If you ask me, not enough records have been recorded by clunking robots. Oh sure, there was Marvin the Paranoid Android‘s brief musical career, but what else? Well, how about Bent Bolt and the Nuts?
In 1966, MGM Records issued The Mechanical Man by Bent Bolt and the Nuts, an act whose career was so brief that it didn’t even extend to the B-side of the single. That is taken up with Sweet and Sour by Teddy Randazzo, who sharper readers will have guessed is the man behind the whole Bent Bolt project. Randazzo was an Italian-American producer and songwriter who had been a big deal in the early days of rock ‘n’ roll as both a writer and performer – you can see him in movies like The Girl Can’t Help It, Rock Rock Rock and Hey, Let’s Twist and his hit songs include Goin’ Out of My Head, Hurt So Bad and I’m On the Outside (Looking In). But by the mid-Sixties, he was becoming old news as rock music shifted direction – while he would have a long career after this, it was very much in the middle of the road scene.
Still, what possessed him to produce this novelty track is anyone’s guess. It’s a weird, clunky number that sounds suitably robotic, as Randazzo adopts a stiff, mechanical voice in the guise of Bent Bolt. The cover art features a classic Japanese robot – the sort that kids of the time would be very familiar with and is now very collectable. However, the song failed to find an audience even as a novelty record until many years later when the likes of Dr Demento gave it a new life, As with bad films, bad music is easy to mock but often has an eccentric originality to it that makes it more interesting than a lot of commercial pop, The work of Bent Bolt – sometimes misspelt ‘Ben Bolt’ on record labels – is not an undiscovered treasure trove but it is an entertaining curio that is more fascinating than many a serious recording. And doesn’t it have a touch of the Kraftwerk about it? I’m not saying that they copied this track for The Robots, but equally, I’m not saying that Bent Bolt is not a Krautrock pioneer.
And no, before you ask – Charles Manson did not record a cover version of this. His Mechanical Man is a different track, unfortunately. Can you imagine it though?
DAVID FLINT
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