The Giant Panther

The first time I heard the British band Sweet was when a song called "Little Willy" was played on the radio station I was listening to in 1972. It had a fun cadence and it was right on the Bubblegum fault line. Sweet had a lot of trouble extricating itself from the Bubblegum label and it's not hard to understand why with the name they chose. In fact, they tried very hard to distance themselves from their bubblegum tag by intentionally doing heavier music on the flip side of all their singles. It drove label executives a bit crazy, but it definitely opened some eyes on the other end of the equation. In the days when you only had an "A" and "B" side to make a decision about a band that second song always got played. Maybe not always on the air, but if the "A" side was listenable the "B" side got a couple of revolutions to make sure nobody was missing anything. When you make songs like "Ballroom Blitz," "Little Willy," and "Fox On The Run" you're gonna get pigeon-holed to a degree. The truth is Sweet had more in common with Glam rockers like Queen, Gary Glitter, T-Rex and Slade than U.S. Bubblegummers like The Ohio Express, 1910 Fruitgum Company or The Monkees.

Back to "Little Willy" for a moment; I still don't exactly know what the song was about, but I did know that I kind of liked it. Sweet had that way about them. Sometimes they sounded like a gang of people singing to you as opposed to just one voice. I never much cared for "Ballroom Blitz," but an awful lot of people did. Sweet had the party vibe about them. They sounded like they were having fun. Everybody wants a piece of the "Action" right? I did know that Willy wouldn't go home, but I never did figure out why. The lyrics are vague, but Willy seemed to like to dance and he had an attitude. I gathered at least that much, but the song was a blast and fun to listen to nonetheless.

Well, I didn't pay them all that much mind until the summer of 1978. It was my senior year of high school and we were all preparing for that trip off to college that would change our lives forever. We still had a couple of months to work a summer job and goof off and listen to the radio and that's just what we did. I was painting houses that summer and one of the songs in very heavy rotation was Sweet's masterpiece "Love is Like Oxygen" from their 1978 album Level Headed. It is often mistaken for belonging to the Electric Light Orchestra catalogue, but it represented a new direction for Sweet as they tried to distance themselves from their old sound. Plagued by lead singer Brian Connelly's alcoholism, several personnel changes and RCA's attempts to shape them, Sweet switched to Polydor Records and scored their final Top Ten Hit in "Love is Like Oxygen." Guilty Pleasure or not, I'll always love "Love is Like Oxygen." So consider me outed in a manner of speaking...