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Andy Kim


Andy Kim - Rock Me Gently / Rock Me Gently Part II - 7

Rock Me Gently / Rock Me Gently Part II - 7"
Ice - 1974


Michael Panontin
"You're only as good as your last two minutes and thirty seconds."

Those were words that Andy Kim had first heard while working as an assembly-line songwriter at the Brill Building in New York. The young Montrealer - born Andrew Youakim to Lebanese immigrants - had made his way there while still in his teens and would co-write hits with Jeff Barry for the Archies ('Sugar, Sugar', 'Jingle Jangle') as well as for himself ('How'd We Ever Get This Way'). But by 1973, his last serious chart success was a good three years behind him, and after his ill-fated LP for Uni that year tanked, Kim had pretty well hit bottom.

Kim had just moved from New York to Los Angeles. He arrived in LA without a label and without friends, but he had written a song that he was quite proud of. "I wrote 'Rock Me Gently' about someone that I met the first day that I arrived in L.A." he would later tell author Juliette Jagger. "It was written in probably twenty minutes at 6 o'clock in the morning, but I couldn't put it away after that. I really, really loved the song. I sang it all the time, in the car or wherever. It was one of those melodies that was in my head in the middle of the night, and that was even before I made the record."

So Kim entered the studio with five musicians that he had "picked by chance" from the musicians' union. The recording, unfortunately, did not get off to a great start. "The first half hour...it was kind of not going anywhere," Kim explained to Toronto radio station Boom 97.3. "I decided to put the guitar down and tell them why I wrote this song - I even had a photo of her - and the door opened and the bass player walked in." The bassist apologized for arriving late, plugged in his instrument and started tuning up. Kim heard that by now familiar 'doo-doo-doo' intro and was gobsmacked. "I said, 'What is that?' And that's what started everybody hearing what I was hoping to translate."

Before long, the group had laid down the bulk of what would become the finished track. 'Rock Me Gently' was mixed and mastered, and surely Kim must have known he had a massive hit on his hands. So he shopped the song around to find someone to release it. "Everybody said, 'Not interested.' From heads of labels that I had known because of my earlier success to whoever, I think that they all truly believed my time had passed."

So Kim decided to return to Montreal and, along with his brother Joe, formed Ice Records to self-release 'Rock Me Gently'. The record was issued in early May 1974 and by May 11th had been picked up by stations in Montreal, Edmonton and Toronto. Things just kind of snowballed from there. He received a call from radio promoter Al Corey, who had just heard the record on Windsor's CKLW-AM and wanted to promote it south of the border. 'Rock Me Gently' was issued on Capitol in the US in June and by Sept. 28th had reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. It also topped the RPM chart up here in Canada, as well as placing #2 in the UK - surprisingly, Kim's only charting single over there - #3 in South Africa and #10 in Ireland.

For Kim, it was definitely a vindication. "When I found out that the song had hit #1 on Billboard, it was midnight and I was standing alone on the balcony of my penthouse crying," he recalled. "I had dreamt up this song, made this record, and been dismissed as irrelevant, so I felt like I had just climbed Mount Kilimanjaro on my own."
         
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