After the Beatle's come to this country and break open the American market for British acts there's literally a flood of British acts that come on to the scene in this country. It's as if what people saw in the Beatles. Were a band of British guys with matching suits and these mop-top haircuts. And, since the British Invasion was in fact a kind of a fad, you know, like a slinky, or a mood ring, or a hula hoop. really any British group that, that, that looked kind of like, did kind of what the Beatles did, was good enough. and so all these groups were kind of lumped together as British invasion bands. Everybody had to have one, everybody had to sign one. This is not so different then what we talked about happening with Elvis Presley in 1956 when he signed to RCA. All of a sudden, which RCA, a major label, got into the game with Elvis Presley, the other labels felt like they had to find somebody too. So Decca signs Buddy Holly, Capital signs Gene Vincent, people like that. And so, what we find happening is all types of groups flooding in. Some of them are ultimately forgettable in the sense that we study them as part of the British invasion, they had hits at the time, but they really weren't able to sustain any careers after that. Others, of course continue to have success past the British invasion groups like The Who, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, somebody like Stevie Winwood and Spencer Davis the Yardbirds who eventually morphed into Led Zeppelin. These groups continued to have success but a lot of the others like Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Dave Clark Five the Freddie and the Dreamers. These are, these are groups that really are consigned to the oldies file, when you hear about their music. So really what these groups were about is is, is having the matching suits and haircuts,the obvious British accents but you can begin to divide these groups it just for organizational purposes into what we might call almost. We can divide them almost all of them this way. There will be a couple at the end of, of this sequence of videos that I'll talk about that don't quite fit the mold. But almost all of them can be divided into either Beatles type groups or Stones type groups. If they're Beatles types groups, the songs emphasize the song and the vocals. It's a smoother kind of performance. Maybe a lot more of vocal harmony, and a more sort of professional sound to the recording. If they're Stones type groups, there's more emphasis on a blues influence. Maybe the vocals are a little sort of grittier, and that kind of thing. And maybe the production values are not quite as as polished as the Beatles type groups. This is just sort of a general way of dividing these groups out. Of the Beatles type bands that we might talk about. There's Gerry and the Pacemakers, a group that was also from Liverpool. Also managed by Brian Epstein and also produced by George Martin. So they were in a stable of artists that Brian Epstein began to pull together after The Beatles first success. there's The Dave Clark Five a, a group that was run by the drummer, Dave Clark, who owned the rights to all the music and somewhere along, along the line decided that as the years went by he wasn't going to license that music to, to anthologies and to, and to collected hits collections and things like that. And so, go out and try and find a Dave Clark Five CD or record online. At least until at least a couple years ago last time I looked, I, I actually did find some but, It was very, very tough to do this because Dave Clark had basically pulled that music out of circulation. Why? I'm not quite sure, maybe he's waiting for something, who knows. anyway The Dave Clark Five were an interesting group because they were the group John Lennon was afraid was going to overtake The Beatles. In those early days it was always, who's going to eclipse The Beatles? Is it going to be this group, is it going to be that group, is it going to be this group? Nobody had the idea The Beatles were going to be as big as they were and John was afraid. That The Dave Clark Five that, that was the group that he respected and he thought was pretty good. It had something, it had something pretty special. Herman's Hermits was another one of these Beatles type groups, led by Peter Noone, who I don't know whether he purposely emphasized his accent, but when you, when you hear him sing Mrs. Brown You've Got A Lovely Daughter. Singing it as Mrs. Brown, you've got a lovely daughter, like that. It's really obvious that it's a British singer. and maybe that's just the way he would've done it anyway, but it seems to sort of play on the British-ness of the British invasion. Herman's Hermits' Peter Noone has often said, after they signed everybody else, they finally got to the bottom of the barrel, and we were them. The fact is those Herman's Hermits records stand up pretty well. And Peter Noone has gone on to have a pretty good singing career playing, you know, clubs and casinos and that kind of thing. Another group, Beatles type group, The Hollies featuring Graham Nash later of Crosby, Stills, Nash, sometimes with Young that had a big hit, a couple of big hits. Bus Stop was a big hit for them. But also a song called Carrie Anne. Which was actually a song about Mary Ann Faithful, who we mentioned earlier as having had a hit with As Time Goes By and having been the girlfriend of Mick Jagger. So they wrote a song, but they didn't have enough guts to call it Mary Ann, so they called it Carrie Anne, as if that obscured the meaning. Somehow and then another of the last of these Beatles type groups that I mentioned is Freddie and the