Bev 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, 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.

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. A few weeks after recording this song, they 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.

Bivens' style and influence

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Bev 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. 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.

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.

The spilt and the 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 a blues number 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.

Family

After leaving We Five, Bivens married jazz musician Fred Marshall (born 1938), inventor of the megatar, and sang for a while with his band. Their son, born in Berkeley, California in 1971, is the saxophonist Joshi Marshall.

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 (1965)