Gary James' Interview With Jim Yester Of
The Association



They were one of the most successful bands of the 1960s. In 1967 they were voted The Number One Vocal Group in the U.S. That same year, they were the first band anywhere to open a Rock festival. That festival was The Monterey Pop Festival. Their "Greatest Hits" album is now Double Platinum and continues to be one of the longest best-selling albums in the history of Warner Brothers Records. They have six Gold and three Platinum albums. Their first Gold Record was in 1966 for "Along Comes Mary". That was followed by "Cherish" in 1967, which also went Gold, and "Windy", which also went Gold. In 1968, "Never My Love" earned the group their fourth Gold record. They've sold over seventy million records. "Never My Love" is one of the most played records in radio history! They were part of the Happy Together Tour in 2015, 2017 and 2018. In 2016 they were inducted into the Pop Music Hall Of Fame in Canonsbury, Pennsylvania. We are talking about The Association, and Jim Yester, lead singer of the group, spoke with us about the bands's history.

Q - Jim, do you guys ever think how different your career might have been had your brother Jerry not been a part of The Lovin' Spoonful?

A - It wouldn't have affected his relationship with us because our relationship with him was based on him being part of The Modern Folk Quartet, not The Spoonful.

Q - Did he influence you in any way?

A - Yeah. He influenced me to spend a year with him when the band re-formed in '91. It was my brother, Joe, Steve and myself. Joe was doing so many solos, lead solos, that we brought him up front and got another drummer. That was great fun.

Q - Before The Association there was The Yester Brothers, correct?

A - Yes, indeed.

Q - You arrived in Los Angeles in 1965?

A - No. I arrived in Los Angeles in 1943. I grew up in Burbank. I was born in Birmingham, Alabama. Our whole family was born in Birmingham, Alabama. When I was three years old, Dad wound up moving the family to the L.A. area, to Burbank in particular. And that's where I grew up. I spent forty-six years in the L.A. area aside from three years in the Army. I did boot camp in California.

Q - What year did you go into the Army?

A - '61. I was in from '61 to '64. Yeah, my brother and I were performing in L.A. We were being managed by Mutt Cohen, who owned the Unicorn Coffee House on Sunset Strip. We were the regular act and we would be the opening act for the other acts that came in.

Q - The guy's name was "Mutt" Cohen?

A - His name is actually Martin, but his nickname was Mutt. Everybody knew him as Mutt. He was also a lawyer, and he and his brother, Herbie Cohen were heavy in the music business. Herbie Cohen was the manager for The Modern Folk Quartet, the group my brother was in.

Q - And later on, Frank Zappa.

A - Yup, Frank Zappa. I'm pretty sure Linda Ronstadt. The infamous Cohen brothers. (laughs) Anyway, my brother and I were doing that and I wasn't really sure. We fell into it so easily and had success right away. I didn't realize how rare that was. (laughs) And I had the Army hanging over my head, the draft, and I was working at a pharmaceutical lab and they weren't going to promote me to Assistant Product Manager because I had the draft hanging over my head. (laughs) I'll show you. I went down and joined the Army.

Q - Go back to this guy Mutt Cohen. Was he a good manager?

A - Oh, yeah. He did a very good job for us. He would send us out on the weekends to other clubs in the area, The Satire in Southgate. I think we were supposed to play The Prison Of Socrates down in Balboa, but we never made it down there.

Q - When you got into the Army were you sent to Vietnam?

A - No, it was before Vietnam. They sent me to Germany. I was in a 280 millimeter canon outfit for awhile and I requested a transfer because I'd been head of my class in the field I was in. They authorized a field but they didn't have it. So then I wound up in a medium tank battalion and in the same Commo section were two guys. One was a Jazz guitarist from Greenwich Village. The other was kind of a Jackie Mason type guy who had been in a Folk group in college and had put out an album, and we put together a Folk/Comedy trio and sent a tape out to the Entertainment Director in Nuremburg. They freaked and pulled us from our outfit and sent us all over Germany and France, entertaining the troops. So, that was fantastic. We did that for almost a year.

