Beverly Bivens

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Beverly Bivens in 1965

Beverly (Bev) Bivens was lead singer with the American West Coast folk-rock group We Five from 1965-7.

We Five

Beverly Bivens was born in Santa Ana, California and educated at Santa Ana High School (attended also by Bill Medley of the Righteous Brothers, as well as members of the Chantays and actress Diane Keaton, who frequently broke the rules on dress) and Orange Coast Junior College. In 1964 she began singing with Jerry Burgan and Mike Stewart (1945-2002), who had formed a folk duo at high school and branched out into electronic music with guitarist Bob Jones, whom they met at the University of San Francisco. With the addition of Pete Fullerton, this group, initially called the Ridgerunners and, for a while, the Mike Stewart Quintet, became known as We Five. They recorded their first album, the highly eclectic You Were on My Mind, for A&M records in 1965 after Herb Alpert, founder of A&M, heard them in a San Francisco folk club.

You Were On My Mind LP: We Five, 1965

You Were on My Mind

A distinctive version of Sylvia Fricker's song You Were On My Mind was We Five's first “single”, reaching number three in the Billboard "Hot 100" in August 1965. It was also A&M's first "hit" record that was not made by Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass. Fricker appears to have been unaware that her song, which she recorded herself with Ian Peters (as Ian and Sylvia) in 1964, had been "covered" until she heard We Five's version when she was driving on Highway 101. She took exception to their having altered - in effect, cleaned up - some the lyrics, but recognised that this improved the chances its being played on the radio . A few weeks after recording this song, We Five performed it live on the ABC television show The Hollywood Palace, on which they were introduced by guest compère Fred Astaire.

A further single in 1965, Chet Powers' Let's Get Together was a more modest commercial success, reaching number 31 in the chart. We Five have sometimes been referred to as "one hit wonders", a description which, though technically accurate in terms of the US "top 20", tends to belie the group's credentials and influence .

Influence

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Beverly Bivens in KYA Beat, 23 October 1965

Bivens' voice was what gave We Five its distinctive and memorable sound. Almost operatic in quality, its range was described as low tenor to high soprano. Bivens' performances on You Were On My Mind and in concert largely foreshadowed a female vocal style that, by 1966-7, was associated with, among others, Elaine "Spanky" McFarlane, Grace Slick of the Great Society and Jefferson Airplane, and Cass Elliot and Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and Papas. Bivens was said to have inspired Jefferson Airplane's original vocalist Signe Toly Anderson. It may be no coincidence either that Karen Carpenter who, like Bivens, had a fine vocal range, was signed by Alpert to A&M, with her brother Richard, in 1969.

Bivens' influence was apparent too in recordings by some male bands: for example, the Turtles' single Happy Together and the Cowsills' The Rain, the Park and Other Things (both major hits in 1967). In 2002, the British newspaper The Independent described We Five as having "bridged the gap" between Peter, Paul and Mary and the Mamas and Papas ; indeed, Bivens' voice and that of Mary Travers had a similar atmospheric quality, although Bivens' was the more commanding.

Images and personal style

In 1965 Bivens' personal interests were said to be fashions, Chinese food and freedom. As regards fashion, photographs show her wearing dresses whose hemlines were well above the knee in 1965, at a time when the mini-skirt, which, in England, became a defining symbol of "Swinging" London, had yet to make a wide impact in America. Surviving television clips capture her rather chic "mod" style of dress, a contrast with the more Bohemian "look" associated with artists such as the Byrds and Sonny and Cher, who emerged at roughly the same time. The Beatles' publicist Derek Taylor, who promoted the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, recalled that the Byrds' audience included "girls [who] wore long dresses from past generations" (rather anticipating the prevailing "hippie" style of the late sixties).

In October 1965 KYA, a leading San Francisco radio station, used a large photographic portrait of Bivens to draw attention to its inaugural International Pop Music Awards (maybe patronising her a little in the process with its caption, "Wee One of the We Five") . Other photographs of Bivens included those of We Five taken by Lisa Law, using a Leica given to her by Frank Werber, manager of the Kingston Trio (of which Mike Stewart's brother John was a member). We Five sometimes used Werber's home at Mill Valley to rehearse; one photograph taken there shows Bivens barefoot in a bikini top and jeans, while the group used, among other things, a broom in place of a microphone .

Split and legacy

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We Five (LP Make Someone Happy, 1967)

Although We Five had been in the vanguard of the San Francisco bands, including Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, that reached international prominence in the “Summer of Love” of 1967, the original group had disbanded by then. As such, they were part of what Janis Joplin's biographer Myra Friedman has described nostalgically as "the exuberant days that preceded the great hippie migration of 1967"; by December 1966 there were some 1,500 bands flourishing in the area of San Francisco Bay, whereas a year earlier We Five had been among a small cluster.

In his notes for We Five's second album, Make Someone Happy (1967), released after they had split (an episode that give rise to unfounded rumours that Bivens had been killed in a road accident,) George Yanok observed that

"We 5 was the first “electric band” to come out of San Francisco. It predated the entire present “happening” in the Haight-Ashbury [a district of San Francisco that became the centre of "flower power"] with all its attendant trippery and hang-overs …".

Yanok asserted also that "there was nothing psychedelic or arcane about We 5's music". However, although, in Friedman's words, "it was the blues, amplified and transformed by the screaming colors and and inward messages of acid, that shaped the San Francisco sound",, various elements of the music of the psychedelic era, notably Bivens' vocal delivery, which Yanok described as "a major reason for this [We Five's] special something", were plainly discernible in We Five's output (for example, on Let's Get Together and such tracks as If I Were Alone , Love Me Not Tomorrow and Bivens' blues solo High Flying Bird ).

After the split

Jerry Burgan and Pete Fullerton reformed We Five. Burgan's wife, Debbie, née Graf, who sang with a group called the Legendaires and had sometimes worked with the Ridgerunners (as they then were), took over from Bivens as lead vocalist. The two allbums featuring Bivens were re-released as a compilation compact disc by Collectors' Choice Music in 1996. Because of her short period of fame, Bivens has remained a rather elusive, almost semi-legendary, figure but one whose voice has plainly been cherished by many of those who heard her in the mid sixties.

Other work and family

After leaving We Five, Bivens married jazz musician Fred Marshall (born 1938) , who had worked with a number of West Coast rock bands and been a member of the Vince Guaraldi Trio which famously recorded the incidental music for television specials based on the Peanuts cartoons of Charles Schulz . Bivens sang for a while with Marshall's band, her work including vocal experimentation that pre-dated that of Yoko Ono with the Plastic Ono Band (although Ono had worked earlier with, among others, the ground-breaking composer John Cage ). Their son, born in Berkeley, California in 1971, is the saxophonist Joshi Marshall.

During the 1970s Bivens appears to have done some session recording, as well making occasional appearances on television and recording radio jingles. However, her career after leaving We Five is not publicly well documented and information is derived mainly from unverifiable Internet "blogs" based on individual recollections.

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Bev Bivens with We Five: Hollywood Palace, 1965

External links

• We Five: folk rock revival

Note: The photograph on the home page of the above site is of a post-1990 incarnation of We Five. The woman in the picture is not Bev Bivens, but Debbie Burgan. There is no direct link to Bivens' biographical page, but this can be reached via internal hyperlinks.

• Bev Bivens & We Five on Hollywood Palace (ABC, 1965)