Gary James' Interview With Jeremy Clyde of
Chad And Jeremy



They were right in there with the British Invasion. Probably best known for their songs, "A Summer Song" and "Yesterday's Gone", they made guest appearances on the top American TV shows of the day, including The Patty Duke Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Batman, and Hollywood Palace. Their popularity saw them place seven songs in the Billboard Top 40 between 1964 and 1966. We are talking about the duo, Chad And Jeremy. Jeremy Clyde spoke with us about the history of Chad And Jeremy.

Q - You had been performing with Peter Asher. Are you still doing that today?

A - No. I think COVID sort of put an end to it. We had worked together for some years indeed, The Peter And Jeremy Show, and it was going tremendously well. And then for various reasons Peter took some time out 'cause he had a little bit of a vocal problem. So, it sort of stopped now. I keep hoping he's going to come back and do some more. Since then I've been working with the great Albert Lee, the great guitarist. I actually went to see him last night here in London with his band and it was absolutely terrific to see him again. I'm hoping to work some more with him. And perhaps Peter will be up for some more, but I'm sort of waiting to find out really. He's a very old friend of mine. We've known each other, God knows, forever. In fact, not only that, when Chad and I were discovered, if that is the word, by John Barry, the film music composer who was starting a record label. This is 1963. He came down and saw us at a little place called Tina's Bar where we had a residency. We are now signed up and going off to fame and fortune and the people around the bar said, "Oh dear, we were doing so well. People were flocking in and we were selling all sorts of drinks. It was going great. Do you know anybody else?" I said, "Sure. Peter Asher. He's at The Pickwick Club. I'll see if they want the gig." So, I got them the gig. Within six months we were all in the charts and nobody could work out which was which.

Q - That's true. People seemed to be confused about Chad And Jeremy and Peter And Gordon. I believe Peter was the producer and manager for Linda Ronstadt.

A - Absolutely.

Q - And he produced James Taylor. I don't remember if he was managing him.

A - He was managing him as well.

Q - He must have missed performing onstage.

A - You mean Peter missed performing?

Q - Yes.

A - He did. It was interesting. He called in 1968, 1969, somewhere in there. He called me and said, "I've just discovered this amazing singer / songwriter. You've got to come over and listen to him. We'll have something to eat and get him to play some songs." I went over to Peter's flat and there was James Taylor, completely unknown. Long dark hair, rather shy. "Go on James. Sing us a song." (laughs) He sang songs and I said, "This is brilliant, Peter." I think Peter always wanted to get back (onstage). He got back with Gordon (Waller) towards the end of Gordon's life. In fact, we did one show all on the same bill. There was one occasion where we all got together at the end of his set and did, the four of us, a ramshackle version of "Bye Bye Love". So, that was rather historic. And then of course Gordon died (July 17, 2009, age 64 years). Yes, I think Peter loves to get up and strut his stuff. And of course, it's a bit like me, once Chad left, bless his heart, he retired and then died (December 20 2020, aged 79), I was left, and liked to do some work. I was enjoying it. That's how Peter and I got back together. It was a very obvious thing. We thought about it, both of us, and it made tremendous sense. So that was that. It was very much of a mixed media show that we did. So, we'd show clips from Batman and he's show clips from something else. We'd send each other up a lot. We didn't take ourselves terribly seriously and people enjoyed it. So that was good.

Q - When you were onstage with Peter, did the two of you trade off your hit songs?

A - Yeah. I was Gordon and he was Chad. Of course, Peter's very bad taste joke, which I hope you will forgive me for repeating, was "The right guys died." Gordon had the lower voice, which was me, and Chad was the tenor. He was up top. And Peter was up top. So we had the same mixtures. You see what I mean? The people up front got twice the hits.

Q - When you and Chad were playing this coffee house, Tina's, how many sets did you do each night and how many free meals did you get?

A - We did a number of little gigs around town before Tina's. It wasn't at night. Curiously it was a lunch time gig. So, we did an hour at lunch and the people came in, the office workers came in and we filled that. It was a bar, not a coffee house. We were there in the corner, bellowing out Folks songs basically. Our price at another gig, which I remember very well, was at an Italian restaurant and it was at night, was we got ten shillings a night and a free meal. In other words a bowl of spaghetti. I can't remember what ten shillings was, it's a half pound. (laughs) But of course it's all so changed. We weren't very well paid, let's put it that way. We didn't get fed at Tina's. The ten shillings and a plate of spaghetti was from a place that I think was called Luigi's, which we used to play.

Q - I only wish I knew what a shilling was comparable to in American money.

A - I have no idea. It's so changed now and we don't even have shillings. Those shillings disappeared in 1971 I think. So, it's like being part of some historical currency. It wasn't very much.

