Video from the Hollywood Palace TV show, with the great Fred Astaire as MC
You Were on my Mind/ Quality 1741x/ A&M 770/August 1965/ # 8 Chum Chart # 3 Billboard
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We Five were a quintet led by singer/guitarist/banjoist Mike Stewart, who also arranged most of the group’s music; Pete Fullerton (bass, vocals), Beverly Bivens (lead vocals), Bob Jones (six- and 12-string electric guitars, vocals), and Jerry Burgan (vocals, acoustic guitar) were the other members.
They were formed in Los Angeles in 1965, and were produced by Frank Werber, the Kingston Trio’s manager, no surprise since Mike Stewart was the brother of Kingston Trio member John Stewart.
Their original sound, as represented by their first album, stood midway between the music of the New Christy Minstrels and the Byrds. They were as prone to do show tunes as folk numbers, although limited as they were to five members, they didn’t have quite the same outsized arrangements on material like “My Favourite Things” (from The Sound of Music), Bernstein and Sondheim’s, “Tonight” (from West Side Story), and George Gershwin’s “I Got Plenty O’ Nothin’” (from Porgy and Bess).
They also had the good luck to pick up on a song written by Sylvia Fricker, of Ian & Sylvia, from their Northern Journey album, called “You Were on My Mind.” The song, released on A&M Records, became a monster hit during the 1965-66 folk-rock boom.
Bivens, in particular, shone well on this record, with a big voice slightly reminiscent of Judy Henske, and not very much like most of the female folkies of the era. On other songs, she could sound like a young Joan Baez, and elsewhere like Elaine “Spanky” McFarlane.
Their version of “You Were on My Mind” was later covered by Crispian St. Peters, an aspiring British singing star, whose own single eventually became a huge hit in England and a lesser one in America.
Unfortunately, the group proved to be barely more than one-hit wonders, without an adequate follow-up. They charted again in 1966 with “Let’s Get Together,” but that single only scraped the Top 40 before disappearing, despite being a fair version of the song, similar to the version by the original Jefferson Airplane.
Their second album, Make Someone Happy, showed the group trying for a harder, bluesier sound, but producer Werber had far less enthusiasm for the project, and by the time it finally came out, the group had split up.
Mike Stewart organized another version of We Five, and the reconstituted group survived until the end of the 1960s, cutting a new album, Catch the Wind, with covers of the Donovan tune, George Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun,” Gordon Lightfoot’s “Early Morning Rain,” and other contemporary compositions (including a John Stewart song), for Vault. By that time, however, there wasn’t much interest in their brand of music.
At various times We Five have reappeared in some version, playing the oldies circuit, with new players substituting for absent originals, but their actual history ended in 1967. Mike Stewart and Bob Jones later formed a short-lived group called West, and Stewart subsequently played with his brother John, and with Kenny Rankin, among others, while Pete Fullerton drifted in and out of the business during the late ’60s and early ’70s.
Michael Stewart appeared in occasional reunions with We Five from 1978 to 1989. He became a record producer (most notably for Billy Joel) and a pioneering developer of MIDI music software. He died on November 13, 2002 at age 57.[ Although his family initially reported that his death was the result of “a long illness”,Stewart in fact committed suicide, and his son Jamie (vocalist of the indie band Xiu Xiu) has occasionally discussed the event in both songs and interviews.In 2009, after many years of seclusion, Beverly Bivens sang at the opening of an exhibition, mounted by the Performing Arts Library & Museum in San Francisco, of the rock scene in the Bay area in the mid sixties to early seventies.
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