“Ron Frangipane touched the lives of colleagues and countless students through his musical genius and his towering humanity,” said David Tripold, Professor and Director of Choral Activities at Monmouth in a statement. In 1997, Frangipane joined Monmouth University where he was musical director for countless shows, an adviser and planner, and a pioneer of the university’s Music Industry Program. “The word on Ron was he was always easy to deal with and had a way of getting the best out of the artists he worked with.” “He was an accomplished producer and especially with women artists, Janis Ian and Grace Slick were two of the most notable,” said Mike Appel, Bruce Springsteen's former manager who was also a member of the band Balloon Farm and songwriter for the Partridge Family. He fronted his own project, too, Ron Frangipane and His Orchestra.
The song was a masterpiece of bubblegum pop that is still played and loved to this day.įrangipane went on to play with greats like John Lennon, Janis Ian, Diana Ross, Gene Simmons, Grace Slick, Melanie and more. He told me he was playing keyboards for the producers and they needed a lead singer.” He was the reason I became lead singer of the Archies. Ron was incredibly talented and a joy to be around. We formed a jingle company together and wrote and produced commercials for radio and TV. “We were in the band on stage and he and I became instant friends. What "Sugar, Sugar" offers is a complete escape from reality, sticky-sweet feel-good music so blatantly commercial and artificial it wasn't even attributed to three-dimensional performers - coming at a time when counterculture credibility meant seemingly everything, it would be almost tempting to call the Archies revolutionary if that didn't defeat the entire purpose of what they were all about.“We both were in a Broadway show called ‘The Freaking Out of Stephanie Blake,’” said Ron Dante, the lead singer on “Sugar, Sugar,” to the USA Today Network. The song is the very essence of simplicity, a classically constructed pop record with an undeniably infectious melody and charmingly inane puppy-love lyrics nothing revelatory and nothing earth-shattering, which is precisely the point - as the "bubblegum" appellation suggests, it's total ear candy, and lord knows it struck a chord, selling over six million copies. Conceived by producer Don Kirshner following his firing by another pre-fab (albeit flesh-and-blood) group, the Monkees, and inspired by the long-running Archie comic book line and subsequent animated series, the cartoon band was in reality a group of session musicians including vocalists Ron Dante, Ellie Greenwich, Andy Kim, and Toni Wine Kim co-authored "Sugar, Sugar" with Jeff Barry, Greenwich's husband and longtime songwriting partner. For better or worse, "Sugar, Sugar" and the countless bubblegum records which came before and after didn't reflect their times, but rejected them - escapist fare at its purest and most palatable. With the Archies' "Sugar, Sugar," pop music moved 180 degrees away from the overtly political, consciousness-expanding aesthetic which emerged during the Summer of Love toward a calculated simplicity and innocence not heard since the years prior to the British Invasion.
In fact, it wasn't even the work of a real band at all.
In spite of (or, more likely, because of) the momentous cultural turning points which stretched across 1969 - among them, Woodstock, Vietnam, the moon landing, and the beginning of the Nixon presidency - the biggest-selling pop single of the year was not the product of a generational torch bearer like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, or Bob Dylan.
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