The Buckinghams [Interview, Side A]

  • [Interview Transcript from the book "Psychedelic Psounds"] THE BUCKINGHAMS: KIND OF A DRAGThe Buckinghams originally began as a group called the Centuries in 1965 in Chicago. The Buckinghams consisted of the following members: Carl Giammerese (vocals; guitar); Marty Grebb (keyboards; sax); Nick Fortuna (bass); Denny Tufano (guitar; harmonica); and Jon Poulos (drums). They were an immediate success with "Kind of a Drag" which went #1 in 1967. Subsequent hits included "Don't You Care," "Why Don't You Love Me," "Susan," and "Hey Baby (They're Playing Our Song)." The entire band was arrested on drug charges in 1968 and the group's Top 40 success seemed to disappear when producer James William Guercio left them to work with Chicago.The following interview was conducted with Carl Giammerese on 10/19/1987.
  • AV: Please discuss the origins of the group and your first singles as the Centuries.CG: The origins of the Buckinghams as a group began in Chicago in 1965 when we started playing as a couple of different groups. Nick Fortuna and myself played in the Centuries which was a local Chicago band that had a pretty good following playing the dance circuit and teen clubs. There also was a group called the Pulsations that included John Poulos and Dennis Tufano. So the four of us came from those two different groups and kept the name the Pulsations for a while. We later auditioned for a TV show in Chicago called All Time Hits. It was a local variety show on WGN. We won the audition against several bands and received a thirteen week contract. We were on every week as the rock segment and we did other people's material which was mostly the English groups. It was the TV show, All Time Hits, that changed our name to the Buckinghams.
  • AV: What about the group the Falling Pebbles?CG: The Falling Pebbles happened after "Kind of a Drag" was a hit. I think there were some legal problems when we left USA Records and went to Columbia. USA released "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" which was the only song they had as a follow up to "Kind of a Drag." At the same time Columbia released "Don't You Care," USA released"Lawdy Miss Clawdy" as the Falling Pebbles. To be honest with you, we used to kid each other and throw that name around because of the Rolling Stones. Why USA decided to release "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" as the Falling Pebbles is beyond me. I don't know how that came about.
  • AV: How did you select the name The Buckinghams?CG: The TV show, as l mentioned, thought it would be good for us to have a more contemporary name, something that went along with the British Invasion. Since they wanted us to sound more British they changed our name the first week of the show to the Buckinghams. It was actually one of the security guards that came up with the name. We started recording with that name in Chicago with USA Records and it just stuck.
  • AV: Your first LP on USA Records entitled Kind of a Drag included "I'm A Man" which was pulled off later pressings. Why?CG: The reason "I'm A Man" was pulled was that we felt that was the weakest cut on the album. Listening to it now the whole album is pretty weak. We really didn't have room for it. There is a problem in that you can only put so much signal on a record before the quality starts to diminish, but there were some copies pressed with it out there. We went in and recorded that whole album in a couple of days. We did all the tracks and then went in and did all the vocals. We were a bunch of kids who were experimenting and didn't really know what we were doing. "I'm A Man" just happened to be one of the cuts that we did, but the producer and record company felt that was the weakest cut and just left it off on later pressings.
  • AV: "Kind of a Drag" was recorded a year and a half before it became a hit and originally without horns. Why the overdubbed horns and the long wait before it was released?CG: Both of those things are incorrect. It wasn't a year and a half. We did record it and I think it took them about six months---definitely not more than a year---to put it out. They just sat on it for a while. It was the last song where we were contracted to USA. It was always intended to be with horns. Of course, the way you do things, you cut the basic track which is a basic rhythm section. Then you overdub the horns. There might have been a few days, even a week, before we finally put the horns on there, but it was always the intention to put horns on the track. If you recall, we had recorded an old James Brown song "I'll Go Crazy" before "Kind of a Drag," and that was with horns.
  • AV: Flip side of "Kind of a Drag" was cover of Zombies' "You Make Me Feel So Good." What prompted your group to do this cover?CG: We were big Zombies' fans as well as the Hollies and the Beatles---we loved all their music, but the Zombies was one of our favorite bands at the time. We listened to all their stuff. "You Make Me Feel So Good" was a song that we were doing in our live shows and it seemed like a good song to record. So that's what we did and it wound up on the other side.
