Growing Up Brady: I Was a Teenage Greg, Special Collector's Edition (26 page)

nce "The Brady Bunch" became a solid and proven success, people everywhere began encouraging us kids to
branch out, break out, cross mediums, and become the
true superstars we were so obviously destined to
become. You can't sing? No problem! Can't dance? We'll get you
lessons! Don't think you're ready? Hey, babe, nobody's perfect.

The Teen
Scene. (Barry
Williams)

You're in a TV show? Good. You're making 1100 dollars per
episode? Great! Now what's next? How can we make some more
money? How can we exploit the exploited? We can train you,
teach you, open doors, and show you the way. We love ya! You're
the greatest. You're going straight to the top! Trust me on this one.
You're big, and you're gonna get bigger! ... You could be the
biggest!!!

When you're seventeen years old and you start hearing that
kinda stuff all day, every day, you start swallowing it wholeheartedly. At least I did. I really thought superstardom was simply there for
the taking, and toward that end, I jumped head-first into whatever
project my persuaders dangled in front of my nose.

Among them was "The Brady Kids," a Saturday-morning cartoon show created by Filmation Associates. Then ABC started
using the six of us to promote its new fall season. Teen magazines (16, Tiger Beat, etc.) hounded us constantly for pictures and interviews that more often than not ended up in articles that were completely fabricated. Famous Music, a subsidiary of Paramount, hoping to outdo the recording sensation of the Partridge Family,
talked to us about record deals and albums. And most prevalent of
all were the merchandisers who, licensed or not, would squeeze
bucks from "The Bunch" by plastering our six likenesses on lunch
boxes, comic books, Viewmaster sets, dolls, coloring books, and
for all I know, their mothers' asses.

The
Merchandise
Machine.
(Photo by John
McGary. Toys by
Kirk and Joanne
Holcomb)

The Brady Kids.
(© Paramount
Pictures

This first wave of teen idolatry hit me at just about the same
time that puberty did, and I went from clueless adolescent to teen
idol almost overnight.

I liked it-a lot.

We made the cartoons. It went like this. Having no idea of what
the cartoon would look like-it hadn't been drawn yet-we'd go
into a recording room, or sometimes they'd come to our "Brady
Bunch" dressing rooms and one at a time we'd simply rattle off our
character's lines into a microphone. We didn't know the storylines
or the context of each line. We'd just read from a random list on a
legal pad. For example, you might say:

1. Wow!

2. That's cool!

3. Hey, look at that dog!

4. Mom's not gonna like it.

Et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum. We never knew what we were
referring to, and as a result, when the cartoons were put together, the dialogue was terribly disjointed. We were told, that didn't matter-the kids watching "couldn't tell the difference," and we had
"earned a nice chunk of change."

(Kirk Holcomb.
Photo provided by
Jeff Kilian)

Still, as inherently slipshod as it was, there's nothing like waking
up on a Saturday morning and watching a two-dimensional animated version of yourself run around the screen for a half-hour. It was
kinda fun.

Oddly enough, this dopey little cartoon presented one of the
first of the situations that would eventually undo the unity of our
little group and ultimately bust up the Bunch.

We'll get to that later, because now it was time for Famous
Music to hitch a ride on the Brady gravy train. At about this time in
American history, sound-track albums from TV shows, good, bad,
and ugly, were splattered all over the pop charts. The Partridge
Family was huge, as were the Monkees and Bobby Sherman-even
Sonny and Cher. The Brady kids' seemed like a sure thing, but
somehow our appeal played better on the television than on the
turntable. That may have been due to poor advertising or poor
marketing ... or maybe, just maybe, it had to do with the fact that
our singing sucked.

The first recording we ever did was called Merry Christmas
from the Brady Bunch, and from the beginning, we were discouraged from contributing ideas, and told, "Be quiet, except for when
you're singing."

At our first meeting, the record's producer showed up with a
piece of paper listing the songs he wanted to include. He then rattled off titles at random, assigning one to each Brady kid: " `Away
in a Manger'... Marcia. `Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer'... Peter. `Frosty the Snowman' ... Cindy." He never bothered to learn our
real names, nor our vocal ranges.

When he got to "Greg," I was assigned the beautiful-though
nearly impossible to sing-"O Holy Night." This is the kinda thing
that you usually hear sung by people like Mahalia Jackson or
Leontyne Price; and now I, this pubescent, crack-voiced novice,
was supposed to belt it out ... in public ... in front of my pals ...
and on a record for the whole world to hear. I was scared out of
my wits.

And with good reason. When it finally came time to warble my
rangy little ditty, and I took my place at the mike with hands-and
voice-trembling, I summoned up all the intestinal fortitude I
could bear, grit my teeth, belted out the song as best I could ...
and embarrassed myself royally. I think I made the recording guy's
ears bleed.

Finally, when the torture became more than I or the engineers
could bear, they summoned in Maureen. She actually had a pretty
good voice, and since the song was in her range, she tackled the
more treacherous first half, and I simply chimed in halfway
through. With the two of us singing, it was only half awful-my
half.

Anyway, mortified and unceasingly ragged on by my fellow
Bradys, I made it through the rest of the session, wherein we all
huddled up around an open mike and sang to prelaid musical
tracks of classic Christmas favorites like "Silver Bells," "Silent
Night," and "We Wish You a Merry Christmas."

We finished our vocals in one afternoon, and then listened
intently as the audio engineers used every gimmick, trick, and
echo chamber in the book to get us at least up to "listenable" status. I'm not sure they succeeded, because even with all their gadgetry, the end result still wasn't, by any stretch of the imagination,
"easy" listening. In fact, should you ever come across this particular
album in a record store, I suggest you run screaming in the opposite direction.