Q - You got lucky there.

A - Yeah. When I got back I was helping my mom and dad at a restaurant and bar up in Joshua Tree, California. I finally went down to the city and was looking for work as a bartender, which is what I'd been doing for them. I said, "I don't want to do this." So I called The Ice House in Pasadena and The Troubadour in Hollywood and wound up getting an audition time in between acts, The Ice House on Wednesday, The Troubadour on Friday. Well, I never went to The Troubadour on Friday because when I played The Ice House the manager pulled me aside and said, "Good news, bad news. I can't use you right now, but the good news is some friends of mine are here and they're putting together a band. They want you to call 'em." So he gave me a phone number and I called and it was the newly formed, had been together for two weeks as The Association. One guy wasn't working out. I went over and sang for them and they sang for me and we fooled around with music for awhile. Then Jules (Gary) pulled me aside and said, "Come back in three days and you can move in and that guy over there will be gone." (laughs) So that's how I wound up in The Association.

Q - What was the club scene like in Los Angeles in the mid-1960s, and did you ever cross paths with Jim Morrison in your travels?

A - No. We weren't actually playing bars and clubs like that. We were playing concert clubs, Folk concert clubs, The Pasadena Ice House, The Troubadour. That's most of what we were doing before we started touring, civic auditoriums and bigger venues because we suddenly had a hit record. What we were accustomed to was theatrical lighting, a professional sound system, somebody mixing the sound, doing the lights. It was really theatre. We did skits and bits. (laughs) We had a really fun, great show besides the music thing being good.

Q - Is it true you rehearsed five months before you played your first gig?

A - Actually, it was six. (laughs)

Q - Six months. While you were rehearsing, where was the money coming from to live in Los Angeles?

A - Well, we had a manager, an old cowboy actor originally named Freddie Foote, who changed his name to Dean Fredericks and wound up as Colonel Steve Canyon, U.S. Air Force on television, a weekly show. He and a partner of his became our managers. The managed the group the other guys were in first, called The Men, which was a happy accident, at The Troubadour, (laughs) on one hoot night. So anyway, that group lasted for about six months. Too many group dynamics I'll say. I'll try to put it nicely. It wound up breaking up one afternoon and the core of that group went over to Terry Kirkland's apartment that day and became The Association.

Q - You said "a happy accident at The Troubadour." What does that mean?

A - Yeah, well, there was a bunch of guys. They had a hootenanny every Monday night. Nowadays they call it an open mic night. Back then they called it hootenanny, and anybody that showed up, you could put your name down on a list and you'd get up and you could do like three songs maybe, ten, twelve minutes worth. There was a bunch of guys who were hanging out, guys who had been in groups, guys who were looking to get in groups. They were there to mostly harass whoever it was on stage and then they would get together and go up on stage. They called themselves The Innertubes. They'd do whatever, "Michael Row The Boat Ashore" or "John Henry" or whatever, and one night it was a rather magical happening and Doug Weston pulled the guys aside and said, "Listen, anybody who wants to do this for real, meet in the office tomorrow." Well, thirteen guys showed up and became a group called The Men, which was the first group dubbed Folk-Rock during that period of time. It was a ballsy, all guys Folk group, kind of like The Christys but without the girls, but adding electric instruments and drums. So it kind of stirred up a lot of dust in Hollywood. But like I said, too many personnel and some guys didn't get along and it came to a big head one day in a meeting. The guys that walked out of the meeting went over to Terry's place and became The Association. They wanted to do something more contemporary. And that's what they did.

Q - Did Terry's fiance name the group The Association?

A - Well, she didn't name the band. The group was going to call itself The Aristocrats after a terrible old Folk group joke. She was looking up the word aristocrat in the dictionary and came across the word "association", a group of individuals united towards a common goal. Everybody freaked out. "That's it!" It was not like she named the group. She found the word in the dictionary and everybody went nuts.

