A Moment In Time: The British Invasion

This story starts in the United Kingdom...

""The British music industry was rigidly controlled by the BBC and London’s Denmark Street music publishers. A handful of powerful managers groomed a stable of homegrown singers in the mold of Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly. This clean-cut, nonthreatening lot included Tommy Steele, Cliff Richard, Adam Faith and Billy Fury — hardly household names stateside. On another front, however, a movement of musical purists, enamored of black American music, began replicating New Orleans-style jazz (a.k.a. trad jazz) and acoustic folk blues. This route would indirectly lead to the Beatles and an indigenous British rock & roll sound.  

One of the more promising offshoots of the trad-jazz movement was a simplified jug-band style of music known as skiffle. Britain’s premier skiffle artist was Lonnie Donegan. Singing in a nasal American twang, he enjoyed a run of hits in the late Fifties; he mostly covered songs by Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie. In fact, Donegan charted sizable hits over here in 1956 and 1961 with “Rock Island Line” and “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor (on the Bedpost Over Night)” — an early warning sign that England could successfully sell America reconstituted versions of its own music. Young Britons — like John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Richard Starkey, the future lineup of the Beatles — took note of this. Prior to skiffle, the only significant blip on the British pop-culture time line had been a brief flurry of juvenile delinquency occasioned by the arrival of Bill Haley’s 'Rock Around The Clock'." (Rolling Stone Magazine)

Liverpool, a seaside town in the UK, became the first hotbed of the so-called “beat boom.” With the Beatles, other exuberant male quartets such as the Searchers and Gerry and the Pacemakers plus the quintet Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas—launched Merseybeat, so named for the estuary that runs alongside Liverpool. Before anyone really knew what was happening the British Invasion exploded in 1963.

"What’s less remembered are the specifics of precisely what and whom this invasion encompassed. Today, the term the British Invasion is usually employed to describe (and market) the triumphal epoch of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Who, with honorable mentions to the Kinks and the Animals. In hindsight, and on merit, this sounds about right—these are the best and most revered of the English bands who came of age in the 1960s—but the reality of the British Invasion, which was at its most intense in the two years immediately following the Beatles’ landfall, was somewhat different. Far from being solely a beat-group explosion, the Invasion was a rather eclectic phenomenon that took in everything from Petula Clark’s lushly symphonic pop to Chad and Jeremy’s dulcet folk-schlock to the Yardbirds’ blues-rock rave-ups. And while the Beatles were unquestionably the movement’s instigators and dominant force, the Rolling Stones and the Who were, initially, among the least successful of the invaders—the former group struggling throughout ’64 to gain a foothold in America while the Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits, and even Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas vaulted ahead of them.

Nevertheless, The British Invasion was a very real phenomenon. Prior to 1964, only two British singles had ever topped Billboard’s Hot 100 chart—Acker Bilk’s Stranger on the Shore and the Tornadoes’ Telstar, both instrumentals—and between them they held the No. 1 spot for a total of four weeks. In the 1964–65 period, by contrast, British acts were at No. 1 for an astounding 56 weeks combined. In 1963 a mere three singles by British artists cracked the American Top 40. In 1964, 65 did, and in 1965, a further 68 did. Beyond all the statistics, the English musicians who came to America between 1964 and 1966 found themselves in the grip of a rampant, utterly unanticipated Anglophilia that made them irresistibly chic and sexy no matter what their background—London or Liverpool, middle class or working class, art school or tradesman’s apprentice, skiffle or trad jazz. Anything English and sufficiently youthful was embraced, exalted, fondled, and fainted over. This applied not only to the important bands whose music would stand the test of time, like the Beatles, the Stones, and the Kinks, but also to such confectioners of engaging period work as the Hollies and Herman’s Hermits, and to such one-hit wonders as Ian Whitcomb (You Turn Me On) and the dubiously named Nashville Teens (Tobacco Road). America lapped it all up, and the cultural exchange proved beneficial to both sides: the Brits, still very much in the throes of postwar privation, saw their nascent swinging youth culture further buttressed, their country abruptly transformed from black-and-white to color; the Americans, still very much in mourning for John F. Kennedy, were administered a needed dose of fun, and, thus re-invigorated, resumed the youthquake that had lapsed into dormancy when Elvis joined the army, Little Richard found God, and Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran met their makers." (Vanity Fair magazine)

"In October 1963, the first newspaper articles about the frenzy in England surrounding the Beatles appeared nationally in the US.[18] The Beatles' November 4 Royal Variety Performance in front of the Queen Mother sparked music industry and media interest in the group. During November, a number of major American print outlets and two network television evening programs published and broadcast stories on the phenomenon that became known as Beatlemania.

On December 10, CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite, looking for something positive to report, re-ran a Beatlemania story that originally aired on the November 22 edition of the CBS Morning News with Mike Wallace but was shelved that night because of the assassination of US President John Kennedy. After seeing the report, 15-year-old Marsha Albert of Silver Spring, Maryland, wrote a letter the following day to disc jockey Carroll James at radio station WWDC asking, 'Why can't we have music like that here in America?' On December 17 James had Miss Albert introduce I Want to Hold Your Hand live on the air. WWDC's phones lit up, and Washington, D.C., area record stores were flooded with requests for a record they did not have in stock. James sent the record to other disc jockeys around the country sparking similar reaction. On December 26, Capitol Records released the record three weeks ahead of schedule. The release of the record during a time when teenagers were on vacation helped spread Beatlemania in the US. On December 29, The Baltimore Sun, reflecting the dismissive view of most adults, editorialized, 'America had better take thought as to how it will deal with the invasion. Indeed a restrained 'Beatles go home' might be just the thing.' In the next year alone, the Beatles would have 30 different listings on the Hot 100." (Wikipedia)

 

 

 

"Rock swept Britain and by 1964 London could claim the Dave Clark Five, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, the Who, the Kinks, the Pretty Things, Dusty Springfield, tPeter and Gordon, Chad and Jeremy, and Manfred Mann. Manchester had the Hollies, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, Freddie and the Dreamers, and Herman’s Hermits. Newcastle had the Animals. And Birmingham had the Spencer Davis Group (featuring Steve Winwood) and the Moody Blues. Bands sprang up from Belfast (Them, with Van Morrison) to St. Albans (the Zombies), with more inventive artists arriving to keep the styles moving forward, including the Small Faces, the Move, the Creation, the Troggs, Donovan, the Walker Brothers, and John’s Children. While the beat boom provided Britons relief from the post-imperial humiliation of hand-me-down rock, the Beatles and their ilk brought the United States more than credible simulations. They arrived as foreign ambassadors, with distinctive accents (in conversation only; most of the groups sang in American), slang, fashions, and personalities. The Beatles’ first film, A Hard Day’s Night (1964), further painted England as the center of the (rock) universe. American media took the bait and made Carnaby Street, London’s trendy fashion center in the 1960s, a household name." (Encyclopedia Britannica) 

 

It wasn't very long before the sounds from England

began to affect music lovers in the USA.   

