The 1960s File Feature
Anything Goes
Harpers Bizarre's "Anything Goes": Sunshine Pop Meets Cole Porter in the Summer of 1967 Harpers Bizarre emerged from the Santa Cruz, California scene in the …
01 The Story
Harpers Bizarre's "Anything Goes": Sunshine Pop Meets Cole Porter in the Summer of 1967
Harpers Bizarre emerged from the Santa Cruz, California scene in the mid-1960s as one of the most musically literate groups in the sunshine pop universe. The quintet, which included Ted Templeman, who would later become one of the most successful record producers in rock history at Warner Bros., combined impeccable vocal harmonies with a refined pop sensibility that drew as readily on Broadway and the American songbook as on the British Invasion. Their association with producer and arranger Leon Russell and with Warner Bros. Records gave them access to resources and musical collaborators that elevated their recordings beyond the typical studio confections of the era.
Their debut single, a cover of Paul Simon's "The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)," had reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 in early 1967, establishing the group's commercial credentials and demonstrating their ability to bring a specific kind of breezy, sophisticated charm to songs associated with other artists. The decision to follow that success with a recording of Cole Porter's "Anything Goes," the title song from his 1934 Broadway musical, was both bold and entirely consistent with the group's artistic personality. Harpers Bizarre were constitutionally drawn to songs that had something to say about the world's increasing anything-goes quality.
The "Anything Goes" recording was produced by Lenny Waronker, who would himself become a major figure in the Warner Bros. Records organization over the following decades. The arrangement, crafted with genuine wit and musical intelligence, placed the Porter standard in a sunshine pop context without stripping it of its original elegance. The result was a record that felt simultaneously of its 1967 moment and connected to a much longer tradition of American popular song, a quality that distinguished Harpers Bizarre from many of their contemporaries.
The single entered the Billboard Hot 100 on August 19, 1967, debuting at number 85. It climbed steadily through positions 77, 61, 60, and 48 over successive weeks. The song reached its peak position of number 43 during the chart week of September 23, 1967, spending eight weeks on the Hot 100 in total. While the peak of 43 was somewhat below the position their first single had achieved, it was a creditable performance that reflected the continued commercial appeal of their signature approach.
The summer and autumn of 1967, during which "Anything Goes" charted, was one of the most musically eventful periods in American pop history. The Summer of Love was in full swing, Sgt. Pepper had been released in June, and the Hot 100 was a kaleidoscope of psychedelia, soul, and pop ambition. Harpers Bizarre's choice to chart during this period with a 33-year-old Broadway standard reflected a genuine artistic confidence: they were not competing with the psychedelic moment but offering something different, a musical sophistication that acknowledged multiple histories simultaneously.
Ted Templeman's subsequent career as producer for Van Morrison, the Doobie Brothers, Van Halen, and many others has given Harpers Bizarre a certain retrospective historical significance: the group was an early training ground for one of the era's most important studio minds. That context enriches the appreciation of recordings like "Anything Goes," which now read as early evidence of the musical intelligence that Templeman would later apply to a very different body of work.
The song also contributed to a minor wave of Cole Porter revivals in late-1960s pop, as multiple artists discovered that Porter's gift for combining sophistication with directness was highly compatible with the era's production values. Harpers Bizarre's version remains the most commercially successful of these attempts, and the recording continues to be cited as an example of how sunshine pop at its best could achieve a kind of elegant wit that transcended its generational moment.
02 Song Meaning
Porter Through a Prism: The Timeless Permissiveness of "Anything Goes"
Cole Porter wrote "Anything Goes" in 1934 as a commentary on the social permissiveness of the Jazz Age, a wry catalogue of modern transgressions that would have shocked previous generations but had become unremarkable. Harpers Bizarre recorded it in 1967 and found, to nobody's great surprise, that its central observation had not aged a day: in every era, the standards that the previous generation held sacred seem to dissolve, and what was once unthinkable becomes acceptable, then fashionable, then simply normal.
The song operates through accumulation. Rather than building a single sustained argument, it catalogues examples of the anything-goes principle in action, each one a small shock that, placed in sequence with the others, demonstrates the comprehensiveness of the collapse of old certainties. Porter's genius was to treat this not as a lament but as a liberating observation, delivered with a lightness that makes the survey of moral permissiveness feel like good news rather than a warning.
What Harpers Bizarre added to this material was the sonic context of 1967, which made the song's argument feel both historically continuous and urgently contemporary. The Summer of Love was a moment when "anything goes" was not merely an observation but a rallying cry, when the generation doing the listening was actively working to dismantle the social conventions Porter had already been satirizing in a different key thirty-three years earlier. The group's choice to record this particular song at this particular moment was thus both historically aware and politically legible.
The irony embedded in the song is multilayered. Porter was himself a closeted gay man living in a society that criminalized his nature, and "Anything Goes" carries the additional meaning of someone celebrating, at a coded level, a world in which those constraints too might eventually dissolve. That hidden dimension of the lyric was not available to most listeners in 1967 but has become more visible to later audiences with greater awareness of Porter's biography, adding another layer of meaning to what already functions as a remarkably rich text.
Harpers Bizarre brought their own kind of sophistication to the material, a West Coast pop refinement that honored Porter's wit without merely imitating it. The sunshine pop arrangement gave the song a brightness that emphasized its celebratory rather than satirical dimensions, and the group's impeccable harmonies lent the catalogue of permissive behaviors a kind of innocent delight that Porter himself might have found amusing. The gap between the song's content and the group's clean-cut delivery was itself a form of the anything-goes principle in action.
The enduring relevance of "Anything Goes" as a title and a thesis is perhaps the most interesting thing about the song's cultural life. In every decade since 1934, someone has felt that the song describes their present moment accurately, that things have reached a point where the old rules no longer apply and the new rules have not yet been written. That sensation of moral and social vertigo is apparently a permanent feature of modern life, and Porter had the wit to see it clearly enough in 1934 to write a song that would document it forever.
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