Q - Terry Kirkman wrote "Cherish".

A - He wrote "Cherish", "Everything That Touches You", "Requiem For The Masses". A very prolific songwriter.

Q - And Tandyn Almer wrote "Along Comes Mary", Ruthann Friedman wrote "Windy", Dick and Don Addrisi wrote "Never My Love". So, if the guys in The Association weren't writing all the hit songs, then somebody, somewhere, maybe the songwriters I've mentioned, had a pretty good ear for what you guys could do and what would become a hit. Would that be a correct assumption?

A - Well, it's a little more basic than that. People write songs and they present them to you. They give you a demo or you're at a club and you hear somebody do a song and say, "Hey, can I have a copy of that?" "Along Comes Mary" during that time, before we worked anywhere, the manager originally was giving the guys fifty bucks a piece a week to live on. When I finally got in two weeks later it was down to five bucks a week. (laughs) As a result, some guys would do demo sessions for other people. Play on them. Sing on them. Jules was doing a demo session one night with Curt Boetteher and Tandyn Almer, I forget what the company is, the publishing company. Anyway, Jules came home that night, four of us lived together at the place we rehearsed over in West L.A., closer to mid-West L.A. and he played on the demo for the song "Along Comes Mary". He brought home an acetate and said, "Hey, listen to this!" We started working on it the next day and that was our first national hit, but it took awhile. We did it on stage for about seven or eight months before we recorded it. So, it was pretty solid and the guy who was our producer at the time had been to probably twenty or thirty of our shows at least, and he had a pretty good idea of where it would go. That always helps.

Q - Talking about "Along Comes Mary", are you surprised that people actually thought "Along Comes Mary" was a song about marijuana? I guess "Mary" was slang for marijuana.

A - (laughs) I wasn't surprised because we knew that. It's a song of social protest. It's not saying "Hey, let's all go smoke grass. Hey, pills and booze are legal and hurt people. Let's have an even playing field." The idea was marijuana was not really harmful then. The other things were. Who's to blame?

Q - How did life change for The Association when that song became a hit?

A - Well, it changed a great deal because we wound up going on the road. First of all we had the number three or four record in the country. We were still working places like The Golden Bear down in Huntington Beach, another ex-Folk club, and we wound up, up-dating our managership. The guy who got us going and laid down really excellent groundwork; we were really covered business wise, but he could only take us so far, is how we felt. So we wound up switching to a friend of a friend who had never been a manager, but he was a very shrewd business guy. He got us going ever further and went on the road with us for our first couple of tours, which was great for us because talk about street smarts, this guy was really together. He was from New Jersey. He had worked the docks and was a horse handicapper down in Florida. So he really had a lot of things together.

Q - Go back to The Ice House in Pasadena for a minute. Tell me about that place.

A - It was basically a Folk club, but it was slowly changing as the music was changing. We worked with Steve Martin a lot. Eventually it became a comedy club. In fact, I opened there in '78 for Robin Williams as a solo. I was a solo opening for him and Gary Mule Deer. But at that time we were working with people like David Troy, who was actually David Troy Sommerville, the founder of The Diamonds.

Q - I interviewed that guy. He's no longer with us.

A - I worked fourteen years with him as a member of The New Four Preps with Bruce Belland and Ed Cobb.

Q - Bruce Belland. I interviewed him too. A wonderful guy to talk to. When you were playing The Ice House, the plan was what? To try and get a record deal?

A - Try and build up a following. We'd be working there during the week and during the day, when we weren't playing our manager would try to get us booked into junior colleges, universities, high schools. Anywhere where they would let us in the door. Whether they paid us or not, and usually they paid something. It wasn't necessarily much, but that started to build up the fan base and we wound up starting a fan club. We had about a 3,000 to 5,000 member fan club when "Along Comes Mary" was released. The members would call and request the record. It was really great. I remember the first time we heard "Along Comes Mary" on the radio. We were in a '59, blue Chevy Impala on the way over to Santa Monica to go to a music store there. We were all screaming and hanging out the window (laughs). It was fantastic.