"What many young Americans in 1964 didn’t realize was that these new sounds coming from across the Atlantic weren’t new at all.  Many of the British Invasion bands and artists claimed America and its remarkably rich pop music tradition as their primary influence.  What made the re-invention of American music by the British acts so alluring was the fresh and innovative ways they interpreted it and then the manner by which they made it their own.  Coupled with intriguing accents, radically new fashion ideas and hairstyles, and a genuine artistic excellence, the British Invasion ignited a music renaissance in America and permanently and prominently established the U.K. on the rock & roll map." (Billboard magazine)

"Nineteen sixty-four belonged to the Beatles. From the moment 'I want to Hold Your Hand' was first played on an American radio station — WWDC, in Washington, D.C., in December of 1963 — the country fell under their spell. Preceded by a promotional campaign that included bumper stickers (The Beatles Are Coming! and Ringo For President), buttons (Be A Beatle Booster) and Beatle wigs — as well as tantalizing glimpses of their performances on Walter Cronkite’s newscast and The Jack Parr Show — the Beatles’ February 7th landing at New York’s Kennedy Airport generated an unprecedented fanfare. The group’s February 9th appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show drew a TV audience estimated at 70 million, the largest in the history of the medium." (Rolling Stone magazine)

 

Billy J. & The Dakotas

 

The Beatles success in America was followed by a flood of pop music bands from the UK.  One of the British artists that made a big impact was Billy J. & The Dakotas who were managed by Brian Epstein, the Beatles manager..  Having Epstein as their manager provided the Peter & Gordon with access to some unreleased Lennon-McCartney songs such as "Bad To Me" and "I'll Be On My Way".

One day, Peter Asher (who was the brother of Paul McCartney's girlfriend) heard McCartney complain that Billy Kramer didn't want to record one of their new songs, World Without Love.  Hearing this, Asher step forward and said, "Can Gordon and I record that song?" More singles followed from the Lennon / McCartney songbooks: Nobody I Know, I Don’t Want to See You Again and Woman; all of which made the Top Twenty. But even without McCartney’s help, Peter and Gordon reaped hits, with Del Shannon’s I Go to Pieces and a music-hall novelty titled Lady Godiva.

 

Peter & Gordon

Another British Invasion act that benefited from gaining access to several unreleased Lennon-McCartney songs were Peter & Gordon.  One day, Peter Asher (who was the brother of Paul McCartney's girlfriend) heard McCartney complain that Billy Kramer didn't want to record one of their new songs, "World Without Love".  Hearing this, Asher step forward and said, "Can Gordon and I record that song?" More singles followed from the same cask — “Nobody I Know,” “I Don’t Want to See You Again” and “Woman” — and all made the Top Twenty.

 

Even without McCartney’s help, Peter and Gordon reaped hits, with Del Shannon’s “I Go to Pieces” and a music-hall novelty titled “Lady Godiva.” 

Another popular British combo was The Searchers who were popular due to their sweet harmony vocals and crafty  guitar hooks. They were known for their cover versions of songs that were released by American pop artists; Love Potion Number Nine and Needles and Pins.

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Scads of would-be contenders were tapping their toes on the far side of the Atlantic, just waiting for a chance to show the Yanks a thing or two. The group that initially gave the Beatles the best run for their money was the Dave Clark Five, who hailed from London’s northern suburb of Tottenham. Although they placed a poor second to the Beatles, the DC5 racked up seventeen Top Forty hits between 1964 and 1967 — more than the Rolling Stones or any other British act during that span of years. By the time the Sixties rolled to a close, the DC5 had sold 70 million records worldwide.  

Because the band’s single Glad All Over unseated I Want to Hold Your Hand from its lengthy perch atop the British charts in January 1964, it was assumed for a while that the DC5 were neck and neck with the Beatles in the superstar sweepstakes. But they didn’t “progress,” in the sense of graduating from pop stars to poets, as the Beatles did. Nonetheless, the Dave Clark Five were what they were: a singles band, a dance band and one of the best.  

Meanwhile, Liverpool was teeming with an estimated 300 bands, and several performers under the aegis of Beatles manager Brian Epstein were having a field day. Gerry and the Pacemakers weren’t a very convincing rock band, but they had a solid way with ballads like “Ferry Cross the Mersey” and “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying.” Gerry’s star shone only dimly after 1965, but his hits are pleasant memories, and he’s notable for being the second act out of Liverpool (behind the Beatles) to crack the British charts." (Rolling Stone magazine)

 

"In the spring of 1964, San Bernardino had one place for rock shows: The Swing Auditorium on E Street. A 6,000 capacity dance hall that — before the Stones — hosted Bob Hope, Jack Benny, and other tamer acts until Bob Lewis came around. Lewis, now a retired concert promoter, had set up dozens of rock and roll shows in the Inland Empire already, but that spring he was approached by a couple investors looking to put on a concert on Friday, June 5, at the Swing. 

'Of course, they wanted the Beatles,' said Lewis. Which wasn't as crazy an idea back then as it seems now. He made a few calls to New York, but, no dice. The Beatles were all booked up and that was that. But word got around and about an hour later he got a call from Kevin Eggers, another talent agent who heard Lewis was looking to book a British band. 

'He said I've got an act coming to the states called the Rolling Stones. Never heard of em! Never heard of the Rolling Stones,' said Lewis. 'So I called the radio station, KMEN, the general manager. I said, 'Jerry, I've got an act coming in and I want to see what you think because I'd have to have their sponsorship.' So he repeated over the phone, "Rolling Stones" and his program director was walking by his office, and he said 'The Rolling Stones, they're really hot!'" 

The show was booked, and the Stones were on their way to make their US debut in San Bernardino, a city more famous today for its messy finances than its contributions to the arts. Bob Lewis says it wasn't always like that. 

At the time, the Rolling Stones weren't nearly as famous as they are now. They'd had a couple hit singles in the UK, all of them covers except for one original: a sunny and acoustic pop tune called 'Tell Me.'  Despite that, they still had a few loyal fans in the States. After all, this was the British invasion.

The band had just arrived in the states a few days earlier performing on Dean Martin's Hollywood Palace show. He wasn't impressed, and the only things rolling were Martin's eyes. 

 That Friday, the band arrived in San Bernardino.  The audience was 4,000 strong. After hours of waiting, at around 9:30, the Rolling Stones walked on stage, opening with a Buddy Holly cover. 

The room was hot. Mick danced. The girls screamed. Gastineau says the highlight of the band's set for her and other locals happened halfway through.  'The favorite song that they played was Route 66, because San Bernardino was mentioned in that song. 

The Rolling Stone's 11-song set at the Swing lasted just 20 minutes. 

'That was their total repertoire. That was it. They didn't rehearse a lot. After a 20 minute set, the show's over and the Stones did their London exit,' said Lewis. 'They just dropped their equipment, ran out and we had a school bus--we didn't have limousines then, we didn't have a budget for limousines! So we put them in a little yellow school bus that would get them in and out of town unnoticed, which worked.'

The Stones wrapped up that first tour with less than a dozen dates. While they may have been a hit in San Bernardino, the rest of the tour was by all accounts a failure: more awkward TV appearances followed, a couple of state fairs with indifferent audiences. The site where the Swing Auditorium once stood is a parking lot now." (www.scpr.org)

 

 

 

"The Stones got a delayed start in the U.S. They didn’t enter the fray in a major way until 1965. After warming up the Top Ten with Time Is on My Side and The Last Time, they delivered a knockout punch with (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction. Its central riff and basic lyrical thrust were created by guitarist Keith Richards one restless night in a Florida motel room. Recorded in Los Angeles, with Richards’ fuzz-cranked guitar blasting like the Stax-Volt horn section, Satisfaction remains one of the bedrock songs of the age. From here the Stones turned up the heat with numbers like Get Off of My Cloud19th Nervous Breakdown and Paint It Black. The music of the Rolling Stones was an ice-and-fire contrast to the Beatles. Simmering, blunt edged and angry, it set off the lads from Liverpool and their sunnier pop visions in a way that perfectly caught the spirit of the times. " (Rolling Stone Magazine)

 

"The Yardbirds, who inherited the Stones’ regular spot at London’s Crawdaddy Club, used their blues background as a launching pad for a series of experiments in futurist rock. They were the first British Invasion group to be recognized for the instrumental prowess of their guitarists — who were, in order of succession, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. They stretched the boundaries of pop, adding a harpsichord in For Your Love and a droning, sitar-style lead in Heart Full of Soul. But most Yardbirds fans climbed aboard for the raveups — extended instrumental breaks that served as showcases for Clapton, Beck and Page."  (Rolling Stone Magazine)

 

Whereas the Yardbirds were known for instrumental virtuosity, a couple of other rising London bands — the Kinks and the Who — established themselves through the force of their songwriting.

