The Executives were an Australian pop music band, formed in 1966 and reformed in 1974, consisting of band members Ray Burton, Rhys Clark, Gino Cunico, Brian King, Carole King, Gary King, Keith Leslie and Brian Patterson. [1] [2] [3] They are arguably best known for their top 40 singles "My Aim Is To Please You" (1967), "Sit Down, I Think I Love You" (1967) and "Windy Day" (1968) reaching No. 18, No. 20 and No. 24 respectively on the Australian charts.
The group later reformed in 1985 with the line up of Carole King and Jonne Sands on vocals, Jose McLaughlin (keyboards), Pip Lee (drums), Moz Sammons (guitar) and Wayne Newey (bass). This version of the group worked extensively throughout Australia before disbanding in 1986.
Dressed in Ned Kelly-style breastplates, they appeared on Skippy the Bush Kangaroo in the episode "The Bushrangers" in 1968. [4]
Year | Single | Chart Positions |
---|---|---|
AUS | ||
1967 | "My Aim Is To Please You" | 4 |
"Sit Down, I Think I Love You" | 4 | |
1968 | "It's a Happening World" | 30 |
"Windy Day" | 7 | |
"Summerhill Road" | 36 |
Skippy the Bush Kangaroo is an Australian television series created by Australian actor John McCallum, Lionel (Bob) Austin and Lee Robinson produced from 1967 to 1969 about the adventures of a young boy and his highly intelligent pet kangaroo, and the various visitors to the fictional Waratah National Park, filmed in today's Waratah Park and adjoining portions of Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park near Sydney.
Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era is a compilation album of American psychedelic and garage rock singles that were released during the mid-to-late 1960s. It was created by Lenny Kaye, who was a writer and clerk at the Village Oldies record shop in New York. He would later become the lead guitarist for the Patti Smith Group. Kaye produced Nuggets under the supervision of Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman. Kaye conceived the project as a series of roughly eight LP installments focusing on different US regions, but Elektra convinced him that one double album would be more commercially viable. It was released on LP by Elektra in 1972 with liner notes by Kaye that contained one of the first uses of the term "punk rock". It was reissued with a new cover design by Sire Records in 1976. In the 1980s, Rhino Records issued Nuggets in a series of fifteen installments, and in 1998 as a 4-cd box set.
Ken James is an Australian former actor and celebrity chef. He is most widely known for his role in children's TV show Skippy the Bush Kangaroo as Mark Hammond to which be became known locally and to international audiences Since his debut in Skippy, James continued to work in film, television and theatre for another 36 years. In December 2009, James was diagnosed with stage three non-Hodgkin lymphoma, which escalated to stage four by 2011. James started chemotherapy, and as of November 2020 the cancer is in remission. James was also actively involved in the Victorian Police Force as an unsworn member from 1993 to 2013.
Melbourne Robert Cranshaw was an American jazz bassist. His career spanned the heyday of Blue Note Records to his later involvement with the Musicians Union. He is perhaps best known for his long association with Sonny Rollins. Cranshaw performed in Rollins's working band on and off for over five decades, starting with a live appearance at the 1959 Playboy jazz festival in Chicago and on record with the 1962 album The Bridge.
Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs were an Australian rock band formed in Sydney in 1963. They were active in two incarnations, the first as a beat band from 1963–1967, and as a hard rock band from 1968–1973. They emerged in 1964 with their cover of "Poison Ivy", which kept The Beatles from the top spot of the Sydney charts during the latter's Australian tour. They enjoyed further success through 1965 when the original members quit after a financial dispute.
Norman Rae Taurog was an American film director and screenwriter. From 1920 to 1968, Taurog directed 180 films. At the age of 32, he received the Academy Award for Best Director for Skippy (1931), becoming the youngest person to win the award for eight and a half decades until Damien Chazelle won for La La Land in 2017. He was later nominated for Best Director for the film Boys Town (1938). He directed some of the best-known actors of the twentieth century, including his nephew Jackie Cooper, Spencer Tracy, Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Deanna Durbin, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Deborah Kerr, Peter Lawford, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Elvis Presley and Vincent Price. Taurog directed six Martin and Lewis films, and nine Elvis Presley films, more than any other director.
Lester Louis Adler is an American record and film producer and the co-owner of the Roxy Theatre in West Hollywood, California. Adler has produced and developed a number of high-profile musical artists, including The Grass Roots, Jan & Dean, The Mamas & the Papas, and Carole King. King's album Tapestry, produced by Adler, won the 1972 Grammy Award for Album of the Year and has been called one of the greatest pop albums of all time.