Q - I'll bet! So many people will say when they hear themselves on the radio they have to pull over.

A - (laughs) We didn't pull over! We just got crazy. I think Jules came pretty close to getting up on the roof of the car (laughs).

Q - At the time you guys were playing The Ice House in Pasadena or Glendale...

A - Both. We started at the Pasadena Ice House. Then we opened the Glendale Ice House.

Q - At that very time you were performing there, the group was being turned down for a record deal. Why were record companies turning The Association down?

A - They didn't know what to do with us 'cause we were all over the road. We weren't Acid Rock. We weren't Blues. You know, we had Heavy Rock. We had Blues. We had love songs. We had funny stuff. They didn't know what to do with us. Then when Valiant Records came to town we auditioned for them in the afternoon at The Troubadour. Just three guys sitting in the audience with dark glasses on, not saying a word. We played five songs and one of those songs got us the record deal, which was "One Too Many Mornings", which was a Bob Dylan song. And Barry De Vorzon, one of the three guys that owned the record company, he produced it. It got up to like number sixteen in L.A. and then we convinced him to let a friend of ours produce us and he wound up letting us do that. So, we went with Curt Boettcher, a friend of ours and he's the one who produced "Along Comes Mary", "Cherish", that whole first album.

Q - Lucky for you that you played five songs. Maybe if you didn't play that Dylan song you wouldn't have gotten a record deal.

A - (laughs) Well, you never know. We wanted to show 'em a little bit of all the different stuff we had. I don't even think we played "Cherish". Probably not. When we picked the five songs to record, "Cherish" wasn't one of 'em, although we'd been doing it for at least a year in the clubs.

Q - Did you ever hear David Cassidy's version of "Cherish"?

A - Oh, yeah.

Q - Did you like it?

A - Yeah.

Q - He did a nice job with it, didn't he?

A - Yeah, he did. It's always good to have somebody cover your song.

Q - That's right. During the time you're trying to get a record deal, did you or anybody in the band want to throw in the towel?

A - No. We had an attitude. We knew we were going to make it. We always said we knew we were going to make it because scum always rises to the top. (laughs) We didn't really consider ourselves scum, but we considered ourselves kind of rebellious in a way. We were doing what we wanted to do. We weren't playing Top 40. We got offers to play and we said no. We just want to play our stuff, and that's what we did. It hurt the pocketbook for awhile, but then it paid off in the long run because we only ever did our own stuff. We had a comedy version of "Poison Ivy" where every verse was in a different genre of music and it was fund to do, but we weren't doing "Poison Ivy" to do "Poison Ivy". I mean, we were doing it to have fun.

Q - You could almost make the case that The Association was doing Theatrical Rock before Theatrical Rock became such a big deal.

A - Well yeah, we didn't get into it as heavy as like "Tommy" or anything like that, but we had bits. The Association Theatre Of The Absurd. We would do commercials. All kinds of crazy stuff. Dr. Frankly Stoned. (laughs) A lot of weird stuff, but it was great fun and people loved it.

Q - I didn't realize The Association was the first to perform at The Monterey Pop Festival.

A - Yes, we opened it.

Q - That being said, did you ever interact with Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix or Brian Jones?

A - Oh, yeah. We bumped into all of 'em. We were staying at the same little motel with Big Brother And The Holding Company, but I was really impressed by watching Pearly interact with the kids in the group. Some of the guys in Big Brother had kids they were traveling with. Watching her with the kids was just fantastic. She was really cool.

Q - And Jimi Hendrix?

A - Oh, we bumped into him in the mess tent. We worked with him quite a bit when he first started touring the States. It was good fun. It was always a good show. We were so different, it was a good show to put on.

Q - I take it you were a fan of his and he was a fan of yours.