 

 

 

Among the many bands scrambling to make the charts, The Kinks' Ray Davies was, next to Lennon-McCartney, the most unique composer during the British Invasion.  His diverse songwriting ability was illustrated by his mastery of various genres; "You Really Got Me" (Hard Rock) and "A Well Respected Man" (British Life & Social Commentary).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Who (which happened to be my favorite band back in 1965) caught the attention of music fans with their auto-destruct stage antics which included the band destroying guitars, amps and drums along with setting off smoke bombs on stage.  Pete Townshend, the band's main songwriter, was an expert at capturing the true essence of teenage angst with such classic tunes as My Generation and  I Can't Explain.  While The Who were immensely popular in Europe, it wasn't until 1967 with the release of I Can See For Miles that the band made a major impact on the American charts.

 

 

 

Eric Burdon of the Animals, had a vocal style that made him sound decades wiser than his age. This alone enhanced such classic singles as We Gotta Get Out of This Place and It’s My Life

Manfred Mann who hit the charts with their 1964 chart topper, Do Wah Diddy Diddy, Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames (Yeh, Yeh) and the Nashville Teens (Tobacco Road) kept London jumping to a bohemian beat. 

 

From Belfast, Ireland, a band called Them, made the charts with Here Comes the Night, and another song called Gloria, which became popular with garage bands across the USA. Them’s lead singer was Van Morrison, who went solo in 1967 with his smash single, Brown Eyed Girl.

"The statistical high-water mark of the British Invasion fell only a month later, on June 18th, 1965. On that date, no fewer than fourteen records of British origin occupied the U.S. Top Forty. It was a record that stood until July 16th, 1983, when the second British Invasion — led by Duran Duran, Culture Club and the Police — landed eighteen hits on the chart. Ironically, during that historic week in the summer of 1965, the top seven positions all belonged to American acts. Herman’s Hermits (Wonderful World) and the Beatles (Ticket to Ride) nailed down Number Nine and Number Ten, respectively, while the rest of the British entries were scattered among the middle and lower reaches of the chart...  

...The Beatles continued to reign supreme in the second half of the Sixties, although the British Invasion, in the sense the term is commonly understood, had pretty much run its course by 1967. It was still the Beatles everyone tried to emulate or top, though the music, the audience and the rules of the game had changed markedly. The simmering down of Beatlemania after 1965 reflected the group’s loss of appetite for celebrity more than any waning of interest on the part of the public. With the release of Rubber Soul (December 1965) and Revolver (August 1966) and their decision to stop touring (they performed their last concert in San Francisco on August 29th, 1966), the Beatles moved into another phase. They were turning inward, and their music was greeted not with screams but with a more mature appreciation of the new places the Beatles were taking their audience." (Billboard Magazine) 

In the course of  my research for this blog post, I happened to come across this fascinating article that appeared in Vanity Fair:

"Here, a variety of figures who witnessed and participated in the British Invasion in the Beatles’ wake—musicians, managers, industry folk—recount the era as they experienced it, from its arrival in the form of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to its dénouement in the hairier, heavier year of 1967, by which time American bands had begun to redress the imbalance, and the pheromonal hysteria had worn off. 

 

Dave Clark (Drummer for the Dave Clark Five)

Of all the early Invasion acts, the Dave Clark Five, from the dismal North London neighborhood of Tottenham, were the most serious challengers to the Beatles’ supremacy—far more serious, initially, than the Rolling Stones, who were still playing blues and R&B covers on the U.K. circuit. 

Dave Clark: 'When people talk about my business acumen, I have to laugh. I left school when I was 15. My dad worked for the post office. Looking back, I think I was just streetwise.'  Clark, the band’s drummer and chief songwriter, was a preternaturally driven young jock, aspiring actor, and stuntman who had first organized his band to finance his youth soccer club’s trip to Holland for a tournament (which they won). He also managed the band and produced its records, securing a royalty rate exponentially higher than the Beatles’ and becoming a millionaire at 21. Clark attracted Ed Sullivan’s attention when Glad All Over, a No. 1 hit in the U.K., started climbing the U.S. charts, portending another Brit sensation.  

When Ed Sullivan first asked us to do his show, we were still semi-professional—the boys still had day jobs—and I said we wouldn’t go professional until we had two records in the top five. This was before Bits and Pieces. I turned him down, but then he offered us an incredible amount of money, so we came over. We did the show, and Sullivan liked us so much he said, 'I’m holding you over for next week.' But we were already booked in England for a sold-out show. I said we couldn’t do it. So he called me up to his office and said, 'I’ll buy the show out.'  

For some reason, without thinking, I said, 'Well, I don’t think I can stay in New York for the whole week.' And Sullivan said, 'Where do you want to go?' Well, on the way in from the airport, they had these billboards out, and one of them said, Montego Bay, Island Paradise. So I said to him, 'Montego Bay'—I’d never heard of it! And so we went to Montego Bay just for the week, all expenses paid. Went on the Monday and came back on the Friday, and there were 30,000 or 35,000 people waiting at the airport.

We’d get hundreds of girls leaving us hundreds of dolls and gifts in every city. And one of the gifts was a sheep. I didn’t have the heart to send it anywhere, so I took it back to the hotel suite. And we came back after the show, and it had chewed every credit card, every piece of furniture—we didn’t trash hotel suites, but the sheep did.

By that May, we were touring America, every show sold out, in our own private plane, which we leased from the Rockefellers. It had DC5 painted on the nose.'  

The Dave Clark Five’s tour was the first by an Invasion band, pre-dating even the Beatles’ first tour proper. With an innate grasp of the American marketplace and a gift for writing peppy, stadium-friendly stomp-alongs (the propulsive Bits and Pieces virtually invented glam rock), Clark scored seven straight Top 20 singles in the U.S. in 1964, and four more in ’65. His band also sold out 12 straight concerts in Carnegie Hall and, over the course of the 1960s, made 18 appearances on Ed Sullivan, more than any other rock group.  

Graham Nash: 'We fuckin’ hated the Dave Clark Five! They were just awful to us. They were snotty and they couldn’t play for shit. I mean, if you’re great, maybe you have the right to be a little stuck-up, but if you’re not great, fuck you and your attitude!'

Beyond the Dave Clark Five, the acts that broke early in the Invasion seemed to be those with Beatle associations, whether because they were fellow Liverpudlians, like the Searchers (Needles and PinsLove Potion No. 9); fellow clients of manager Brian Epstein and Gerry and the Pacemakers (Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying and Ferry Cross the Mersey).

Paul Jones (lead singer for Manfred Mann)

Manfred Mann’s song picker was its singer, the dreamy Paul Jones. The band, named after its bespectacled, Beatnik keyboardist, started out as a jazz combo but had little success. Enlisting Jones, they reconstituted themselves as an R&B outfit but still weren’t having much luck, prompting the singer to take them in a poppier direction.  

Do Wah Diddy Diddy had been written by Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, one of the hit-making teams that worked in Manhattan’s fabled Brill Building. But the Exciters’ version had done surprisingly little business in the U.S. Manfred Mann’s version, however, a future staple of sports-arena playlists, became another No. 1 for the British side in October of ’64.  

