Beverly (Bev) Ann Bivens (born April 28, 1946 in Santa Ana, California)California Birth Index, 1905-1995. Sacramento, CA, USA: State of California Department of Health Services, Center for Health Statistics is the American former lead singer of the West Coast folk rock group We Five from 1965 to 1967. Since 2021 she has been the original band's last surviving member. After her marriage to jazz musician Fred Marshall and the break-up of We Five, she sang for a while with the experimental Light Sound Dimension, but by the late 1960s Bivens had largely left the music scene. After many years of relative seclusion, she sang at the opening of an exhibition in San Francisco in 2009. Her son is the saxophonist Joshi Marshall.
Early years Beverly Bivens attended Santa Ana High School, where she was a direct contemporary of actress Diane Keaton,Jonathan Moor (1990) Diane Keaton: The Story of the Real Annie Hall and Orange Coast Junior College.Sleeve notes for LP, "You Were on My Mind" (1965)
Mid 1960s: We Five
With the encouragement of her mother, Bivens had developed her singing voice as a child. Around 1963–64, she began performing with Mike Stewart (1945–2002) and William Jerome (Jerry) Burgan (1945–2021), who had formed a folk duo at high school and branched out into electronic music with guitarist Bob Jones (1947–2013), whom they met at the University of San Francisco. She had been recommended to Mike Stewart by Terry Kirkman, later of The Association, who was then the boyfriend of her sister Barbara. Contrary to popular belief, she did not perform backup vocals with Glen Campbell, who also played banjo, on "Desert Pete", a recording by The Kingston Trio, of which Stewart's brother John (1939–2008) was a member. The backup vocals on “Desert Pete” were performed by Sue Ellen Davies, who originally performed with The Ridgerunners but left the band after discovering she was pregnant, and was subsequently replaced by Bivens. With the addition of Pete Fullerton, the new group, initially called the Ridgerunners and for a while the Mike Stewart Quintet, became known as We Five.The name is thought to derive from We Seven (1962), the title of a book by the seven Mercury astronauts They recorded their first album, the highly eclectic You Were on My Mind, for A&M records in 1965 after Herb Alpert, founder of A&M, heard them at the "hungry i", a folk/night club on Jackson Street in the North Beach area of San Francisco.
You Were on My Mind We Five's first single, from their debut album of the same name, was a reworked version of Sylvia Tyson's song "You Were On My Mind". It became one of the first folk-rock hits,Richie Unterberger in Mojo, October 2011 reaching number three in the Billboard "Hot 100" in August 1965.Charlie Gillett & Simon Firth (1976) Rock File 4. This was A&M's first hit record that was not made by Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass. Tyson (then Sylvia Fricker) says that she was unaware that her song had been covered until she heard We Five's version on a car radio while driving on Highway 101 in California. One consequence of We Five's success was that Tyson's song, which until then had been unavailable in sheet form, was published by Witmark of New York with a photograph of Bivens and We Five on the cover.Tyson's friend (and early girl-friend of Bob Dylan) Suze Rotolo recalled that, in the early days of Ian & Sylvia, Sylvia Tyson's abilities as a songwriter were not acknowledged as people "just assumed that Ian was the writer and that she was there to look lovely and sing beautifully" (Rotolo (2008) A Freewheelin' Time). However, with the British Invasion at its height, We Five's recording had only limited international success, having been covered reluctantly though successfully in Britain by Crispian St. Peters.St. Peters reached number two in the British charts in January 1966: Rock File 4 (ed. Charlie Gillett & Simon Frith, 1976). He disliked the song and his recording achieved chart success only after prolonged plugging by his record company, Decca: Brian Matthew, Sounds of the 60s, BBC Radio 2, January 17, 2015.