A - Yeah. I think I played with him in the All Army Entertainment Contest. I had heard that he originally got that Star Spangled Banner thing from another guy, but whichever one was in the All Army Entertainment Contest, and I heard that he was in the service in Germany at the same time I was. This guy played "Autumn In New York" all the way through rehearsals and then on the night of the show he gets out the Gibson and does the Star Spangled Banner one-handed, waving the flag. He won that category. (laughs)

Q - Brian Jones. Did you meet him?

A - No. Jagger came over to our dressing room. We played the NME (New Musical Express) concert one year that they do at Wembley Stadium. Jagger came over to our dressing room and introduced himself and shook hands. Very nice. Very polite. Was like a Wall Street banker rather than a Rock star. (laughs) But we worked with a lot of people over the years, different types of acts when we were just starting because we were an opening act. Then once we had a couple of hits we were the stars and people were opening for us, like The Who opened for us for a few weeks.

Q - Were they smashing their equipment on stage then?

A - Yes, as a matter of fact. (laughs)

Q - That must have been hard to follow.

A - Well, the worst one to follow was at the Rome Pop Festival when we followed a group called The Move and they stole like ten microphones. It took the sound company about twenty minutes or so to find more microphones so we could go on. They were also chopping up the stage with axes. I mean, it was pretty wild. (laughs)

Q - On July 4th and 5th of 1970 The Association performed in Atlantic City. Was that on Steel Pier?

A - Yes. We did the Steel Pier a couple of times. Later on, when came back, we played one of the casinos, but back then there were no casinos. It was a resort town, which it may go back to being someday.

Q - The Association drew 100,000 people at the Wisconsin State Fair. You were headliners? And what year was that?

A - Probably about '68 would be my guess. I think we were playing with two or three other acts. Rare Earth I think was one of them. I think we were the headliners. I don't really recall, but it seemed like we were. We were waiting as Rare Earth was on.

Q - 100,00 people. That's a lot of people!

A - Yeah, well a state fair, most of 'em are already there anyway. (laughs)

Q - A grandstand set-up?

A - Yeah. A grandstand on two sides. People in the center in chairs and it went back forever.

Q - Over the years there have been quite a few personnel changes in The Association. What would the reason for that be?

A - Well, starting originally, Jules wanted to go to India to meet his guru. Some guys like Terry had a physical problem with the road. He did not handle traveling that well. It got to him. It got him down. He just wanted to come off the road. He had other things going on which he had to take care of. He wound up becoming a substance abuse counselor and he is still involved in helping recovering musicians. He's a sponsor for AA (Alcoholics Anonymous). In fact, he had a four part AA choir going at one time. I don't know if that's still going. He was with us this weekend in L.A. at a place called the Village Recorder. A very small venue, but wonderful. It was an awards ceremony put together by a guy named Bennett Zimmerman. We all got individual awards and we got a big monster plaque for all of us together. So, it was quite a weekend. But Terry was there. Ted Bluechel, our original drummer. Russ Giguere, who has retired. He's actually managing and running the group from the sidelines. (laughs)

Q - There must be quite a bit of work for The Association, even today.

A - It keeps us busy. We're always looking for more! You always want more gigs. We've got a bunch lined up this year (2019) and they're still coming in.

Q - You're not just playing your hits at these gigs, are you? Are you introducing new material?

A - Yeah. A little bit, every now and then. We're doing mostly stuff from our catalog. We just added a few tunes that we put back into the show, like "Requiem" that we were doing for a lot of years. At this concert the other night, Paul Hollland, one of our fantastic guitarists/singers, did a version of "The Time It Is Today", a Russ Giguere tune, and really did a great job on it too. So, we're experimenting with stuff. But we have a show that's entertaining with patter and humor. We do a tribute to The Mamas And The Papas 'cause they were such good friends. We did many shows with them. We do a thing called The Big Chill with a lot of songs from the movie. We just do pieces of them. It's a medley. It's great fun, but we always do the big hits.

Official Website: www.TheAssociationWebsite.com

© Gary James. All rights reserved.


Photo from Gary James' Press Kit Collection