Paul Jones: 'I would avidly listen to the very few programs on British radio where you could hear American popular music. And every time I heard something that I lied, I would go to one of the very few record shops in London you could rely on to stock that stuff. And I heard this Do Wah Diddy, by the Exciters, and I thought, It’s a smash!  

I wanted to get over to America as fast as possible. And when some guy said, “There’s a tour with Peter and Gordon,” I said, “Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go!” And it was dreadfully arranged, in the depths of winter ’64-’65. When we got to New York, we played at the New York Academy of Music, and ticket sales were very poor indeed. So they decided that it would be necessary, at the last minute, to beef up the bill with some local talent. And of all the blind-blank stupidities, the local talent that they booked was the Exciters, who then sang “Do Wah Diddy” before we did.' 

Manfred Mann’s tour wasn’t a total washout, though. While the band was in Los Angeles, the ubiquitous scenester Kim Fowley witnessed what he deems a seminal event in music history: the first official campaign by a groupie to bed a rock star.  

Kim Fowley (producer / promoter)

Kim Fowley: 'Her name was Liz, with red hair and green eyes; she looked like a Gidget version of Maureen O’Hara. She was about 18 years old. She was the first girl who I ever saw walk into a hotel room for the express purpose of fucking a rock star. I was standing in the driveway, between the Continental Hyatt House and Ciro’s. I had just gotten out of a cab, and I was gonna go over to the hotel and welcome the guys. Then her cab came up. I said, 'Hey, Liz, what’s going on?' She said, 'Do you know Paul Jones in Manfred Mann?' I said, 'Yeah.' And she said, 'Well, I want to fuck him.' I said, 'Really? So what do you want me to do?' She said, 'I want you to drag me into their room and introduce me, so I can nail this guy.'  So we knock on the door, and they open the door, and I said, 'Paul Jones, here’s your date for the evening.' 

Paul Jones: 'I seem to remember that at the time there were lots of girls that made a beeline for groups—especially the singer. Look: the music was always the main thing for us. If I did get into debauchery, then I have to admit that girls were more likely to be the subject of it than drink. And drugs a poor third.'

The greatest of England’s song pickers in the Invasion era was Mickie Most, a former pop singer of middling achievement who’d made himself over as a Svengali-like producer. Unique among London music figures, Most was jetting off to New York even before the Beatles’ breakthrough, trawling the Brill Building music publishers for songs that he could turn into hits with the promising young groups he’d found, the Animals and Herman’s Hermits. 

 

Mickie Most (Producer)

Mickie Most: 'The previous generation of British pop artists, like Cliff Richard, Adam Faith, and Marty Wilde, were basically clones of the Americans, except that they didn’t have the ability to write. They used other people’s songs, normally covers of American records that had already been successful. So I designed a shortcut—go to America, to the publishing companies, and get the songs before they were recorded. When I’d find a band like Herman’s Hermits—I liked the band, but they didn’t have any tunes. So off I went to New York, and we found a song called I’m into Something Good, written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King. And the Animals, for instance—their first hit was House of the Rising Sun, which was an old folk song they were doing in their set; they weren’t writers. So We Gotta Get out of This PlaceDon’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, and It’s My Life—those tunes were all American songs which had never been recorded.  

The Animals, from Newcastle, were an earthy blues-R&B act fronted by Eric Burdon, a volatile, charismatic belter of small stature and serious intellect. Their slow, portentous version of House of the Rising Sun held the No. 1 spot for three weeks in September ’64, establishing them as rootsy heavyweights of the Invasion.  

 

Eric Burdon (lead singer of The Animals)

Eric Burdon: 'I still resent being lumped in with the British Invasion. That’s just not the way I saw music—to have our management look around for chewing-gum commercials. We weren’t bubblegum. I was fuckin’ serious about the blues. In one of my first journals, I made an incision into my arm and wrote the word “blues” in blood. It was a crusade.'

As the winter of ’64 progressed into spring and summer, the American charts were inundated with British product—not just the Beatles’ hastily issued ’62–’63 back catalogue (She Loves YouLove Me DoTwist and ShoutDo You Want to Know a SecretPlease Please Me), but singles by the Dave Clark Five, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, Peter and Gordon, Chad and Jeremy, Dusty Springfield, Cilla Black, the Animals, the Kinks, the Searchers, and Manfred Mann. With all these chart-storming acts came an attendant, and often ridiculous, American Anglophilia. 

Kim Fowley: 'There were three trade papers in those days, Billboard, Cashbox and Record World. All of a sudden, I Want to Hold Your Hand comes along, and it went straight to No. 1..America just laid there, spread its legs, and said, 'Come on in, guys. Come over and violate us with your Englishness.' Everybody suddenly wanted an English band, an English song, or something that could be sold or classified or categorized or manipulated into that area.'

 

Andrew Loog Oldham (Manager of the Rolling Stones)

"Andrew Oldham, just 20 years old in 1964, had already made a name for himself in England by embarking on a whistle-stop apprenticeship tour of early Swinging London, working brief stints for the designer Mary Quant, the jazz-club impresario Ronnie Scott, and the Beatles’ famous manager, Brian Epstein. The son of an American soldier who had been killed in World War II combat before Andrew was born and an Australian-born Englishwoman who concealed her Russian-Jewish background, Oldham gorged himself on American culture, became obsessed with Alexander Mackendrick’s quintessential New York film, The Sweet Smell of Success, and became one of Swinging London’s greatest self-inventions—an immaculately turned-out press manipulator who loved trouble, wore eyeliner, and, in Marianne Faithfull’s words, 'would say things you only hear in movies, like I can make you a star, and that’s just for starters, baby!’  At 19, Oldham took over the management of the Rollin’ Stones (as they were then known), a nice group of middle-class blues enthusiasts from the suburbs of London, and masterfully recast them as mystique-laden bad boys—scruffing them up, encouraging them to unleash their delinquencies, and stoking the newspapers with his infamous promotion Would you let your daughter marry a Stone? campaign. 

Andrew Loog Oldham: 'You sucked up America as energy, to get you out of the cold, gray, drab streets of London. Before global warming, I doubt that England had more than three sunny weeks a year. Which is one of the reasons that England fell in love with the Beach Boys, to a certain degree, more than America did.  America was not even a possibility for anybody before the Beatles. As a place to practice your business, it wasn’t even a consideration. Before the Beatles, what were the possibilities? 

 It should be remembered that the Dave Clark Five were the next God for more than a few minutes. In March and April of 1964, with “Glad All Over” and “Bits and Pieces,” they hit the U.S. Top 10 twice. “Glad All Over”? The Stones and I thought it was sad all over. London was as big as the world in those days, very territorial, and Dave Clark came from no-man’s-land, according to our New Wave elitism. But we did not laugh at his business acumen and ability to get it right in America. 

All the people that we would laugh at while we were backstage at Ready Steady Go!—Dave Clark, Herman’s Hermits, the Animals—they were having hits in America a long time before the Rolling Stones. Name anybody—even [the unforgivably glutinous Irish vocal trio] the Bachelors got to No. 10.

February ’64, when the Beatles came to America, it was a big Uh-Oh—no, a huge one. I was in a fuckin’ panic, man. All of my gifts were of absolutely no use to me. This was a country where you killed your president. I mean, c’mon, we’re turning up only six months after you’d popped Kennedy. That did have an effect on one.'

