While lounging at the Prince Hotel in North York in the late spring of 1974, Bill, Mark and Brett Hudson were visited by a children’s television advocate from Washington, DC who flew in to investigate a show being produced for the CBS network’s Saturday morning fall schedule.

“'Gentlemen, you have to understand,'” Brett recalls the speech he and his brothers were given, “'if this show works you will have captured the hearts and minds of the youth of America.'

“I was like, who? What? I was a 21 year old in a rock band. My main priority was meeting girls. This level of responsibility was not something I was interested in.”

But it was too late to turn back. The Hudson Brothers Razzle Dazzle Show was being produced from May through September 1974 at the CFTO-TV studios in Agincourt, an attempt to channel the resources used to produce The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour — which had come to a temporary halt due to the couple’s divorce — into an early experiment in live-action comedy for kids.

The complete 16-episode series gets released on DVD today, another Canadian television footnote taken out of mothballs, but one with a more intriguing legacy than most.

The Hudson Brothers were welfare-raised Italian teens from Portland, Oregon who won a battle-of-the-bands contest in 1967,  the prize being a single released under the name of its automotive sponsor — The New Yorkers. From there, the trio traded up through a series of record labels, each one willing to take a gamble on heartthrobs who could harmonize, and be America’s own Bee Gees.

“To be perfectly honest, it was usually the female assistants and secretaries that got us in the door,” Brett Hudson, now a 55-year-old film producer, tells Scrolling Eye. “And once we got in, put the three of us together, would own the room. We might have been overpowering, overbearing, or borderline obnoxious, but we knew we were entertaining. I think the confidence came through because we were real brothers who wore our hearts on our sleeves.”

There was enough momentum to move to Hollywood, even if it meant lodging together in the empty cells rented out as hostel space in the Santa Monica Jail. Their willingness to wallpaper the house of a record executive for a party, in exchange for being able to attend, led to a deal with the Playboy Records label. For a time, the brothers based themselves in Vancouver, BC.

Hudson, the album, didn’t produce any hits. But they didn’t need to work as hard for the party invitations, either — their next contract was with Elton John’s startup record company, Rocket, and Bernie Taupin was flying them to France to try working his magic on a follow-up, Totally Out of Control.

Just before leaving, though, they met Sonny and Cher’s television producer Chris Bearde — who was bowled over by how the brothers intuitively crossed one leg over another in synch when they sat down on the couch to talk.

Tracked down after returning from Europe, they were asked to come in to CBS Television City to improvise before cameras, not thinking much of the results. Turned out, they were edited just right to get them a five-week stint as the summer replacement for Sonny and Cher, whose supporting cast were brought over from Toronto, where the earlier seasons had been filmed.

While those primetime episodes were slated to air through August 1974, a deal was struck to make the Hudson Brothers a half-hour fixture on Saturday mornings — translating the formula of the prime-time music and comedy shows for a younger audience. The Hudson Brothers Razzle Dazzle Show would also allow them to salvage the services of Sonny and Cher’s sidekicks. (Razzle Dazzle had previously been the name of a CBC kids show in the 1960s.)

The opening featured the cast — along with British sideshow Rod Hull and his emu puppet — being loaded into a psychedelically painted Divco milk truck then swirling around the city, including the Canadian National Exhbition grounds, before hitting Highway 401 toward Scarborough. The black-and-white credit captures posted on YouTube doesn’t do the delirium justice.
 

While the early 20s Hudson Brothers had top billing on the program, the episodes start with them admonished by a redheaded runt television executive. Razzle Dazzle might’ve been unearthed from the vaults sooner had the role gone to another kid who auditioned for the part, Mike Myers.

A more fascinating remnant of its era, though, is the spectacle of seasoned comedic actors well into their 30s playing in sketches to would-be teen idols without being reduced to doofus high-school teacher types. The best known of this bunch, Billy Van, had already sealed his local legacy by starring in The Hilarious House of Frightenstein, although Brett learned from their humility.

“These were the greatest sketch players that ever lived,” he says of the cast that included Peter Cullen, Freeman King, Ted Ziegler and Murray Langston — who went on to notoriety with a bag on his head as The Gong Show’s Unknown Comic. “It’s hard to believe that they were playing second fiddle to us. But it was from Billy Van that I learned that the attitude was more important than the line.”