  • AV: Kind of a Drag LP includes several other interesting tracks such as "Breakin' Up" and a cover of the Mamas and Papas' "I Call Your Name."CG: We were struggling for material at the time because there really weren t any writers in the band. We actually recorded "I Call Your Name" after hearing the Beatles record it. Soon after that the Mamas and Papas recorded it. We were really doing a cover tune of the Beatles version and the Mamas and Papas just happened to get a hit with it. The other tune, "Makin' Up and Breakin' Up," was written by a Chicago guy who was just a friend. He submitted this tune to us which we recorded and used on the album. The album, which I don't have in front of me right now, had a few original tunes that were written by people we knew. One of them was "Kind of a Drag" written by Jim Holvay who continued to write all the hits that we had, including "Hey Baby (They're Playing Our Song)," "Susan," and "Don't You Care." Other than "Kind Of A Drag" the other tunes were copy tunes like "I'll Go Crazy" which was an old James Brown tune. "I Call Your Name" was Beatles. "I'm A Man" was an old blues tune that was originally---I want to say Howling Wolf, but maybe it was Muddy Waters---who originally recorded that song. Of course, the Yardbirds got it and made a hit out of it, and then later Chicago (Transit Authority) did too. We were searching for material and picked what friends had written and also copied two cover tunes that we were doing in our show live.
  • AV: How did the Buckinghams manage to get signed by Columbia Records?CG: After "Kind Of A Drag" became a number one record our contract was up with USA records. We had left our manager, our booking agency, and our record company, yet here we were with a number one record. -What happens when you have a number one record is that every record company in the country is trying to sign you. We were being romanced by several record companies. About this time we met James William Guercio. We met him through one of our roadies, Rick Jesperson, who was Guercio's cousin. Guercio lived in Los Angeles and he was playing with a duo called Chad and Jeremy. Rick introduced us whereupon Guercio came to Chicago and for some reason things clicked. We felt he was someone who could really help us get it together and keep it going. At the same time, a friend of mine in Chicago named Jim Scully, who had been very supportive of the Buckinghams, was responsible for bringing us to the Columbia label. We signed with Guercio and flew to New York. We then signed a contract with Columbia Records whereupon we recorded our second single "Don't You Care."
  • AV: Discuss the involvement of producer James William Guercio since he was involved with such songs as "And Our Love," "Foreign Policy," and "Susan." I was wondering if he played in the band since he had played as a bass player for the likes of Del Shannon, Tommy Roe, the Shangri-Las, and the Beach Boys.CG: He never performed live with us. He did some playing on records. He mostly did some percussion things. He was a very good producer and was responsible for the sound that we got and the arrangements of the songs. He had a pretty clear cut idea of what he wanted us to sound like.
  • AV: What about Guercio's involvement with Blood Sweat & Tears and also Chicago?CG: Guercio and the Buckinghams had already established a sound with horns. His production of Blood Sweat & Tears was sort of a continuation of the Buckinghams. Al Kooper has even said this. I think that group was struggling for a hit record and somehow Guercio got involved on the successful Blood Sweat & Tears album. They felt he was the right guy to do it for them and he was because he produced a great album.The group Chicago was another thing. Chicago was a group of guys we had grown up with and known all through the rock era of the 6Os in Chicago. They were all friends of ours. We were trying to get Guercio to listen to that group for quite some time, but he was always too busy. Right about the time when we were breaking up and had our differences with him, Guercio heard the group, signed them, and brought them out to L.A. He established them out there and started recording them. It was a continuation of our band because that was what Guercio knew how to do best. Chicago was nine great musicians---all they needed was some direction and somebody like Guercio to put them in a studio and capture what they were doing.
  • AV: Did any of the future members of Chicago ever play horns for the Buckinghams on your records?CG: No, not really. Marty Grebb, who was our keyboard player, was also a sax player and he did some sax work on their records. He later played with Chicago, too.One of the famous horn players that did play on the Buckinghams' records was Tom Scott. Years later, when I was playing with Dennis Tufano, Tom Scott produced our album that we did as a duo. Both Tom Scott and Clark Terry played instruments for the Tonight Show band.
  • AV: Discuss the contributions of Gary Beisbier and James Holvay who wrote such songs as "Kind Of A Drag," "Don't You Care," "Why Don't You Love Me," "Susan," and "Hey Baby."CG: Holvay was another Chicago guy who played in a group called The Mob, which also included Terry Kath of Chicago. They were a show band. Things started happening for us around Chicago and Holvay submitted a tape to us with "Kind Of A Drag" on it. It was a very rough tape with just him and a guitar. We wanted to record the song. We thought it was a good tune. The rest is history. It became a number one hit. But then, after that, he gave us a tape with "Don't You Care," "Susan" and "Hey Baby (They're Playing Our Song)" and "Why Don't You Love Me." We just took that whole tape to Guercio and went in and started recording them one by one.AV: What happened to Holvay?CG: To tell you the truth, I've lost touch. I know in the last few years he was living out in L.A. I don't know what he's doing now.