But, for all his bravado in England and his romance with America, Oldham never anticipated that he would actually have to try to crack the States.  The Stones arrived in the U.S. in June for a disastrous two-week tour that found them, at one juncture, playing four consecutive shows at the Texas State Fair in San Antonio.  

'Texas . . . [Sighs.] There was a swimming pool in front of us. With seals in it. Performing seals were on in the afternoon, in front of us. And Bobby Vee appearing in tennis shorts—forget the American Dream, now we’ve got the American nightmare. The tour was only 15 dates, but it was a hard slog, a lot of disappointment. You know, if the Beatles’ landing at J.F.K. was like something directed by Cecil B. DeMille, it looked as if Mel Brooks directed our entry.'  

The indignities piled on. Making their American TV debut on the ABC variety program The Hollywood Palace, the Stones were ritually abused by that week’s host, Dean Martin, who said of them, 'Their hair is not long—it’s just smaller foreheads and higher eyebrows.'  

Oldham did manage one coup on the Stones’ first trip, though, getting the group a recording session at Chess Studios in Chicago, where many of their blues idols had put down their most famous tracks.  

'I could not have them going back to England with long faces. So, as a compensation, I organized a recording session at Chess, where they could basically record at the shrine. That got us as far as It’s All Over Now, the Bobby Womack song . . . . . . the Stones’ cover of which squeaked into the American Top 40 in late summer ’64, peaking at No. 26 in mid-September—just as their nemesis, Martin, was enjoying his eighth week in the Top 10 with Everybody Loves Somebody.'

The early Stones were hardly the only British group whose repertoire consisted almost entirely of covers of American R&B singles. For bands who were not writing their own material, it was crucial to have a good song picker. The Searchers, from Liverpool, had one of the best in drummer Chris Curtis. 

Chris Curtis (Drummer for The Searchers)

 

Peter Noon (Herman's Hermits)

Herman’s Hermits were the perfect teen-dream band, acutely polite and forever dressed for school-picture day. Herman was actually Peter Noone, a relentlessly chipper, well-to-do boy from the suburbs of Manchester who had been a child actor on the English soap opera Coronation Street. He was barely 17 when I’m into Something Good became an American hit in the fall of 1964. Precocious and possessed of energy and political skills, Noone proved adept at ingratiating himself to the appropriate American media figures. 

Peter Noone: 'I made an alliance with Gloria Stavers, the editor of 16 magazine, because I knew that she was the most important person in rock ’n’ roll in America. She developed acts. If she liked what you represented—she liked Paul McCartney; she liked John Lennon—she made you look better. She would change your answers to make you look better.  And Ed Sullivan was charmed by Herman’s Hermits because I was a bit brighter than the average musician. He said, 'You’re a Catholic, aren’t you? Meet me tomorrow at Delmonico’s'—which I thought was a restaurant; he meant the building—'and come with me and my family to Mass.' It was a big honor. I showed up, suited up and everything, and genuflected in all the wrong places; I hadn’t been for about 10 years.  

There was a time when we were all staying at the City Squire hotel in New York—us, the Stones, and Tom Jones. Herman’s Hermits had just done Henry the VIII on The Ed Sullivan Show, and there were two or three thousand kids standing outside the hotel for us—it had been on the news. We went up on the roof—the Stones and Tom Jones too—and it must have made a big impact on the Stones, because they started to write pop tunes. No more of the blues stuff, Little Red Rooster—that was instantly gone. They went and started writing songs, ’cause they said, 'Look what happens when you make it in America.'

Noone’s politicking and Most’s production savvy paid off. Herman’s Hermits commenced a streak of five straight Top 5 hits, including the No. 1s Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter and I’m Henry VIII, I Am

 

As ’64 turned into ’65, the Invasion grew ever more literal, with British groups coming over in great numbers for package tours, New York variety showcases hosted by D.J. Murray “the K” Kaufman, and appearances on the various manic television programs that had arisen to cater to the hysterical-teen demographic: NBC’s Hullabaloo, ABC’s Shindig! and Where the Action Is, and the syndicated Hollywood A Go Go. Among the groups to visit were the Kinks, whose Ray Davies-written originals You Really Got Me and All Day and All of the Night were all over the radio; the Zombies, whose extraordinary debut single, She’s Not There, was the first self-written British No. 1 after the Beatles; the Yardbirds, who came to America with a new featured guitarist, Jeff Beck, because the old one, blues purist Eric Clapton, found the band’s hit For Your Love inexcusably poppy; the Hollies, who were having hits in England but who wouldn’t crack the U.S. Top 10 until ’66 and ’67 with Bus Stop and Carrie-Anne; and lesser acts like Nashville Teens, yet another Mickie Most discovery, who had a hit with a cover of John D. Loudermilk’s Tobacco Road, and Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, who went to No. 1 with the soulful The Game of Love

For young Brits abroad for the first time, America was at once a wondrous land of untold exotica

 

Dave Davies (lead guitarist, The Kinks)

Dave Davies: "On our first tour, I was surprised how old-fashioned Americans were. Ray and I grew up listening to Big Bill Broonzy and Hank Williams and the Ventures, all these really cool people. So before I went, I was in awe of America, thinking, We’re gonna go places where all these great people are, and we’re gonna listen to the radio and hear all this great music! And they didn’t play anything on the radio that was any good; it was all that poppy, croonery, 50s kind of stuff. I expected to hear Leadbelly on the radio—no one knew who he was! 

I said the word cunt on the radio in Boston once. The D.J. was talking like the Beatles, so I called him a cunt on the air. They closed the radio station down and dragged me out of the building." 

 

Rod Argent (of The Zombies)

Rod Argent: "We did the Murray the K Christmas Show at the Brooklyn Fox. It was Ben E. King and the Drifters, the Shangri-Las, Patti LaBelle and the Blue Belles, Dick and Deedee, and another English band, Nashville Teens. Headlining the show was Chuck Jackson. We started at 8 o’clock in the morning and did six or eight shows a day, until about 11 o’clock in the evening. Each act did a couple of songs—our hit and one other song—and then we would have to go to the back of the stage and sort of dance, almost like a very naff chorus line."

But, for all the bands who were chagrined at having to go the cornball route, there were those who embraced the opportunity. 

Gerry Marsden (Gerry & The Pacemakers)

Gerry Mardsen: "On Hullabaloo, I think I was in a hairdresser’s chair, singing I Like It while surrounded by a bevy of beauties. I found it great—bloody hell, to be on television in America, I would have shown me bum to get on!"

Chad and Jeremy, a harmony duo whose mellow, Kingston Trio-like sound on such hits as A Summer Song and Willow Weep for Me was as far away as could be from that of the Rolling Stones, were so Old Guard-friendly that they actually lived with Dean Martin for a short time. Jeremy Clyde was the Invasion’s one authentic English aristocrat, the grandson of the Duke of Wellington. Between his august lineage and his and Chad Stuart’s drama-school backgrounds, Hollywood could not keep its hands off the pair. They could sing; they could act; they had English accents; they had mop-top hair—they were TV-land’s official Invasion mascots. 

 

Jeremy Clyde (of Chad & Jeremy)

Jeremy Clyde: 'We were brought over to do the Hollywood Palace show as a sort of antidote to Ed Sullivan—'Well, he’s got the Beatles, so we’ll get Chad and Jeremy!' My parents knew Jeannie Martin, so we stayed with Dean and Jeannie and hung out with Dino, Deana, and Claudia. The house revolved around this great big wet bar. 