Brett had already perfected his own recurring character, Chucky Margolis, based on an insufferable dweeb who’d hover around the Hudson Brothers shows in Portland, desperate for anyone to listen to him slur tall tales — the kind of character unlikely to be mocked in a modern-day kids show.

 

Their comedy wasn’t the least bit risqué, of course, but it was the product of a self-indulgence wrapped around the notion that good-looking wholesome young guys who could carry a tune got away with anything under the guise of comedy.

“The whole motivation for me as a performer was to make my brothers laugh,” says Brett. “And I know they felt the same way. But, in general, the things we did back then are things we’d either get arrested or sued for today. Just a few years later, suddenly the qualification to create sketch comedy on television was a degree from Harvard, because that’s who executives related to.”

Where the Hudson Brothers found a kindred spirit for a year, following their return to Los Angeles, was John Lennon — who, it turned out, recognized them immediately at a party: “You’re the kings of Saturday morning.”

Lennon’s exposure to their Beatlesque tunes on Razzle Dazzle was more likely the consequence of watching before falling asleep, however, since this was during his “lost weekend” era of slumming around Hollywood.

“What we had in common was that working-class mentality,” says Brett. “You could have been in the Beatles, but you never get over looking for the cheapest drink.” The Hudsons also spent a long evening at Harry Nilsson’s house where Lennon was arguing that he didn’t have a good enough singing voice. Finally convinced otherwise after hours of needle-drops, he serenaded them with “In My Life” on a battery-powered portable piano at 5:30am.

“It’s not simply that these things don’t happen to me anymore,” says Brett. “The fact is, these things don’t happen to anyone anymore.”

Television exposure renewed hope that the Hudson Brothers could actually sell a few records — or at least Casablanca Records founder Neil Bogart thought they could, even if the resulting LP was patched together from demos. The cover photo had them in white suits from the set of the CBS variety show, and the track listening was interspersed with a Chucky Margolis skit.

“There was a knock-down drag-out fight over the whole thing,” says Brett. “That wasn’t who we were — but Neil Bogart had to explain this is what the public thought we were. Of course, he was 100 per cent right.” Two singles broke into the top 30 during Razzle Dazzle’s run: “So You Are a Star” and “Rendezvous”.

From there, the brothers retained the stature of on-call television personalities good for ad-libbing on any chat show, although that didn’t translate into sales of the records they kept getting deals to make. The Hudsons tried kids television again, following The Muppet Show formula of going to the UK to produce Bonkers!, syndicated across the pond in 1978. There was also a comedy-horror movie, Hysterical, in 1983 — a disaster that led them to amicably call the act off.

Bill Hudson was married to Goldie Hawn, co-producing a future movie star in the process. Then he was married to Cindy Williams, who quit Laverne & Shirley because she was pregnant, and they later produced The Father of the Bride movies.

Mark Hudson stuck it out in music, frequently collaborating with Aerosmith and Ringo Starr, and more recently in the role of sinister television talent show judge — including infamous debacle The One: Making a Music Star, hosted by George Stroumboulopoulos.

Brett Hudson, on the other hand, wasn’t too sure what his resumé was worth.

“I was ready to move on,“ he says. “I didn’t feel I need that adoration anymore. I knew what I wanted to do — I just didn’t know how to do it.”

Where he landed was behind the scenes, initially pitching and selling, if not necessarily writing a finished product. But his efforts have built momentum over the past few years, leading to the recent completion of a documentary about a kindred spirit of sorts, Neil Innes, called The Seventh Python. Premiering next week at the Mods & Rockers film festival in Hollywood, plans are afoot to shop it around this fall at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Yet, while the three Hudson Brothers remain connected, Brett is in no hurry to regurgitate the routine — beyond the possibility of releasing the prime-time variety show episodes if justified by the Razzle Dazzle DVD sales.

And typical for someone whose day job involves rifling through other people’s archives, Brett isn’t in a hurry to sit down and watch 34-year-old footage of his 21-year-old self.

“I’ll get around to watching an episode or two eventually,” he says. “But I can already tell you what my reaction will be: Who the fuck put us in those outfits?”

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