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| My fantasy of the Red Velvet.... |
The Hit
1966’s “Lies,” which sounds a lot like The Beatles precisely because The Knickerbockers lifted the guitar, chord progressions and all, on one of their songs and dropped the word “Lies” after it. They are not remotely shy about copping to it either.
The Rest of the Story
The band’s core came together in the early-1960s around two brothers, Beau and John Charles (born Robert and John Carlos Cecchino), in Bergenfield, New Jersey, a town north and west of Manhattan. Buddy Randall (born William Crandall) added a third member and a saxophone to Beau’s guitar and John’s bass when he came over from another band, The Royal Teens (famous for “Short Shorts"). Their drummer, Jimmy Walker, found them performing at an outdoor Memorial Day event (for a fire department, maybe, or they just hijacked a parking lot), and he decided he’d make a good fit as their drummer. When the rest of the band auditioned him, his drumming impressed them less (or Beau Charles’ mom) than his singing voice (“Hire that guy,” she said, “he does sound good.”). Even though Walker came over from another band called The Castle Kings – who had done recordings with Ahmet Ertegun and (holy shit) Phil Spector that went nowhere – he wasn’t the polished product. In interviews, he recalls taking pointers from Randall and others on the art of drumming.
The Knickerbocker’s big break came when the newly-minted East-coast rep for Challenge/Four Star Records, Jerry Fuller, spotted them at the University Swing Palace in Albany, New York. While they’d started with early rock ‘n’ roll – e.g., Elvis, Sam Perkins, and so on – The Knickerbockers learned Meet The Beatles start to finish during that residency and developed that into a repertoire. They knew their way around their instruments well enough to learn just about any song, and they built their success around mimicking. According to Walker (the living member with the greatest ongoing media availability), Fuller bought in when they played a song he suggested, but wasn't even sure they knew (Johnny Mathis’ “Misty”) with musicians’ flair. Fuller signed the band, produced “Lies,” a song the band had written during that upstate residency, as well as a couple near-misses (e.g., “One Track Mind” instead of their preferred “Just One Girl”) and moved The Knickerbockers to Los Angeles. Their story picks up here.
With a hit single under their belts, The Knickerbockers picked up steady gigs at a venue called the Red Velvet, an off-the-radar spot where actors and musicians gathered after time on the set of Shindig, and they spent just shy of a year as regulars on Dick Clark’s Where the Action Is. (A place called The Pancake House is involved as well, but mostly as another celebrity and semi-celebrity hang-out.) They also went on a couple of the Dick Clark package tours that typified the early(-ish) rock era, something they loved and hated in equal parts. But the meat of the stories about The Knickerbockers happened in LA, where they spent years mimicking popular bands, sometimes with members of those bands in the audience, much like they’d done with The Beatles. They impressed some of your harder to impress artists too:
1966’s “Lies,” which sounds a lot like The Beatles precisely because The Knickerbockers lifted the guitar, chord progressions and all, on one of their songs and dropped the word “Lies” after it. They are not remotely shy about copping to it either.
The Rest of the Story
The band’s core came together in the early-1960s around two brothers, Beau and John Charles (born Robert and John Carlos Cecchino), in Bergenfield, New Jersey, a town north and west of Manhattan. Buddy Randall (born William Crandall) added a third member and a saxophone to Beau’s guitar and John’s bass when he came over from another band, The Royal Teens (famous for “Short Shorts"). Their drummer, Jimmy Walker, found them performing at an outdoor Memorial Day event (for a fire department, maybe, or they just hijacked a parking lot), and he decided he’d make a good fit as their drummer. When the rest of the band auditioned him, his drumming impressed them less (or Beau Charles’ mom) than his singing voice (“Hire that guy,” she said, “he does sound good.”). Even though Walker came over from another band called The Castle Kings – who had done recordings with Ahmet Ertegun and (holy shit) Phil Spector that went nowhere – he wasn’t the polished product. In interviews, he recalls taking pointers from Randall and others on the art of drumming.
The Knickerbocker’s big break came when the newly-minted East-coast rep for Challenge/Four Star Records, Jerry Fuller, spotted them at the University Swing Palace in Albany, New York. While they’d started with early rock ‘n’ roll – e.g., Elvis, Sam Perkins, and so on – The Knickerbockers learned Meet The Beatles start to finish during that residency and developed that into a repertoire. They knew their way around their instruments well enough to learn just about any song, and they built their success around mimicking. According to Walker (the living member with the greatest ongoing media availability), Fuller bought in when they played a song he suggested, but wasn't even sure they knew (Johnny Mathis’ “Misty”) with musicians’ flair. Fuller signed the band, produced “Lies,” a song the band had written during that upstate residency, as well as a couple near-misses (e.g., “One Track Mind” instead of their preferred “Just One Girl”) and moved The Knickerbockers to Los Angeles. Their story picks up here.