We were on tv shows; Batman and Patty Duke and The Dick Van Dyke Show. On Dick Van Dyke, we played a British band, and Rob and Laura Petrie kept them in their house for three days—actually, not unlike Dean and Jeannie Martin. On Batman, we did a double episode. We played ourselves, Chad and Jeremy. Catwoman stole our voices—Julie Newmar, who was gorgeous. As I remember, because Catwoman had stolen our voices, the amount of tax that Chad and Jeremy were paying to the British Exchequer would then be lost, and Britain would collapse as a world power. It was a Beatle joke, obviously.'

Like Chad and Jeremy, Freddie and the Dreamers were a clean-cut English group who, through the magic of American television and the sheer force of the Invasion, became much bigger in the U.S. than they were in their homeland. Freddie Garrity, a 26-year-old who’d shaved five years off his age to appear more youthquake-friendly, was an impish little fellow in Buddy Holly glasses whose trademark was a spasmodic leg-flailing dance that came to be known as the Freddie. 

Freddie Garrity (of Freddie & The Dreamers)

Freddie Garrity: 'We were really just a cabaret act. The Freddie dance was just an old routine—it depicted a farmer in a field kicking his feet out in the mud.' 

Freddie and the Dreamers’ chart placings were already in decline in England when, in 1965, Brian Epstein, moonlighting as the host of Hullabaloo’s London segment, showed a clip of the group performing its 1963 U.K. hit I’m Telling You Now. The clip proved so popular that the group was invited to Los Angeles to perform live on Hullabaloo.

Freddie Garrity: 'So we went on, did I’m Telling You Now, and the phones lit up. Policemen were doing the Freddie in the street. And the song shot to No. 1 in America . . .. . . which it hadn’t done even in Britain. Freddie-mania took such hold in America that Garrity’s record company hastily put together a follow-up single called Do the Freddie for him to sing (it reached No. 18), and on Hullabaloo such luminaries as Chuck Berry, the Four Seasons, Trini Lopez, Frankie Avalon, and Annette Funicello joined Garrity in doing the dance. Freddie and the Dreamers also embarked on a U.S. tour with two fellow Manchester bands, Herman’s Hermits and Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders. 

 

Ian Whitcomb (pop singer)

Another young Englishman unwittingly caught up in the slipstream of the Invasion was Ian Whitcomb, a wellborn boy who, while attending Trinity College in Dublin, had started up a band called Bluesville and secured a modest recording contract with Tower, a small subsidiary of Capitol Records. At the end of a Dublin recording session in which he’d committed to tape a protest song called No Tears for Johnny, he and his band played a boogie-woogie joke song they’d made up in which Whitcomb panted like a phone pervert and sang, in falsetto, C’mon now honey, you know you really turn me on.

Ian Whitcomb: 'I was brought across to New York in spring of ’65 by Tower Records. And, to my horror, the promotion man had a copy of the next release of mine, and it was called Turn On Song. I said, 'You’re not gonna release this! It’s supposed to No Tears for Johnny! I’m gonna be the next Dylan!” 

Conveniently, the British Invasion dovetailed with the sexual revolution, which made for plenty of post-show action for visiting English musicians. 

Peter Noone: 'I thought I was in love with every girl, and I was gonna get married. I never, ever took advantage of anybody. I didn’t know that they were groupies. I thought, What a nice girl! She likes me!' 

Freddy Garrity: 'It was difficult. I had a wife and a baby daughter. And all of a sudden you’ve got girls coming out of your ears! And, you know, I didn’t want to go deaf.'

Wayne Fontana (of Wayne Fontana & The Mindbenders)

 

Wayne Fontana: 'Oh, Freddie was the worst! Even though he was the funny one that jumped around—oh, what a lech! The group joined in—they hired film cameras and everything, so they could set movie scenes up in bedrooms.'

 

Cynthia Plaster Caster

Among the most famous of the early rock groupies was Cynthia Albritton, a shy Chicago teen who, for reasons she barely understood, found herself suddenly impelled to storm the hotels where visiting British musicians were staying. In time, she would make a name for herself, literally, as the groupie who made plaster casts of rock stars’ erect penises—she became Cynthia Plaster Caster. 

Cynthia Plaster Caster: 'I’d say the British Invasion made me what I am. It was the hysteria of Meet the Beatles that evolved into plaster-casting. When it happened, a lot of us were virgins. We would climb fire escapes—like 15, 20 stories—to get to the rock ’n’ roll floor, because the hotel security guards just didn’t allow girls in. They didn’t think it was proper.  I didn’t know what my goal was. I didn’t even know why I was drawn there. The guys were like magnets, and I didn’t know what I wanted at first. ’Cause I’d only made out with a boy or two before that.'

In time, though, Cynthia and her friends embraced overt naughtiness. 

Cynthia Plaster Caster: 'We discovered along the way this Cockney rhyming slang that only British bands seemed to know. So we learned all the dirty words that we could find out. Such as Hampton Wick, which rhymes with dick, and Charva, which meant fuck. I’m guessing it rhymed with larva. Maybe larva’s a sexual term, I don’t know—they didn’t go as far as telling me what it rhymes with. But it was a very popular word; we made a lot of contacts from that word. We actually wrote a note to somebody saying that we were the Charva Chapter of the Barclays bankers. And Barclays Bank rhymes with wank. 'Would you like to make a deposit? Would you like to make a nightly deposit? We have nightly banking hours'—that was it. This was for somebody in Gerry and the Pacemakers. And we didn’t even know what a wank was. We were still virgins. The end result was that two days later I got a long-distance phone call from the guy. And it transpired into him finding out very quickly that I didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about.'

The plaster-casting idea arose from Cynthia’s and her friends’ desire, having given the matter some consideration, to lose their virginity to British pop stars. Nervous about how to break the ice, Cynthia and company decided that asking musicians to submit to having their members coated in a viscous molding agent was the way to go. 

Eric Burdon: 'I was fascinated by the whole thing. They had a team, and one of them was a real expert at fellatio, and she was beautiful. They came with a wooden box and showed us all the equipment and everything.'

The problem was that, initially, Cynthia was not well schooled in the art of molding. 

Cynthia Plaster Caster: 'There was, like, a two-year period where we were dragging the casting-equipment suitcase around, not really knowing how to do it, just wanting to try it out, using it as shtick to get to the hotel rooms. We’d tell people, 'We need someone to experiment on. Would you like to help us experiment?' We’d get the pants down, and then, ultimately, they would put the make on us, and voilà—sex would happen. I think we encountered Eric Burdon during that time period. We were on an airplane with him, and we were gonna try aluminum foil, wrap it around his dick. That proved not to work. 

Eric Burdon: 'It was on a tour plane, and the engines were already running. And they had me in the bathroom and the plane was rocking backwards and forwards. They got as far as getting the plaster on. It wasn’t very comfortable, you know. I’m a romantic character—I have to have candles, music, and a bottle of wine.'

The British Invasion also ushered in a new kind of sex symbol—not the Brylcreemed, conventionally handsome pop idol of yore, but the skinny, spotty, often myopic, often dentally deficient Englishman whose magnetism derived from his Englishness and status as a musician. 

For all the fun that touring America entailed, there were some rocky moments for the invaders. Some were merely tempests in a teapot . . . 

Eric Burdon: "America was hotter than I expected it to be and colder than I ever imagined it would be, weatherwise and culturally. I went to the Stax Studio in Memphis one day and watched Sam and Dave cut “Hold On! I’m a Comin’,” and the next night, in the limousines on the way to the gig, we ran into the Ku Klux Klan on the streets. So one minute you were like, 'This is the new South! This is the new dream!,' and then the next minute the old world would just come and slap you upside the head.'