Dreamers who really were gosh of of of very kind of strange group, I mean they really just had only the sort of minimal amount of, of ahm. requirement to be a British invasion group, the guy Freddie who was a lead singer, they, they had a song called Do the Freddie, I guess they were trying to create something like the twist of something and he would Do the Freddie and it was, it looks especially like a guy doing jumping jacks. So you've got this situation where they're on The Ed Sullivan Show and you've got these all guy, all these guys. Sort of looking like Beatles but the singer in the front, sort of with Buddy Holly horn-rim glasses, singing a song called Do the Freddy. And, sort of, doing jumping jacks and running across the stage. Anyway, I talk about things that, that, that, that didn't quite make a historical mark. that might of been one of them. But we can see where they came from. Other groups, Chad and Jeremy. Peter and Gordon. these are all sort of, think of these as Beatles type groups. Really sort of focused on the vocals. Focused on the song. but not a lot of rought edges in those. And then, against that, you've got groups that are Stones type groups. Now these Stones type groups influence by blues, it turns out that a lot of people who were members of these stones type groups end up having pretty good careers after the British Invasion, into the late sixties and certainly into the seventies and beyond. The best example of stones type groups of course is The Yardbirds, who as i mentioned before take over at the Crawdaddy Club And then are managed by Giorgio Gomelsky the first important guitarist in the group, though he wasn't strictly speaking. The first guitarist in the group, was Eric Clapton, who I mentioned before quit the group while they were recording, after they recorded the first single because it just was getting all too pop oriented. He went to work with John Mayall and the Blues Breakers. That was gave Eric Clapton the real sort of badge of authenticity that has been part of his career and his, his appeal ever since. He was replaced by Jeff Beck guitarist Jimmy Page came in first on bass when the bass player in the group quit. Jimmy Page had been a session musician was doing tons of sessions at the time but decided he wanted to be in a band. So first he went on bass, then they said why we've got Jimmy Page on bass, let's put him on guitar. So that was Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page on guitar. They were actually buddies, they had known each other for many years, but the competition, well that didn't work out. So Jeff Beck left the group and Jimmy Page left with the group stayed in the group. And he was sort of still the one left standing when everybody had quit the group and there were still some gigs left over that they need to. That they needed to do, as late as 1968, 1969, and so he got some people together this, this kid from the country Robert Plant, and a drummer that he knew, John Bonham, and another session musician he'd worked with during his studio days. John Paul Jones, who put the group together they were going to be called The New Yardbirds, but then they decided they would change the name to Led Zeppelin, and so you see The Yardbirds really give birth to Led Zeppelin, and that's another story for another day, part two of the history of rock. The Animals, another Stones type British band, although they weren't part of the London blues scene. im, important with Eric Burdon on lead vocals. when they did House of the Rising Sun with the electric guitar and the organ, apparently Dylan heard that, and that was one of the things that made him think, maybe he should use electric guitar more. That story we'll tell next week, when Dylan goes electric at the Newport Folk, Folk Festival in 1965. Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames. Not a group you hear much about, except that they had John McLaughlin, the famous guitarist in the group and Mitch Mitchell, who later ended up in the Jimmy Page, Jimmy Hendrix Experience. The Graham Bond Organization that also had John McLachlan for a time. Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, those two, Bruce and Baker who would team up with Clapton to form Cream later. The Zombies, a group the was run by Rob Argent who would later have a group in the 70's called simply Argent. Zoot Money's Big Roll Band featuring guitarist Andy Summers who would later emerge in the Police at the end of the 70's, going into the 80's. And the Spencer Davis group. Which featured a young Stevie Winwood. By young, I mean like teen-aged Stevie Winwood. And his voice, of all these groups, the Rolling Stones included. And all the Stones type British bands. his voice, Stevie Winwood's voice is the one that could most likely pass for actually being an African-American blues singer from the late 1950's. And what was funny was it came out of a skinny little teenage kid but there was that big voice on those Spencer Davis records. Maybe the other guy who could compete with him for this sort of sounding of authenticity would be somebody like Eric Burton. So, when we think about The Beatles. And The Stones, we can think about most of the other of these British invasion bands as either Beatles type or Stones type. And we have to be kind of liberal in the way that we distribute, we think about that because it's never going to work this categorization. But there's two groups. That no matter how we stretch it, no matter how we try and do it, we can't get to work into the, fit into these two categories. And those groups are The Kinks and The Who, and it's to those bands that we turn in the next video.