  • AV: First Columbia LP was Time and Charges with the hit "Don't You Care. Please discuss single and flip side "Why Don't You Love Me" along with rest of album including cover of "Mercy Mercy Mercy."CG: Time and Charges was our first LP on Columbia Records. We had Guercio's sound and "Don't You Care" by Jim Holvay just seemed the logical follow up to "Kind Of A Drag." It had a lot of the same sounds. The difference in the production is phenomenal because it was recorded much better. We went from eight-track to sixteen-track and recorded in New York with Guercio. "Don't You Care" had just the right lyrics and the right melody to be a follow up single. We were correct---it was also a number one record! The flip side "Why Don't You Love Me" was another tune that Holvay had written, but we just didn't feel it was as strong and so that's why it became the flip side. It still was in much the same vein and had much the same sound because Holvay wrote it. The remainder of the LP was a collection of tunes, some of which Guercio had written, that were used because they seemed to be connected to what we were doing musically at the time. My personal opinion was that the album was a little too symphonic. I think Guercio got a little carried away with the production on it. "Mercy Mercy Mercy" was a song Cannonball Adderley recorded. We really liked the song and his version of it. His version was definitely a lot different from ours. His had a lot more of a jazz feel to it. Ours had a lot more R&B. We changed the arrangement and put our own lyrics to it. To tell you the truth, I don't know who was responsible for writing the words. I think we just got in the studio and started playing around with lyrics and added the words to it. That song was never intended to be a single. It was a lot of fun to do because our roots in Chicago were R&B and that was the closest we got to an R&B feel. It was done very spontaneously without a lot of thought on it being a single.
  • AV: Please discuss the song "Foreign Policy" which is the B-side of the "Susan" single. The track includes excerpts from John F. Kennedy speeches. Why did you include the Kennedy speeches?CG: Music, politics, and the whole feel of the country at the time made us want to do a political statement. I can't take responsibility for the group on this---it was Guercio's idea. He was just trying to make a statement with it and it worked out really good. We went along with it and it was a nice cut.
  • AV: The "Susan" single features a bizarre, improvised bridge near the end. Discuss the inspiration for this bridge. Also there were sounds from the streets of Chicago similar to "Summer in the City" by the Lovin' Spoonful as well as the Beatles "A Day in the Life." How did this come about?CG: That collage of sound in there does sound a lot like the end of "A Day in the Life." We were very busy on tour at the time and we were taking a short break. We went in and recorded the basic track with all the vocals. Guercio was going to do all the sweetening---horns, strings, and whatever else. When we recorded it the arrangement was such that he left so many bars of empty space in there for us to keep time to. We kept saying to him, "What are you going to do in there? What's going to fit into that section?" He said, "Well, I've got this idea I want to try. Let me just try it and you guys can listen to it and tell me what you think." We said, "Okay, try whatever you want." Since he had already given us a few hit records we said, "Why not?" We went back on the road and he sent us a test pressing of the finished single. We played it and when we got to that section there was this loud collage of sounds, reverse tapes, and all kinds of stuff. Our immediate reaction was that we didn't like it. We thought that it didn't contribute to the song at all. It was his decision and Columbia Records also went along with him and decided to leave it in. A lot of radio stations edited out the collage and played the song without it. Today, we don't even use that in the live show. It was a difference of opinion. It seemed to hurt the record because a lot of people said, "Why is that in there?" I think Guercio was just trying to get a bit of what the Beatles were doing.
  • AV: Please discuss the later Columbia albums entitled Portraits (which included "Hey Baby," "Susan," and the cover of the Animals' "Inside Looking Out") and In One Ear and Gone Tomorrow.CG: The album Portraits was probably the best contribution and the best recording of the Buckinghams. We spent about six months in Los Angeles recording that album, taking our time, and being very particular about how we laid the tracks down. We did it in much the same fashion as the Beatles did in recording Sgt. Pepper at the time. We did a lot of overdubs and tried a new way of recording. Instead of laying a basic track down with several instruments, we did just one instrument at a time. There was no bleeding or leaking into another in order to keep it as clean as possible. It was very tedious and time consuming that way. We would lay down a drum track and then a bass on top of that and a guitar and a keyboard. We put a lot of time and effort into that album. I think it was somewhat of a masterpiece for that time. I don't feel the album got the attention that it deserved because we were known as a Top 4Os singles band at the time and we just didn't get the recognition that we should have gotten with that album.Soon after that album we broke our relationship off with Guercio because of disagreements. Most of them had to do with publishing and writing. We were promised a lot of things that he never gave us. We were pretty naive back in the 6Os and didn't know what was going on in the business. We were just like a thousand other bands. We finally realized how much money there was in publishing and writing. We had trouble getting or sharing our rights with our record company and with our manager. He refused to cooperate and there were many disagreements between us which led to our break up.We went on to do In One Ear and Gone Tomorrow without Guercio. It was actually a very tragic album because there were some good songs, but Columbia didn't have enough sense at the time to put us together with another really great producer. They gave us one bad producer after another and we wound up coming up with a mediocre album. The In One Ear LP was not a progession after doing Portraits.