Petula Clark

 

More sure of herself was Petula Clark, who, at the time of her first U.S. smash, the winter ’65 No. 1 Downtown, was a trouper already in her third show-business incarnation—as a child she’d been an actress, England’s answer to Shirley Temple, and as a young woman she’d married a Frenchman, relocated to Paris, and had a second career as a French-singing chanteuse. 

Petula Clark: 'The first show I did live was The Ed Sullivan Show. I got there on the day of the show, which was unheard of. But I had a show in Paris on Saturday night, so I got there on Sunday just in time for the dress rehearsal, which was in front of a live audience. I was totally jet-lagged, no makeup, just enough time to throw on my funny little black dress, and they were playing my music—too fast, actually. I walked out onstage, my first time in front of an American audience, and before I’d sung a note, they stood up and cheered. It was extraordinary—that was the moment that I realized what this British Invasion really meant. And then I remember waking up in the hotel and hearing Downtown, thinking, Am I dreaming this? It was the St. Patrick’s Day Parade going up Fifth Avenue—the marching band was playing it."

 

Marianne Faithful

 

The most beguiling of the Invasion gals was Marianne Faithfull, an aristocratic beauty who was just 17 when Andrew Loog Oldham discovered her at a London party in March of 1964, pronouncing her 'an angel with big tits'. By Christmastime of that year, her single As Tears Go By had become the first original Mick Jagger / Keith Richards composition to crack the American Top 40. Though she was at the epicenter of the Swinging London scene—friends with Paul McCartney and Peter Asher, a visitor to Bob Dylan’s Savoy Hotel suite as chronicled in D. A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary, Don’t Look Back, affianced to bookstore and gallery owner John Dunbar—Faithfull was reluctant to plunge headlong into America to capitalize on her success. She had her reasons. 

Marianne Faithful: 'I was pregnant. So I got married to John Dunbar and had my baby. But, also, I was so young, I couldn’t quite get my head ’round going away to America for a long tour. A very sheltered little girl I was—I honestly did think I would be eaten alive in America. So I couldn’t imagine touring America, and maybe I was right. I did do Shindig!, and it was very weird. I was really beautiful, right? And they covered me in makeup, and put false eyelashes on me, and made me look like a tart—a fucking dolly bird!'

Still, Faithfull’s success augured the beginning of better times for the Rolling Stones. The group had secured its first U.S. Top 10 hit late in ’64 with yet another R&B cover, of Irma Thomas’s Time Is on My Side, but Oldham had already realized that for the Stones to compete they would have to start writing their own material. After a tentative start, Jagger and Richards, egged on by their manager, finally hit their stride in 1965. 

Andrew Loog Oldham: 'That was a hell of a process for two people who basically thought I was mad, telling them that they could write songs. My stance, as I was not a musician, was based on the simplicity of 'Hey—if you can fuckin’ play music, you can write it.' And they did. The Last Time was the first time they got into the Top 10 in May 1965 with a self-written song. And then the record after that was Satisfaction which was a No. 1 in the summer of ’65, to be followed by Get off of My Cloud, to be followed by 19th Nervous Breakdown, to be followed by Paint It, Black, and so on. The Rolling Stones were at last the Rolling Stones.'

Another significant development of ’65 was the emergence of Invasion-inspired American bands. Back in ’64, the future members of the Byrds, all folkies, had bonded over their mutual love of the Beatles—a bold stance in the severe, smoky environs of hootenanny-land. 

 

Chris Hillman: 'I was a bluegrass mandolin player before I was in the Byrds, and I’d cross paths with David Crosby and Jim McGuinn, as Roger was then known, at this folk club in L.A., the Troubadour. So one night I’m down there with my bluegrass group to play open-mike night, and Jim McGuinn gets up. His hair is a little funnier, it’s starting to grow out, and he’s doing I Want to Hold Your Hand on an acoustic 12-string! And I’m going, 'What the hell is that?' 

Roger McGuinn: 'I was working for Bobby Darin in New York, working in the Brill Building as a songwriter, and he was a mentor to me. He said, 'You ought to get back into rock ’n’ roll,” because I was influenced by Elvis Presley originally. So I would go down to the Village and play these sort of souped-up folk songs with a Beatle beat. Then I got a gig at the Troubadour in California and did the same thing. Of course, it didn’t go over well—it was like Dylan at Newport. They were antagonistic, and I got the freeze, and they’d talk and talk over my set. Except Gene Clark was in the audience and was a Beatles fan, and he liked what I was doing. So we decided to form a duo around that, and then Crosby came in a few days later. 

David Crosby: 'Roger and I and Gene Clark all went to see A Hard Day’s Night together. I was, like, spinning around the stop-sign poles, thinking I’d just seen my life’s work. We started growing our hair right away. We learned how to manipulate a dryer and a comb pretty quickly."

Soon enough, the Byrds were holding their own during the Invasion with their jingle-jangle No. 1's Mr. Tambourine Man and Turn! Turn! Turn!.

Meeting one’s heroes was a big part of the American experience for Invasion acts and meeting one’s black heroes, however, was fraught with difficulties, especially given the British artists’ obvious debt to American R&B.

The One & Only Chuck Berry

Eric Burdon: 'The agent would say, 'Well, boys, I got you on a Chuck Berry tour in the U.S. And guess what? You’re the fuckin’ headliners.' What? We were headlining above these guys who I’d worshiped since I was 14. Chuck was really nice to me. I’ve heard a lot about how nasty Chuck can be, and how difficult he can be to work with, but I showed some interest in his feelings, knew all his records, and told him that I thought he was America’s poet laureate. He was embarrassed, I think, but he was kind enough to take me to dinner, sit me down, and say, 'Look—stay away from booze and drugs, you know, and keep your money in your sock.' 

 

The One & Only Bob Dylan

Resolutely unimpressed by the Brit parade was Bob Dylan, who, though gracious enough a host to introduce both the Beatles and Marianne Faithfull to marijuana when they visited New York, was otherwise disdainful. 

Marianne FaithfuI: 'I don’t think Bob’s ever thought much of the British Invasion. What I do know is how he treated people in London, all those who came to worship at the shrine. He felt that he was much, much, much, highly superior. I think he was really irritated that I wouldn’t run away with him to America, or whatever it was he wanted. And then I went off with bloody Mick Jagger! I can see what he means, quite frankly.' 

By 1966 and 1967, there was a palpable shift under way in music, from pop to rock. The vestigial flourishes of 50s showbiz began to fall away, endangering the more clean-cut Invasion acts like Freddie and the Dreamers, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and Chad and Jeremy. 

Jeremy Clyde: 'For us, I think it lasted about two years, ’64 to ’66, and then the girls stopped screaming. And we wanted them to stop screaming, because it was annoying, actually. Chad and I tried all kinds of things. We did a two-man show and took it ’round colleges—bits of drama, mime, and songs, very mixed-media. And then people started to re-invent popular music, and it all became very serious and, in quite a lot of cases, certainly ours, pretentious.'

 

The Yardbirds

This should have been the moment for the Yardbirds, who, with their instrumental virtuosity and futuristic original compositions such as Shapes of Things and Over Under Sideways Down, were poised for greatness. But they proved too volatile to last, as Simon Napier-Bell, who took over their management from Giorgio Gomelsky, found out.

Before the group’s 1966 U.S. tour, Paul Samwell-Smith, their bassist and driving musical force, quit. Jeff Beck recommended that they draft in his guitarist friend Jimmy Page on bass. 