"The Shadow of Your Smile", also known as "Love Theme from The Sandpiper", is a popular song. The music was written by Johnny Mandel with the lyrics written by Paul Francis Webster. The song was introduced in the 1965 film The Sandpiper, with a trumpet solo by Jack Sheldon and later became a minor hit for Tony Bennett. It won the Grammy Award for Song of the Year and the Academy Award for Best Original Song. In 2004, the song finished at number 77 in AFI's 100 Years...100 Songs poll of the top tunes in American cinema.
Edwin Dudley Roberts was an Australian television screenwriter and supervising producer.
From the Top is a box set by the Carpenters, released in 1991, containing everything from the Richard Carpenter Trio recordings from 1965 to the duo's biggest hits in the early 1970s through to the final song: "Now". This compilation was revised with The Essential Collection: 1965–1997 in 2002.
"Monterey" is a 1967 song by Eric Burdon & The Animals. The music and lyrics were composed by the group's members, Eric Burdon, John Weider, Vic Briggs, Danny McCulloch, and Barry Jenkins. The song provides an oral account of the June 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, at which the Animals performed. Burdon namedrops several of the acts who performed at the festival such as the Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, the Who, the Grateful Dead, and Jimi Hendrix. In 1968, two different video clips of the song were aired.
George Assang, also known by his stage name Vic Sabrino, was an Australian jazz and blues singer and actor from Thursday Island, Queensland, Australia. He performed under his own name and the stage name Vic Sabrino. Assang was of Aboriginal, Pacific Islander, and Asian descent.
Lee Robinson was an Australian producer, director and screenwriter who was Australia's most prolific filmmaker of the 1950s and part of the creative team that produced the late 1960s international hit television series Skippy the Bush Kangaroo.
The Intruders is a 1969 Australian film directed by Lee Robinson. It is a spin-off of the popular Skippy the Bush Kangaroo TV series.
Rhys Edward Clark is a New Zealand drummer who, since moving to the United States in 1970, has played with such artists as Hoyt Axton, Freddy Fender and, most notably, Billy Joel.
Ross Napier was one of Australia's leading radio and TV writers from the 1950s to 1990s, as well as an accomplished novelist. Born in Sydney in 1929, he began writing short stories for magazines while still in high school, selling his first script at 17. Shortly after, he became a staff writer for Grace Gibson Radio Productions, and during the 1950s and 1960s his radio serials were broadcast Australia-wide and internationally. This firmly established Napier as one of Australia's leading drama writers. Whilst at Gibson's he met Ann Fuller, who he married in 1953.
"Sit Down, I Think I Love You" is a 1966 song composed by American singer-songwriter Stephen Stills and originally recorded by American-Canadian rock band Buffalo Springfield. A cover version by The Mojo Men was released as a single in 1967 and reached the U.S. Top 40. Also that year, Australian band The Executives charted in their home country with their version of the song.
"Brian Wilson is a genius" is a line that became part of a media campaign spearheaded in 1966 by the Beatles' former press officer Derek Taylor, who was then employed as the Beach Boys' publicist. Although there are earlier documented expressions of the statement, Taylor frequently called Brian Wilson a "genius" as part of an effort to rebrand the Beach Boys and legitimize Wilson as a serious artist on a par with the Beatles and Bob Dylan.
Raymond Charles Burton is an Australian musician and singer-song writer. He was briefly a member of rock 'n' rollers the Delltones (1965–66) on vocals, pop group the Executives (1968–69) on guitar and vocals, progressive rockers Leo de Castro and Friends (1973) on guitar, and jazz fusion band Ayers Rock (1973–74) on guitar and vocals. In 1971, Burton was working in the United States where he co-wrote "I Am Woman" with fellow Australian Helen Reddy, which became a number-one hit for her on the Billboard Hot 100 late in the following year. Another song written by the pair, "Best Friend", was sung by Reddy while she was also acting in a disaster film, Airport 1975. As a solo artist, Burton issued an album, Dreamers and Nightflyers, and two associated singles, "Too Hard to Handle" and "Paddington Green", in 1978 in Australia. He returned to the US, where he worked as a song writer.
Beverley Anne Harrell, is an Australian pop singer, most famous for her 1966 Australian hit "What Am I Doing Here with You?".