t you know, I’d come to regret it.