ARCHIE BELL AND THE DRELLS
Houston, Texas, the sunny, sweltering, expansive Lone Star city, largest along the U.S.A.'s Gulf Coast, has at least two famous quotes connected to it. Archie Lee Bell once claimed to have written "...a new dance called the tighten up" and the resulting song became a surprise hit in the spring of 1968. In April 1970, astronaut Jack Swigert relayed the message "Houston, we've had a problem" to Earth's Manned Spacecraft Center following an explosion on the Apollo 13 mission, a planned moon landing that couldn't be completed. By that time, the "problem" phrase could have also been applied to Archie's career as his then-current single stalled at number 100 the exact same week as the Apollo disaster (two years after "Tighten Up" had been approaching a successful ... MORE ››