Q - In 1962, you were playing in a band called The Jerks. Were you hearing about what was going on in the music scene around England and Liverpool in particular? Did you hear about The Beatles?

A - Chad and I met at drama school. So, The Jerks was a college band. I met Chad in September, 1960. I'd been at the drama school for a year. It was a three year course. A guy came up to me and said, because everyone knew I played the guitar, sort of, a little bit, as in I could play Folk songs. I was always looking for someone to play with. In September of 1960, the beginning of my second year, a guy comes up to me and says, "I think the person you're looking for has just arrived in the teacher training course. Do you want to meet him?" I said, "Yeah, sure." And Chad came out the first time and sat down at the piano and played absolutely brilliant Boogie-Woogie. And then picked up a guitar and played things way beyond what I could do. We were both in choruses. We were both choir people. He was a brilliant vocal arranger. We used to sit at the back off... there was a circular, service staircase at the back of the drama school and it's actually still there, and we would sit at the bottom, the two of us with two guitars and the voices in harmony and the echo would come up and up around the staircase. We knew then that we were on to something because we had this amazing blend. Our influences at the time were actually American. So, it was Buddy Holly of course, Elvis of course. All the usual suspects. Ricky Nelson was another huge influence at the time. And Country stuff, Chet Atkins stuff that we tried to do. We were very good. We tried to impress the girls and that was the point of the school hops. I remember the first time I heard about The Beatles. I know where I was. I had just left drama school. It would've been late '62. Somewhere in there. It was in our school in a music magazine about this band that were tearing 'em up in in Liverpool. Then of course after that we knew all about them. In fact, somebody asked us to perform at a party and there was Paul.

Q - Your success brings up this old saying. "It's not what you know, but who you know." Your mother knew a literary agent who knew a manager who knew a record producer. And that record producer was John Barry, who signed you.

A - That's quite right.

Q - Without your mother's input, what would have happened to Chad and Jeremy? Do you think success was around your corner anyway?

A - I think that's fair. That's exactly right. My father was a film producer. I was in drama school. I wanted to be an actor. Show business people were in and out of the house. So, that is absolutely true. Without that contact... And the other thing, which is that yes, John was forming a record company. He was looking for likely young talent and was steered by Tony Lewis, who was going to manage us. Tony Lewis was sort of managing people like Shirley Bassey. Very show biz. Not Rock 'n' Roll. Diana Dors, people like that. It was luck. The second piece of luck, really the big break, was the fact that we were in exactly the right place at exactly the right time when The Beatles hit America the first time. That's when all the A&R men from the labels in America came rushing to Liverpool and then down to London, looking for acts that were current, and we had a single in the charts. We were doing all the TV shows. We were players. Whether six months either side of that... we were swept up in the slipstream of The Beatles and that's the British Invasion. And Peter And Gordon too. Exactly the same deal. We were all exactly in the same place at the same time.

Q - I remember seeing Chad And Jeremy on The Patty Duke Show. She was quoted as saying, "I was obsessed with them." Does that mean she was romantically interested in one or both of you guys?

A - I heard that later. I don't remember making goo-goo eyes particularly, although she was sweet and lovely to work with. We enjoyed our time on the show. But apparently she was the one who wanted to get us on the show. There wasn't just Patty Duke, there was Batman and Dick Van Dyke. By that time we were living in America, in Hollywood, in L.A. I particularly had done three years of drama school and a year of repertory theatre and was an actor. Chad was not so much an actor, but he could certainly handle the dialogue and he had very good comedy timing. And so, we were perfect for everything to do with the music scene and the sort of jokes about the British Invasion, and that's how we were picked up and did all those shows, because we were available. We were around. We were local. And we could handle the dialogue. So that was the extraordinary thing and we got quite a lot of stick of it at the time. Our fellow musicians didn't think it was kind of hip, doing silly comedy shows. But actually as it turns out extraordinary the way it is because these shows keep repeating, particularly Dick Van Dyke and Batman. Somehow they've given us a sort of longer shelf life.

Q - How did you like doing that Batman TV show?