  • AV: How did you select the song "Inside Looking Out" for Portraits?CG: That was a song that we worked on as a group. The album Portraits had a lot of original material that we had written ourselves.
  • AV: How did the group break up after In One Ear and Gone Tomorrow?CG: In One Ear had a semi-hit on that album called "Back in Love Again." Soon after that there were a lot of problems because the music business had been changing so rapidly. Top Forty bands like us, the Association, and the Beach Boys were being left behind by the more heavy underground groups like Cream, Hendrix, and Janis Joplin. The interest was going in that direction. They were getting a lot more attention and consequently people were buying a lot more of that than they were the Top 40 bands like us. That was a problem along with the fact everybody in our group was losing interest and wanted to try solo projects and different things. We had been bogged down with a lot of legal problems, too. There's not one thing that really broke us up. Our conclusion was that it was just a collection of many different reasons. I think back now and it would have been good if we could have held it together and rode through the problems and probably had another string of hits. But it's easy to look back and say stuff like that now. That was back in early 1970.
  • AV: Could you discuss your Greatest Hits LP and the photo on the cover of a lake with a light blue mushroom cloud behind the group?CG: That whole album cover was designed in the studio. Those were life-size cut-outs that were photographed. Everything that was in the background was designed by Columbia and separately put in there. So it wasn't really us standing in front of a blue sky and a lake. The mushroom cloud was the idea of the artists at Columbia Records. I can't give you any one name.
  • AV: Please discuss the Tufano/Gimmarese cover of "Kind of a Drag" in the mid-70s.CG: By that time, Dennis and I had been writing a lot of our own material. We went up to a production company called Nimbus 9 in Canada and recorded that album in Toronto. It was Dennis Tufano's idea. He just came up with this arrangement on the piano. He said, "Why don't we just slow the song down and see how it sounds?" It was just a fun thing to do. Most people didn't make a connection between us and the Buckinghams. We took the song and did it a new way. I think it was more fun for us, just because of people we knew and friends who loved to hear that song re-recorded.
  • AV: The group reformed in the early l980s. Please discuss this reformation.CG: I was contacted by John Guerin of WLS Radio in Chicago. They were sponsoring one of the stages of the Chicago Festival. This is a festival that was popular for a few years while Jane Berne was the mayor of Chicago. He said, "We're doing a revival stage. What are the chances of getting the Buckinghams back together?" My first reaction was---it can't happen! We hadn't played together in over ten years. It just didn't seem possible. I talked to Nick Fortuna about it who was the original bass player and to Dennis Tufano who was living in Los Angeles. Everybody, for some reason, felt that it might be fun to do. We got together and rehearsed in Chicago with a couple of other musicians for about a week. We went and did it and the response was overwhelming. We had the biggest crowd they ever had there. The audience was really great to us. It was just a great response and a feeling like it was great to be back.After we did that festival, the three of us (original members) got together every summer for several years. We did ten to twenty dates in the Chicago area in `81, `82, and `83. At that point, 60s music started to become very popular again. There was a demand for us to do dates. So I approached Dennis Tufano and Nick Fortuna about the idea. Nick wanted to do it, but Dennis had an acting career in Los Angeles and that forming together with the Buckinghams on a regular basis would pull him too far away from his acting career. Nick and I decided that it would still be a good thing to do based on the imput we had realizing that what the audiences really wanted was to hear the Buckinghams and 60s music. It didn't really matter who was in the band as long as there were some original members. So we went on in `84 to do about thirty-five dates that year in and around Chicago. A lot of people remembered us, but it was still like starting over again. It wasn't that easy. In `85, we were offered to go on "The Together" tour by the David Fishoff Production Company out of New York. He had a lot of success with the `84 "Happy Together" tour and he wanted The Buckinghams, the Turtles, the Grass Roots, Gary Lewis and the Playboys, and the Mamas and Papas. So we agreed to do it. We toured the whole country---about l8O dates in 150 different cities. We traveled 50,000 miles for seven months. We had a lot of success with it and that tour was responsible for throwing us back out there again. Last year we did about seventy-five to eighty dates on our own around the country. This year we'll do about 150 dates.
  • AV: Are you making more money than you did in the 60s?CG: Yes, we're definitely making more money than we did in the 60s. The difference is that the dollar isn't worth as much.
  • [Interview continues at http://av.cah.utexas.edu/index.php/Vorda:Da_00135]