At Summer’s End, the Story of Chad & Jeremy’s ‘A Summer Song’
200 Greatest 60s Rock Songs Book Excerpt
Enjoy this excerpt from the new eBook, 200 Greatest 60s Rock Songs.
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Chad Stuart and Jeremy Clyde debuted in America with 1964’s “Yesterday’s Gone.” It was the first single Stuart wrote and rose to №21. “Yesterday’s Gone” was produced and arranged by John Barry, who became a preeminent composer and conductor of film music. Barry discovered Chad & Jeremy at Tina’s, a London coffeehouse.
Stuart credits Barry for the duo’s “whispering” style of singing. Stuart recalled on WBIG-AM that Barry was unhappy with their first attempts at “Yesterday’s Gone.” “He told us we sounded like a locker room full of football players. In the end in desperation, he said, ‘Whisper it,’ so we kind of backed off a bit and so that sort of slightly sotto voce sound came about.”
The new singing style paid dividends on their follow-up, “A Summer Song,” a №7 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 later that year. The song was penned by Stuart and British songwriters Clive Metcalfe and Keith Noble.
On the duo’s website, Stuart recalls, “We never thought ‘Summer Song’ could possibly be a single. It was just a pretty, romantic song. Or so we thought . . . you never can tell, can you?
“We were just a couple of folkies really, even though I played in rock bands to pay the rent. And the concept of doing the odd ballad now and then was validated by McCartney’s singing ‘Till There Was You.’ All in all, it made for quite a grab bag of styles. Two characters in search of a musical identity!
“But the really scary part was yet to come. After you’ve written a hit song, what happens next? You write another one; at least that’s the theory. After getting lucky two times in a row, I started to feel like I was on a surfboard for the first time having caught a wave entirely by accident. Everyone’s watching and I have no idea what to do next! ‘Come on kid! Write another hit!’ Not as easy as you might think.”
Stuart said in 2006 that the pair never profited from their biggest hit. “In our case, our first record company, Ember Records, never, ever paid us, so every time they license ‘A Summer Song’ for a movie or a commercial, we never see a dime, so if we want to see any financial return for our recordings, the answer seems to be to re-record the hits.
“Okay, got that. Makes sense. But Jeremy and I have had a hard time buying into that concept. I mean, we’ve never enjoyed any revenue from the hits anyway since the bastards never paid us.”
Stuart explained the song’s appeal in the New Jersey Home News. “What it blundered into is being one of those archetypical summer songs where you don’t have the girl, and no, no, no, and then you have the rain. It had a lesson of angst in the final analysis.
“It’s a perfect summer romance song where you have to go home for the summer, and the girl with whom you’ve had a steamy romance has to go back to Pittsburgh, or wherever.”
Frank Mastropolo is the author of the new eBook 200 Greatest 60s Rock Songs and New York Groove: An Inside Look at the Stars, Shows, and Songs That Make NYC Rock.