Simon Napier Bell: 'The Yardbirds were a miserable bunch. They were always arguing, bickering, and they weren’t fun.  After three days, Jimmy said, 'I think I should play guitar.' And then [rhythm-guitarist] Chris Dreja had to play bass. It was sensational, but, of course, Jeff no longer was getting 100 percent of the credit for his own solos, ’cause he was playing them with Jimmy, and Jimmy wasn’t getting any credit, ’cause everybody knew they were Jeff’s solos. So both of them were pretty dissatisfied. You could see it was just gonna get sourer and sourer, and on the American tour Jeff just walked out.'

Jim McCarty (drummer for the Yardbirds): 'There was a bit of competition going on, ’cause they’d follow each other playing solos, and try and outdo each other, and maybe play at the same time. Sometimes it sounded good, but not very often. But I think Jeff just got stressed out. We were on this dreadful Dick Clark Caravan of Stars tour, and it was the totally wrong sort of thing for us—Gary Lewis and the Playboys, Sam the Sham, Brian Hyland, all these really straight American acts. We’d play in some of these little southern towns, and they’d shout, 'Turn the guitars down, you’re too loud!' Jeff just blew his top, smashed his guitar up in the dressing room, and disappeared.' 

 

 

 

 

Another band to break on the later end of the Invasion, in 1967, was the Spencer Davis Group, whose Top 10 hits Gimme Some Lovin and I’m a Man featured the uncannily black sounding vocals of Steve Winwood, a white, 17-year-old Birmingham boy. The group, named after its founder-guitarist, had actually been knocking around for a while, with two U.K. No. 1s already to its credit. 

Spencer Davis: 'We had a kind of cult status in America, with the young Winwood prodigy, Little Stevie—a name he hated with a passion. In respect to why we were late in having hits, we weren’t really a pop group. A lot of groups—Manfred Mann, Stones, Animals—weren’t pop, but went pop for a minute to have a hit and then went back to what they were doing. For us, the hits came when there was a better climate for rhythm and blues.' 

The only trouble was that the Spencer Davis Group, like the Yardbirds, couldn’t keep its hit-making lineup together. 

Spencer Davis: 'We didn’t quite invade as a complete unit. When we recorded Gimme Some Lovin’, the band was already splitting. Steve was going into Traffic with Dave Mason. We ended up going to New York in 1967 with a new singer, Eddie Hardin. Elton John had shown up as Reggie Dwight for the audition, wearing a milkman’s outfit, and we didn’t think that was cool.'

A lot of the Invasion groups were beginning to splinter or close up shop, either outpaced by musical currents or eager to try new styles with new colleagues. Eric Burdon organized a new lineup of the Animals. The Jeff Beck less Yardbirds carried on briefly before packing it in, prompting their remaining guitarist to form the New Yardbirds, soon to be known as Led Zeppelin.

The increasingly psychedelicized Graham Nash was growing disenchanted with the Hollies and more interested in hanging out with his friends David Crosby from the Byrds and Stephen Stills from Buffalo Springfield. 

Graham Nash: 'I realized that I was drifting far away from the Hollies. And then, when they didn’t want to do Marrakesh Express or Teach Your Children, I said, 'I’m done.'

 

For London’s The Who, the tail end of the British Invasion was just the beginning. In 1965 and ’66, they were already a massive success in England with their mod anthems I Can’t ExplainMy Generation, and The Kids Are Alright. Their single Anyway Anyhow Anywhere had been adopted as Ready Steady Go!’s theme song, and their volcanic live act was thought to be the U.K.’s greatest. But they didn’t make so much as a dent in the American charts. Part of the reason for this was that their managers, Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, were film producers making their first foray into the music business. 

 

Chris Stamp: 'We signed in America with a company called Decca, which we thought was the same as the English Decca, which was the second-biggest label in England. In fact, American Decca was utterly unrelated, an old-fashioned label that released Bing Crosby, “White Christmas” sort of stuff. They were Sinatra guys—they didn’t know rock ’n’ roll, didn’t even like it. Well, there was a natural outbreak of Who fans somewhere in Michigan with I Can’t Explain, and the next record was Anyway Anyhow Anywhere. And this company, Decca, sent it back to me, because they thought there was something wrong with the tape, because of the sounds the Who were making. We think of those songs now as pop, but, you know, they weren’t Herman’s Hermits. My Generation had stutters in it; it had feedback.'

Lambert and Stamp were desperate to break the Who in America, no matter what it took. Kit Lambert was a total eccentric, very upper-class, very upper-crust. And we didn’t know till afterwards that he was selling the family silver, pawning the cuff links his dad had given him, to bankroll the Who.. 

Stamp, who was in charge of the Who’s American campaign, caught a break when his brother, the quintessential Swinging London actor Terence Stamp, was going off to the U.S. on a promotional junket. 

Chris Stamp: 'The first time I got over to New York, I got over because my brother had a premiere of a film called The Collector, and he was coming over to do Johnny Carson and promote the film. He exchanged his studio first-class ticket for two economy class tickets, and I came over with him and stayed in his hotel room for three days while he was doing all this stuff.'

Stamp managed to make the acquaintance of promoter Frank Barsalona, whose firm, Premier Talent, had developed a reputation as the best of the booking agents for British groups. One of Barsalona’s star clients at the time, Mitch Ryder, was from Detroit, the one place where the Who had an American fan base. Ryder, an early champion of the Who, had gotten his big break in 1965 playing one of Murray the K’s 10-day multi-act shows, and in gratitude had promised to come back whenever Murray Kaufman beckoned. 

 

Frank Barsalona 

 

Frank Barsalona: 'Well, of course, a year and a half later, Mitch was really happening, and Murray, of course, wanted him to headline his Easter show. And Mitch called me and said, 'Frank, that’s 10 days, five shows a day. I can’t do that.' 

Barsalona, in an effort to extricate Ryder from this situation, tried to sour Kaufman on Ryder by making a series of absurd demands, such as having Ryder’s dressing room done up entirely in blue, from the walls to the carpet to the curtains. 

Frank Barsalona: 'Murray kept saying yes to everything. So then the last thing I said was 'Look, Mitch has this thing about this British act called the Who, and he would like them on the show.' Murray said, 'They don’t mean anything.' I said, 'Murray, that’s what I’m saying. So why don’t we forget about Mitch?' Then Murray said, 'I’m not going to forget about Mitch!' so I said, 'Well, then you have to put the Who up in the show.' 

 

Murray the K with The Who

In such a fashion did the Who secure its first American engagement, as a support act, along with Eric Clapton’s new group, Cream, in Murray the K’s 1967 Easter show at the RKO 58th Street Theater in New York. 

Frank Barsalona: 'I had never seen the Who live, and I thought, Oh my God, I’m going to screw myself over! I went to the dress rehearsal with my wife, June, and I said, 'You know, June, they’re not bad at all.' And then Pete Townshend starts smashing his guitar to pieces, and Roger Daltrey is destroying the microphone, and Keith Moon is kicking over the drums. I said, 'June, do you think this is part of the act?' 

Chris Stamp: 'Murray the K was still doing these old-fashioned shows in Brooklyn where the act came on, sang their hit, and walked off. So we had to compromise—we stretched it out, I think, to about four songs. The Who would come on; do, like, I Can’t Explain and some other song; and finish up with My Generation and smash their equipment. Normally, the smashing came about of its own volition—it wasn’t meant to be a showbiz thing. But in the Murray the K thing, it tended to be slightly that. Although Pete was just as angry, I suppose, about having to do only four songs. 

 

Naturally, the Who stole the Murray The K show, and their reputation grew to the point that by June of ’67 they were one of the major attractions of the Monterey Pop Festival in California, a three-day event that effectively brought down the curtain on chirpy, well-groomed, besuited 60s pop—and, therefore, the phenomenon known as the British Invasion."  (Dave Kamp, Vanity Fair 2002)


 

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