A hit recorded with a scrubbing brush, far from home

The drummer on one of the 1970s' most carefree singles reportedly kept time with a toilet scrubbing brush instead of sticks. That detail comes from the Paris sessions of King Harvest, a band whose story is far stranger than its sunny sound suggests.

It began in 1969 in Ithaca, New York, where four Cornell students, Dave “Doc” Robinson, Ron Altbach, Ed Tuleja and Rod Novak, played covers of Sly and the Family Stone, Jimi Hendrix and The Band at fraternities and bars. The name came from a Band song. In 1971 the group split, but within months each member had drifted across the Atlantic to Paris, and the band was reborn there as a company of expatriates.

Paris turned out to be a busy place for them. They took session jobs on other people's records, Altbach studied classical music with Nadia Boulanger, and the band won a rock and roll talent contest. By the end of 1971 they had put out a debut LP, I Can Tell, which appeared only in Europe. They also wrote and played songs for a French film that went to Cannes, and sometimes recorded under made-up names such as E. Rodney Jones and the Prairie Dogs. Membership kept shifting, though the four founders always stayed.

The song that outlived all this was “Dancing in the Moonlight”, written by Sherman Kelly, who had first recorded it with an earlier band, Boffalongo. Kelly's brother Wells, a drummer, pushed the group to revisit it, then left before the recording to help start Orleans. Steve Cutler, a jazz drummer from New York, stepped in and cut the track. It became their 1972 hit, a song that still sounds like an open window in summer, written and played by a handful of students who never meant to end up in France.