Producers Kim Fowley and Gary Paxton assembled the Hollywood Argyles as a hastily convened studio project that also included drummer Sandy Nelson. Fowley had first worked with Nelson on sessions in the late 1950s, and by then he had already overseen short-lived ensembles such as the Paradons and the Innocents. Earlier success arrived when he guided a pair of Arizona schoolmates—Gary (“Flip”) Paxton and Clyde (“Skip”) Battin—who recorded as Skip & Flip and placed two singles in the Top 20 during 1959: “Cherry Pie” at number 11 Pop and “It Was I” at number 11 Pop. Once Skip & Flip disbanded, Paxton and Fowley quickly formed another one-time ensemble of Los Angeles musicians and singers, styling the ad-hoc outfit as a novelty doo-wop act called the Hollywood Argyles.
The makeshift unit reached the top of the charts in 1960 with the number-one hit “Alley Oop,” a blatant imitation of the Coasters’ style that Dallas Frazier, later a country performer, had written and recorded in 1957. The song drew its premise from a then-popular newspaper comic-strip character. During the session Fowley and Nelson, both thoroughly intoxicated, struck empty bottles and wastepaper baskets for percussion. Because the Argyles existed only as a loose circle of Fowley’s regular associates, no second release appeared under that name, and the two producers turned to other projects.
That October they entered a production arrangement with Bob Keene’s Del-Fi Records and cut a follow-up titled “Alley Oop Cha Cha Cha,” on which Paxton recited the original lyrics in the same drawl; the track was issued under the name the Prehistorics.