A - Well, of course it was amazing fun. It was absolutely wild. There was the Batmobile, which by the way, the one on the set, because it was all done on a set, was a very old, tacky, I think it was a T-Bird that had been sort of tarted up with cardboard wings on it. It wasn't all the shining machine that you saw, but it was just the one you saw in the background. They had hundreds of them. They didn't have to drive. But it was remarkably sort of lived in. (laughs) One of the things about Batman is we were Chad and Jeremy, whereas Patty Duke we'd been Nigel and Patrick, and on , Fred and Ernie. So, we finally got to be ourselves, which was cool. That was nice. So, we could just be ourselves and not pretend to be some other band. It was lovely. Adam West. What a really good actor. He and Leslie Nielsen for example had that wonderful, dry thing to say absolutely stupid things with a straight face that sound serious, but are actually hysterically funny and it takes real acting talent to do that. He was a funny, sweet man and I liked him very much. Had a great time. Later on Chad ended up in Sun Valley. That's where he lived for quite a lot of the last part of his life, which is a small community. He and Adam West would bump into each other in the supermarket. (laughs) There was a telephone directory in the days of telephone directories up there and if you looked up, Chad told me this, "Adam West", it would say, "see Batman." And if you looked up "Batman" it would say "Adam West." That gives you some idea of his sense of humor, which was dry and nice and we liked him. I don't want to speak out of turn, but Burt Ward, who played Robin, didn't seem to be an actor to me. He was a little sort of aloof and quite full of himself. I think he went on later to into business. He didn't strike me as loving the profession as I did and do. And of course how could I forget Julie Newmar. We ran into her later on. I mean years later. We would send messages to each other because she remembered us fondly. I remember her very fondly. She was great and really nice. I have happy memories.

Q - There was an agent at William Morris by the name of John Hartman, who got you on The Patty Duke Show and Dick Van Dyke after he saw you on Hollywood Palace.

A - That's right.

Q - How did you get on Hollywood Palace? Was someone at William Morris booking you then?

A - Yes. Our manager, Tony Lewis, had put us with the William Morris Agency. John Hartman, who was sort of our age, who was really sort of a junior agent, had spotted what was coming in terms of this new thing called the music business, the youth market and all that. He was the man who pushed us. In fact, he almost became our agent. We were great friends. But he also sort of became our manager. The reason we were on the Hollywood Palace show was it was sort of the West Coast answer to The Ed Sullivan Show. Again, contacts, contacts, contacts. My mom was a friend of Jeannie Martin, Dean's (Dean Martin) wife. Extremely nice woman. I think it was Dean's mother who was the one who had seen us or had heard of us and fell in love with these nice boys, and said, "You've got to have them on the show." So, it was quite a Hollywood push to get us to do the Hollywood Palace show. We didn't know any of this of course, but we did stay with Dean and Jeannie for a few days. It was our first taste of America, Beverly Hills and all of that. It was extraordinary. Dean was very nice. He was quite a traditional Italian father. I mean, we were just house guests for a few days and the kids were thrilled. They had their own British act to have fun with and they were all very sweet, and Jeannie was lovely. A very nice woman. A den mother.

Q - I did an interview with Dean Martin's daughter, Deana Martin. She told me Frank Sinatra would come over to the house and she'd call him Uncle Frank.

A - "Uncle Frank is coming up the drive." I remember that. (laughs) "My God! Here he is!"

Q - I don't think he was too fond of Rock 'n' Roll, but of course Chad And Jeremy were Pop, not Rock 'n' Roll.

A - Exactly. We were sort of more on the acceptable side. We had a slight problem with that later. The business wanted to make us sort of an Andy Williams and be very safe and lush and do old standards, which we sort of did up to a point. But it was an element of trying to make us into what they thought they liked rather than what we liked. And so some of the later choices that were made; we were making records at such a lick. We were off the road. "Boys, you're in the studio. We're going to do this and that." We rebelled a few times and said, "We're not doing that." There were arguments. We did Andy Williams. Andy Williams was very nice. We did The Andy Williams Show several times because we were safe. Not too threatening. Not too loud. (laughs)

Q - William Morris had a London office in 1963. Was John Hartman in London or Los Angeles?

A - L.A. There was a moment. "Boys you're moving to Los Angeles." "Are we? Oh, great!" We were suddenly going up the charts. The only way to be around was to move to L.A., which we did on Green Cards. Quite unexpectedly we found ourselves with swimming pools, sunshine and all those pretty girls.

Q - The big mystery to me is, here is William Morris with an office in London in 1963. Someone in that office must have seen and heard what was going on in the music business then. Yet, GAC (General Artists Corporation) booked The Beatles. It's very strange.

A - You've put your finger on it. I think I'm right in saying all of this. I seem to remember this is correct; William Morris didn't have a music department as such. They thought it was all sort of low class and not what they did. I know John (Hartman) got promoted very fast on the back or our success. Suddenly they started taking it seriously. They didn't spot it. They didn't spot what was happening with the kids. They thought it was a phase. They thought it would blow over. The music business was reinventing itself. It came very fast and people were making it up as they went along.

Q - Did Allen Klein ever have anything to do with Chad And Jeremy?

