Side One continues with "Superman," a six-minute, four-color comic book love triangle complete with romance, deceit, intrigue, murder, jail time, and the keyboard riff from Del Shannon's "Runaway." Elsewhere, we find the rinky-dink "Girls Never Know," ("Girls never know/What they want to be/That's why they start a family") "I Shot My Manager," a parody of the music business set to BOB MARLEY, and "Mission A Paris," a dime-store spy novel of stolen NATO plans and secret rendezvouses at the Eiffel Tower. The album opens with the maddeningly catchy "Beep Beep Love," one of only two GRUPPO tracks to garner any US airplay, in which Roger Corman and Tom Petty vie for most-favored-influence status as Vandenburg relates his tale of cartoon space-love. Indeed, frontman Hans Vandenburg (aka "Vandefruits") unashamedly cops familiar lyrical and musical motifs from pop's past, weaving them so overtly, yet so deftly into his B-movie love affairs, spy thrillers, and sci-fi tales, that only the stodgiest and most litigious listener would think to cry "Plagiarism!" instead of reveling in his obvious love for the genre. Yet what Gruppo lack in true feelings of nostalgia they more than compensate for in wit, musicianship, and their uncanny ability to satirize without the slightest trace of condescension. Gruppo Sportivo are Dutch, having experienced the glory days of post-war American pop culture not first hand, but filtered through TV shows and films as cheesy and overbearing as Peter Calicher's pervasive "96 Tears"-inflected farfisa. A main reason for this seeming aloofness is geographical. Where Happy Days is Norman Rockwell, 10 Mistakes is Roy Lichtenstein. Where Happy Days expresses genuine nostalgia for a bygone era, 10 Mistakes embraces more the absurdity of the era than the era itself. Where Happy Days is retro-saccharine for the masses, 10 Mistakes is retro-kitsch for the intellectual elite. GRUPPO SPORTIVO It would be a mistake indeed to regard Gruppo Sportivo's 1977 debut as a mere aural equivalent to television's Happy Days.
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