With a hit single under their belts, The Knickerbockers picked up steady gigs at a venue called the Red Velvet, an off-the-radar spot where actors and musicians gathered after time on the set of Shindig, and they spent just shy of a year as regulars on Dick Clark’s Where the Action Is. (A place called The Pancake House is involved as well, but mostly as another celebrity and semi-celebrity hang-out.) They also went on a couple of the Dick Clark package tours that typified the early(-ish) rock era, something they loved and hated in equal parts. But the meat of the stories about The Knickerbockers happened in LA, where they spent years mimicking popular bands, sometimes with members of those bands in the audience, much like they’d done with The Beatles. They impressed some of your harder to impress artists too:
“Brian Wilson told me one night we sounded better than them doing them. I thought that was the greatest compliment I’ve ever received” (I put “Bite Bite Barracuda” on the sampler for a reason.)
In the big picture, that’s what came to define The Knickerbockers – e.g., sounding like other bands. As Wikipedia’s entry put it:
“Throughout The Knickerbockers' three years of recordings, the group tirelessly pursued current trends.”
While they got only so much out of it, they were wired to the scene at the time; they can name-drop some very famous bands - e.g., The Lovin’ Spoonful, The Young Rascals, The Byrds, The Turtles - as acquaintances, and even friends. Also, their mimicking paid off, at least for Walker, who would later get invited to join The Righteous Brothers for a few years thanks to them seeing him perform their songs. They had more…moments besides, e.g,. featuring in the third movie in the short career of Lenny Weinrib (following Beach Ball and Wild Wild Winter), a spy parody called Out of Sight, lead by “a variety of Universal contract players,” and written by a cast member from Hogan’s Heroes (Larry Hovis), and featuring an all-woman hit-squad comprised of “Scuba, Tuff Bod, and Wipe out.”
The Knickerbockers’ falling apart might be the most outlandish story about them. For instance, this is how Walker remembers Randall leaving the band:
“After we had ‘Lies’ and after we had toured a lot, we were kind of looking for another record company but we were stuck with Challenge. They would not let us go, it was a mess. Buddy got into using substances and one night he didn’t show up to work. We were playing a place out in the Valley called the Rag Doll. We played the first set without him and I called his home. His wife said, ‘Oh yeah, he left about an hour ago,’ and we said, ‘Hmm… that’s weird!’ He never showed up and I didn’t see Buddy again for years, until after I joined the Righteous Brothers. He just skipped out of town and left everybody.”
To be clear, he was not alone:
“Also, you have to remember Beau had spoken to me in a coffee shop in Seattle while we were on the road, about seriously considering leaving the band. He wanted to just quit playing for a while. So he was not up and full of energy like he was anymore, he wasn’t happy.”
Even without members walking out, Walker acknowledges the band “lost their way,” something that could easily translate to, they were a cover band talented enough to impress Brian Wilson, but there wasn’t a lot after that. Apart from occasional reunions (even more occasional after Randall’s death), their catalog is the only thing that keeps The Knickerbockers hanging around - that and the single that made them famous.
A Bigger Taste
The Knickerbockers would struggle for traction and relevance from the post-“Lies” era to the end of their career – i.e., the same period where I found them (whether accurately or not) most interesting. That has a lot to do with how much Walker talked up their talents as mimics. I wouldn’t call (for instance) “Guaranteed Satisfaction” or “As a Matter of Fact” better songs than their Beatles’ knock-offs, but I do like both songs better than their Beatles material. They recorded a couple real outliers to boot, whether the hippy-esque “Sweet Green Fields,” or the still further outlier “Harlem Nocturne.” The more I listened to The Knickerbockers, the more I heard a band with more talent than ideas.
To round out the rest of the playlist, I tried to mix up the stuff from The Knickerbockers’ Beatles-borrowed hey-day – e.g., “She Said Goodbye” and “Stick with Me” – with the songs that I either, 1) liked better (e.g., the demo for “High on Love”), or the stuff that showed some measure of desperation (e.g., “Rumors, Gossip, Words Untrue” (Byrds, anyone?) the straight-hokey “The Pad and How to Use It.” I also included a couple tracks from a Charles brothers project called Lodi, “Happiness” and “I Hope to See It in my Lifetime”). The larger point is that, yes, all that stuff is derivative, but most of it is non-terrible. All in all, you could do worse than to give The Knickerbockers a shot. Just don't expect a revelation.
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