The Crew-Cuts - Crazy 'Bout You Baby

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• Description : Issued probably March 1954 on Mercu...(more)ry 70341. After The Four Lads, the next superstar pop vocal group to come out of Canada were Toronto's Crew-Cuts. Rudi Maugeri (baritone), John Perkins (lead), Ray Perkins (bass) and Pat Barrett (tenor) started the group when they were still members of the St. Michael's Boys Choir. Prior to the group's foundation, Maugeri and John Perkins had sung together in The Jordonaires (not Elvis' backing group "The Jordanaires") with two other members who would go on to join the Four Lads, but quit to finish high school. Following graduation, they joined with Ray Perkins and Pat Barrett in March 1952 in a group called The Four Tones. Toronto DJ Barry Nesbitt heard them sing, and invited them to perform on his weekly teen program. Its audience renamed the group "The Canadaires." They started to receive steady work under this name, so much that all four quit their day jobs to sing full-time. They saved up some money while slogging it out in the Niagara Falls club circuit, and drove to New York to appear on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Hunt, where they won second place. They missed out on a potential recording contract after appearing in Toronto in March 1953 with Giselle Mackenzie, because, while she enthused about them to her record label, she could not remember their name. While playing in Sudbury, Ontario in the winter of 1953, they received word from their agent that they had been offered a guest spot on a TV show in Cleveland. They drove in minus-forty degree temperatures for six hundred miles in a car without heat to appear on "The Gene Carroll Show." In Cleveland, DJ Bill Randle befriended the group, renamed them "The Crew-Cuts" after their hairstyles, and got them an audition with Mercury Records in Chicago. (He would do the same for The Diamonds a year later.) Mercury signed them up. The first single by The Crew-Cuts didn't go very far, but their second, the self-composed "Crazy 'Bout You Baby" went Top 10 in the spring of 1954. Immediately afterward, they would follow the direction of other Mercury artists and make nice, safe cover versions of R&B records by black performers. Their version of The Chords' "Sh-Boom" went to #1 and put them in the history books. Upon returning to Toronto, they were treated to a ticker-tape parade. The Crew-Cuts' R&B covers were never more popular than the original versions, but they managed to stay in the Top 20 with a string of them through 1957. In a strange turn of events, their lesser-known material was more popular in Canada, while their R&B covers were more popular in the US. In 1958, The Crew-Cuts moved to RCA, then to other, ever-smaller labels and never had another hit. The group disbanded in 1964. (less)