[NB this should come before yesterday’s post.

A note on sources — for most of these essays I have used multiple sources. For this essay, I have relied more than any other on a single source, Steve Stanley’s liner notes for the And Then… Along Comes The Association reissue, and I thought this should be noted. ]

Frank Zappa hadn’t only been listening to doo-wop and Edgard Varese as a teenager — he had also been a very big fan of folk music, especially Ewan MacColl’s recordings of sea shanties, and in 1961 he had been in a folk duo, with his friend Terry Kirkland. They played improvised pieces, with Zappa on guitar and Kirkland on clarinet and bongos, read beat poetry, and played blues songs.

However, Kirkland soon left to work in Hawaii, where he met Jules Alexander [FOOTNOTE Alexander used the name Gary Alexander on early Association albums, but later reverted to using his birth name, which I will use throughout this book for simplicity.], who was in the Navy at the time, and struck up a musical friendship.

Both men moved back to California in 1963, and there Kirkland had a musical epiphany after watching the Modern Folk Quartet — while the music he had played with Zappa had been folk influenced, it had been based on difficult, abstruse, folk, and Kirkland’s musical tastes had run more to jazz. This was Kirkland’s first exposure to the more accessible folk music that was becoming popular among college students, with lyrics relating to the concerns of normal people.

Alexander and Kirkland quickly became the centre of a regular amorphous folk jam session called The Inner Tubes, which at various times featured Roger McGuinn, Doug Dillard, Cass Elliot and David Crosby, among many others. This evolved into a thirteen-piece professional band, The Men (so called because there were no women in the band), and eventually this in turn became the six-piece The Association, with a line-up of Kirkland, Alexander, Russ Giguere, Ted Bluechel Jr, Brian Cole, and Jim Yester (brother of Jerry Yester of the Modern Folk Quartet).

The band became an instant live success, but their first single, a version of Babe I’m Gonna Leave You, was a flop. A second single, One Too Many Mornings, was slightly more successful, but still not the hit they needed.

But then Curt Boettcher, a friend of the band who had been chosen to produce their next single, asked Alexander to play on a demo session for songwriter Tandyn Almer. Almer’s song had originally been intended as a ballad, but Boettcher had come up with a new arrangement of it, in an uptempo pop style [FOOTNOTE There is a possibly apocryphal tale that he also rewrote the melody, keeping just Almer’s lyrics and chords.], and so he, Alexander, Almer, and session bass player Jerry Scheff went into the studio to cut a demo of Along Comes Mary.

Alexander was amazed, and asked Almer if his band could have the song to record in their next session. Almer readily agreed, and soon the band were in the studio with Boettcher and a group of session musicians (the band all played their own instruments on their first two singles, but the label insisted that they use session players for this session) recording Along Comes Mary, Your Own Love, Remember, I’ll Be Your Man and Better Times. After a consultation with the leaders of Subud, the new religious movement with which several of the band were involved, it was decided that Along Comes Mary and Your Own Love were the songs which best expressed the power of God moving through the band, and so they were chosen for the first single.

Your Own Love was chosen as the A-side, but DJs soon flipped the single and started playing Along Comes Mary, and its tumbling internal rhymes (“when fake desire is the fire in the eyes of chicks whose sickness…”), syncopated rhythm, and hints at a meaning just outside the literal meaning of the lyrics quickly drove it to number seven in the charts.

While the song was, at least on the surface, a love song to a woman, many people interpreted the lyrics rather differently, insisting that “Mary” was “Mary Jane” or marijuana. That may well have been the songwriter’s intention, but other interpretations were certainly possible, as the band found out when they read a newspaper report about the nuns at Loyola Marymount University declaring the song the best of the year.

A follow-up was obviously needed, and Cherish, written by Kirkman and with additional backing vocals by Boettcher, was soon released, and this time went all the way to number one. The team of the Association and Curt Boettcher was clearly going places — so it was all the more surprising when the Association decided to stop working with Boettcher, and to hire Jerry Yester to produce their next album. While Boettcher was a great producer, he was seeming more interested in just using the band as hired hands to realise his ideas than he was in collaborating with them as equals. The Association didn’t want to be a manufactured band…

Along Comes Mary

Composer: Tandyn Almer

Line-up: Terry Kirkland, Jules Alexander, Russ Giguere, Ted Bluechel Jr, Brian Cole, and Jim Yester (vocals), Jerry Scheff (bass), James Troxel and Toxey French (percussion), Ben Benay, Mike Deasey, and Lee Mallory (guitars), Michael Henderson and Butch Parker (keyboards). Uncredited horns.

Original release: Along Comes Mary/Your Own Love The Association, Valiant V-741

Currently available on: And Then…Along Comes The Association (Deluxe Expanded Mono Edition) Now Sounds CD