Single - Grand Prix - Candy Apple Buggy

Shut Down, that LP released by Capitol Records in 1963 was a big hit.  It supposed the flag start for the musical genre known as hot rod music, a spin-off from surf music, with cars, racing and gasoline instead waves, sun and surf boards as the main inspiration. In that compilation the most repeated band was The Super Stocks, a group made up from studio musicians and leaded by surf legend Gary Usher. The formula of that LP was so successful that Usher returned to it a few months later producing another pair of hot rod music Lps. One of them was Hot Rod City released by Vault Records, a small company that hosted one of the best surf bands ever, The Challengers. Richard Delvy, drummer of The Challengers and former drummer of surf music pioneers The Beal-Airs, joined forces with Usher to produce the 13 cuts that would integrate that LP, this time under the suspicious names of The Customs, The Quads and THE GRAND PRIX.

Actually none of those groups really existed, and behind them there were well known west coast musicians and Usher and Delvy taking charge of the compositions and directing the bunch. The productions of Usher in this Lp were grouped under the name of The Customs, while Delvy’s were divided between The Quads and The Grand Prix. The Grand Prix songs had a much harder rockin´ feelin´ than the rest, regardless of those Beach Boys type vocal harmonies that splashed the LP. For those cuts Art Fisher took care of the guitars, Rene Hall played bass, Dennis McCarthy was on keyboards and Ed 'Sharky' Hall beat the drums. It seems that Usher and his musicians added the vocal part in many of the cuts, but for The Grand Prix tracks it was the singer and composer Bobby Hart who put his voice on. In this EP you will find the four songs of The Grand Prix that appear on that LP, three of them composed specially for the album and completed with a terrific cover of Chuck Berry's Maybellene. CANDY APPLE BUGGY was chosen as single and a couple of years later it would be released again in Japan as the B side of the first and only record known fromThe Richard Brothers.  You guess it, Richard Delvy was one of those Richards.