Excerpt from Wake Me, Shake Me by Mitchell Cohen. All rights reserved.

The group that put John Simon on the map as a producer was originally called the Rondells. They had one single on ABC-Paramount, “Parking in the Kokomo.” The Rondells looked like Rondells, fresh-faced and short-haired in the pre-Beatles way — stick acoustic guitars in their hands and they could be the Chad Mitchell Trio, photograph them on a beach and they’re the Surfaris. The trio — Tom Dawes, Don Dannemann and Jim Maiella — was playing at a club in the Village, Downtown at 1 Sheridan Square. Nat Weiss, an American associate of Brian Epstein, caught their act, told Epstein about them, and they became the first American act taken on as clients by the Beatles’ manager. But “Rondells” would not fly in 1966. How about the Circle? The story was that John Lennon suggested the new spelling: Cyrkle.

For their debut Columbia single, the group was given “Red Rubber Ball,” written in London by Paul Simon with Bruce Woodley of the Seekers (although at first the single credited it to Simon alone). It was released in spring 1966, between Simon & Garfunkel’s “Homeward Bound” and “I Am a Rock,” and was a bigger single than either of them — and a better one as well. It shows that Simon (with a collaborator?) could have knocked off catchy pop hits at will, if that whole sensitive-singer-songwriter plan didn’t work out. More evidence: “I Wish You Could Be Here,” also cut by the Cyrkle, and “Cloudy,” both Simon-Woodley songs, although Woodley insisted it was like pulling teeth to get Simon to acknowledge it. “Red Rubber Ball” is a sliding door into an alternate Paul Simon career; it feels casual and tossed-off, not labored-over and literary.

The Cyrkle returned to Downtown as “Red Rubber Ball” was going up the charts, and Cash Box’s “Record Ramblings” was on the scene to report: “The Cyrkle seems to be as complete and self-contained a musical aggregation as has come onto the rock scene in some time.” Billboard titled its review “The Cyrkle: Alumni of the Clean-Cut School of Talent,” and said, “The quartet of college graduates has a clean sound to match their appearance, a unique quality in today’s pop music scene of shaggy-haired, shaggy-voiced groups.” A Hit Parader profile was headlined, “There’s room for normal groups too!”

The rise of the Cyrkle coincided with major executive changes at CBS Records. In mid-1965, Clive Davis, who began his music business career as an attorney, was named Administrative Vice President. “In this spot,” Billboard announced, “he will be responsible for the overall direction to the Columbia and Epic labels.” If that sounds rather unspecific in retrospect, it was vague enough even then: the critical area of A&R became a corporate jump ball. Bill Gallagher was named vice president of the Columbia label, reporting to Davis and, quoting Billboard again, “will direct the complete activities of the Columbia label, including artist & repertoire, distribution and sales.” The music industry can take terms like “overall direction” and “will direct” and make them sound like different things. A year later, Davis was named vice-president and general manager of the CBS Records Division, and addressing the 1966 CBS convention in Las Vegas, included the Cyrkle in his speech as evidence that Columbia was a “young and ever-changing company alert to, and frequently ahead of, the public’s demand for something new and different.”

Contemporary pop was on Davis’s to-do list. “I realized,” he now reflects, “that if you’re really only in middle-of-the-road A&R, you don’t know the first thing about rock. You don’t even care about it. I was just shocked as I plunged in, listened to the radio, Top 40 radio… I never thought I would sign an artist, honestly. I was just aware that these other A&R names didn’t know anything about rock music. I made a few deals of my own; I made a deal with Mickie Most for Donovan.” He also scooped up Chad and Jeremy and the Hollies from the UK, and placed them on Columbia and Epic, respectively. But in the U.S, the East Coast A&R-production staff had a lot of ground to make up, especially with the defection of Tom Wilson to MGM-Verve.

John Simon’s work with the Cyrkle — “Turn-Down Day” was a follow-up hit — indicated that he had a feel for what radio wanted, but otherwise, the A&R department was, Davis felt, out of touch. He hired Charles Calello, a producer-arranger with an impressive track record. He was the arranger on many Four Seasons’ records — “Walk Like a Man,” “Bye Bye Baby (Baby Goodbye),” “Dawn (Go Away),” “Girl Come Running” are just a few — and hits by Shirley Ellis, Soupy Sales, the Toys and Freddie Cannon. He scored the 1965 film Who Killed Teddy Bear?, a mind-bendingly seedy NYC-set thriller with Sal Mineo and Juliet Prowse. Calello even produced and arranged a Northern Soul floor-filler for Paul Anka (“I Can’t Help Loving You”). Calello told an interviewer, “When I joined [Columbia], I had ‘Lightning Strikes’ as a producer, ‘The Name Game’ as a producer, plus I was making Four Seasons records. So, when they brought me in, they wanted me to start to make pop records for Columbia Records. The funny part about it was, although they wanted to move in that direction, the resistance corporately was something I was not used to.”