A - He did. John Barry had started a record label. He was in partnership with Jeff Kruger and the record label was called Ember Records. He actually fell out with Jeff Kruger, not a difficult thing to do, quite early on, while we were making our first album. Shel Talmy was a very hot producer at the time, working with The Who, came in and finished up our album. But John started it and then it was finished up by Shel. Meanwhile, Jeff Kruger had signed us to a tiny little label called World Artists out of Pittsburgh who were a pretty rough bunch. The records were stacked in a bathroom in a hotel suite. This was not the big time. (laughs) So, we wanted to get off Ember, and also there were problems about getting paid. Who was paying it, whether it was Ember or World Artists remains a moot point, but by the way we weren't seeing it. So, Allen was brought in to get us to do the deal to get us off Ember and onto Columbia, which he did, taking a hefty piece off the top I am now told. He was a very tough business person and actually I ran into Paul (McCartney) and Peter (Asher) one time and Paul was asking me a lot of questions about Allen Klein, this being later on when Apple was falling apart. "What do you make of Klein? Be careful. He's not a sweetheart." So, there you are.

Q - Too bad you guys didn't have Brian Epstein as your manager. He would have been an ideal manager for you.

A - He would've been ideal. Listen, there were many, many ifs and possibilities and things that didn't happen. He would have been splendid. He had his hands full. He had the best bands in the world then. And we weren't from Liverpool. I've actually never been to Liverpool. I'm not against it, I've just never been there. So, Cilla (Black), Billy J. (Kramer) and The Swingin' Blue Jeans were all local Liverpool bands. But that was his base. We weren't that at all. We were London.

Q - "A Summer Song" was featured on Juke Box Jury in England in 1964 and Ringo was one of the judges. He called it a "miss", but said it could do well in America. He was right, but how did he know that?

A - Well, Ringo the prophet. He spotted it. They had a thing on Juke Box Jury and it was not the most exciting thing on television looking back. Four people being asked "Hit or Miss" for thirty seconds of a new record. But, they'd Jazz it up. Sometimes they'd have the act backstage with a camera on them and they'd wait to see if they were going to be celebrated or humiliated. Chad was backstage that day. I don't know how I got out of it. Maybe I was ill or something. So, he was there sort of waiting for the "hit" or "miss." And yes, Ringo voted "miss", but he said, "I have a feeling that it could be a very big hit in America," and he was absolutely right. He spotted it. So, there you are, and the disc jockeys were all over it in the summer of '64 and that's why it sort of remained a classic of summer.

Q - When I listen to that song, it still sounds good. It could've been recorded last week. And here it is sixty plus years later. I don't know how many songs recorded in 2025 will be played in 2085.

A - It's an interesting subject. Every generation thinks their music is the best because it's their youth. Wonderful music is being made still. No question of that. Whether it's as hummable as as it used to be, I'm not sure. Obviously Ed Sheerhan is wonderful and Taylor Swift is wonderful. I was on to Taylor Swift very early because Chad and I would travel around. This was much later. I'm talking the early 2000s I guess, and we were doing shows, just the two of us and we would drive. I would always like to listen to local Country stations as we drove across America. That's where we heard Taylor Swift for the first time. She was 15 or something. I was going, "She's fantastic. She's really an amazing songwriter. This girl is really astonishing." Songwriting is called structured songwriting I'm told, verse and chorus. And of course it still exists in Country music still, for that form. Could I sing "Cowboy Carter"? No. I'm not sure I could. I could sing bits. (laughs) But it's changed. The music is not as structured. It's different. It's beats and hooks. The person I'm still obsessed by is Prince, who was the most wonderful songwriter. I often listen to him. He's very much a classic songwriter. But, he could do everything. But, I'm out of touch. I do like Country music, some of it, not all, which comes from having heard Chet Atkins all those years ago. It's hard to know what will last. I think structured songwriting is hummable and singable. A lot of this music is beats and hooks. They're not songs so much anymore, to my ear, the very exception being Prince, who could do everything it seems to me.

Q - What I've noticed is when people talk about Taylor Swift, the emphasis seems to be on money. With The Beatles the emphasis was always on the music.

A - That's spot on. I have thoughts on that. I know that Americans in particular, if I may say so, are very impressed by money. I've run into people recently, last time I was there. "You're going to meet so-and-so and they've got a lot of money." I've never sort of heard that in England particularly. It's something in your society. It isn't quite so much over here. Its not a badge over here so much I don't think. But, I take the point. I think you're absolutely right. The music came first, and then the success and the money, that came with it later. I think there's an element still of a woman controlling her own business and being so unbelievably successful. It's an interesting thought.

Q - It was part of Brian Epstein's managerial strategy to never talk about money. And he did a great job because nobody ever talked about money.

A - I didn't know that. That's very smart and quite right.

Official Website: www.ChadAndJereny.com

© Gary James. All rights reserved.

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