Fact #194282
When:
Short story:
The Knickerbockers enter the Billboard Singles Chart in the USA with Lies – a quite remarkable Beatles-a-like effort – which will peak at No20.
Full article:
Beau Charles (guitarist, The Knickerbockers) : We all knew there was something special about it because even before we released it as a single we'd play it at our shows and people loved it. But it was my brother, John, who had the strongest feelings about that song. I still remember, we were driving cross-country out to California and we were in Texas when he mentioned what a great single Lies would make. He kept going on about how he thought the song would really do well.
We actually did a demo version of the song back in New York, and recorded it again in California.
John Charles (bassist, The Knickerbockers) : I can still remember the very day we cut the track and how excited we were. Some bands go into the studio, sit down on chairs and are very relaxed about the whole thing, but we were fired up, stoiod at our microphones and just rocked. It only took us one or two takes to record the single because we were good and ready.
Beau Charles : Lies was originally the b-side of the single – The Coming Generation was the a-side, which was a protest song. I even played 12-string guitar on it.
People like Barry McGuire were big then and everybody was jumping on the folk-rock bandwagon so that's why The Coming generation was getting pushed. We liked the song, but it didn't kill us.
We thought Lies was a hotter number and, apparently, so did some of the DJs, because when our public relations man went to the radio stations they said they liked that song better than The Coming Generation. So they started playing Lies instead and, sure enough, it became a hit record.
Somewhere up in the Northwest there was this DJ who played it for like a week or ten days before he told anybody it was actually recorded by a group called The Knickerbockers. The British Invasion was huge at the time and it seemed like every other day a new band from England was making it. So we took that all in and we probably consciously tried to write a British-sounding song when we wrote Lies. We all loved The Beatles, of course, so it was quite a compliment to have people think we sounded so much like them.
John Charles (bassist, The Knickerbockers) : Right after one of our shows at the red Velvet Club on the Sunet Strip in Hollywood, it was about two o'clock in the morning, I was going to grab some breakfast so I got in my car, turned on the radio and they were playing the record on KFWB. It was a very exciting moment for me and I felt like I was listening to a song I wasn't even connected with.
Beau Charles : Linda Ronstadt recorded it for her Get Closer album in 1982 and I even went to one of her concerts to thank her in person for doing our song. She was very gracious and told me she always thought Lies was a great song.
Nancy Sinatra recorded the song and so did Gary Lewis, The Ventures and The T-Bones. Styx also covered it, and so did the Tarney-Spencer band, whose version I really like a lot because it's so different.
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We actually did a demo version of the song back in New York, and recorded it again in California.
John Charles (bassist, The Knickerbockers) : I can still remember the very day we cut the track and how excited we were. Some bands go into the studio, sit down on chairs and are very relaxed about the whole thing, but we were fired up, stoiod at our microphones and just rocked. It only took us one or two takes to record the single because we were good and ready.
Beau Charles : Lies was originally the b-side of the single – The Coming Generation was the a-side, which was a protest song. I even played 12-string guitar on it.
People like Barry McGuire were big then and everybody was jumping on the folk-rock bandwagon so that's why The Coming generation was getting pushed. We liked the song, but it didn't kill us.
We thought Lies was a hotter number and, apparently, so did some of the DJs, because when our public relations man went to the radio stations they said they liked that song better than The Coming Generation. So they started playing Lies instead and, sure enough, it became a hit record.
Somewhere up in the Northwest there was this DJ who played it for like a week or ten days before he told anybody it was actually recorded by a group called The Knickerbockers. The British Invasion was huge at the time and it seemed like every other day a new band from England was making it. So we took that all in and we probably consciously tried to write a British-sounding song when we wrote Lies. We all loved The Beatles, of course, so it was quite a compliment to have people think we sounded so much like them.
John Charles (bassist, The Knickerbockers) : Right after one of our shows at the red Velvet Club on the Sunet Strip in Hollywood, it was about two o'clock in the morning, I was going to grab some breakfast so I got in my car, turned on the radio and they were playing the record on KFWB. It was a very exciting moment for me and I felt like I was listening to a song I wasn't even connected with.
Beau Charles : Linda Ronstadt recorded it for her Get Closer album in 1982 and I even went to one of her concerts to thank her in person for doing our song. She was very gracious and told me she always thought Lies was a great song.
Nancy Sinatra recorded the song and so did Gary Lewis, The Ventures and The T-Bones. Styx also covered it, and so did the Tarney-Spencer band, whose version I really like a lot because it's so different.