Ron Dante
b. Carmine Granito, 22 August 1945, Staten Island, New York, USA. Dante was one of the most prolific and commercially successful studio singers of the late '60s, having provided the voices of the Archies and the Cuff Links and sung on many television and radio jingles. Dante's first break occurred as a Brill Building songwriter and then demo singer for entrepreneur Don Kirshner, as a replacement for Tony Orlando. Dante's first hit was Leader Of The Laundromat, a parody of the Shangri-Las’ Leader Of The Pack, with the Detergents in 1964. (Dante did not sing lead on this recording, despite what has long been reported. Group member Danny Jordan was the vocalist.) In 1968, Dante was hired as the vocalist for the studio-created Archies, a spin-off of a successful Saturday morning television cartoon and earlier comic book. After a couple of moderate successes, the Archies’ Sugar, Sugar reached number 1 on both sides of the Atlantic in the summer of 1969, ultimately becoming one of the year's top-selling singles. A US Top 10 follow-up, Jingle Jangle, came that same year. Dante's role as the Archies’ vocalist was never acknowledged on the group's album, although he remained the singer for five years, eventually writing songs for and producing the records as well. In 1969, at the same time the Archies were at their commercial peak, Dante sang lead on another Top 10 hit, Tracy, by the Cuff Links, overdubbing all of the voices himself. He later went on to record under his own name (as well as several other pseudonyms) and to score Broadway plays and musicals and, in the early '70s, produced early recordings by Barry Manilow for Bell Records.