On October 2, 1965, We Five performed You Were on My Mind live on the ABC television show The Hollywood Palace, on which they were introduced by guest compère Fred Astaire. Video footage of this performance survives, as does that of appearances around the same time on the Jack Benny and Bob Hope shows and Shivaree. There have been some claims that Bivens did not sing on the original studio recording of You Were on My Mind and that the female voice was that of another artist. However, most sources, including We Five's Jerry Burgan in his 2014 memoir, have rejected this suggestion.Brian Matthew on BBC Radio 2, Sounds of the 60s, December 6, 2008; Jerry Burgan with Alan Rifkin (2014) Wounds to Bind: A Memoir of the Folk-Rock Revolution
Subsequent singles A subsequent 1965 single, Chet Powers's (aka Dino Valenti) "Let's Get Together", was a more modest commercial success, reaching number 31 on the Hot 100. The song, which had been recorded in 1964 by The Kingston Trio, became a much bigger hit in 1969 for the Youngbloods under the shortened title Get Together.See Rock File 4 (ed Charlie Gillett & Simon Frith, 1976)Sounds of the 60s, BBC Radio 2, July 28, 2007
A third single, You Let a Love Burn Out, was trailed by A&M as a "3rd We Five smash in a row" on the back of a Grammy nomination for You Were on My Mind.A&M publicity material reproduced with sleeve notes for CD There Stands the Door (2009) Released early in 1966, its "twangy-oriental sound", with Bivens "really put[ting] her voice in front of the others and set[ting] the tempo for the remainder of the group"Review by Kathi Koscki (1966), reproduced with sleeve notes for CD There Stands the Door (2009) represented a significant departure of style that in various ways was to be adopted by other bands in the coming year. However, it had limited public impact, a fate shared in May 1966 by a further single, There Stands the Door (which was coupled with Somewhere, a song from the 1957 musical West Side Story). Pete Fullerton felt that with both these recordings "there was always that edge of whining".Sleeve notes for CD There Stands the Door (2009)
Influence and style
Bivens' voice gave We Five its distinctive and memorable sound. Almost operatic in quality, its range was described as low tenor to high soprano.Sleeve notes for You Were on My Mind (1965) Bob Jones has recalled that "Bev had this husky kind of voice, and somehow there's this old soul in there".Sleeve notes for CD There Stands the Door: The Best of We Five (Big Beat, 2009)
Bivens' performances on the album You Were On My Mind and in concert largely foreshadowed a female vocal style that by 1967 was associated with, among others, Elaine "Spanky" McFarlane, Grace Slick of the Great Society and Jefferson Airplane,Grace Slick's delivery was rather more "edgy", being described by James Goodfriend, Music Editor of Stereo Review, as "beautifully focused, but [with] the kind of steely edge to it that forbids prettiness" (sleeve notes to CBS LP The Best of Grace Slick, 1974). and Cass Elliot and Michelle Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas. Bivens was said to have inspired Jefferson Airplane's original vocalist Signe Toly Anderson, who was already well established on San Francisco's jazz and folk scene before joining the Airplane, originally a folk-rock band, in 1965. 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.A&M continued over the years to have an instinct for spotting striking female talent. A more recent example was their signing of the Welsh singer Aimee Duffy in 2007.
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;Pierre Perrone, obituary of Michael Stewart, The Independent, November 27, 2002. In Wounds to Bind: A Memoir of the Folk-Rock Revolution (2014), We Five's Jerry Burgan substituted Jefferson Airplane for the Mamas and Papas. indeed, Bivens' voice and that of Mary Travers had a similar atmospheric quality, although Bivens' was the more commanding. In the latter respect. There was also a similarity with both Judith Durham of the Australian group the SeekersJerry Burgan has described We Five's approach to Sylvia Tyson's You Were On My Mind as "the Seekers, but with balls" and drawn attention to similar harmonization on that recording and the Seekers' Georgy Girl (1966): Burgan with Alan Rifkin (2014) Wounds to Bind: A Memoir of the Folk-Rock Revolution. and Dusty Springfield, initially of the Springfields,In the late 1950s, Dusty Springfield, then known by her birth name of Mary O'Brien, had been a member of group called the Lana Sisters. Burgan has observed of Springfield that "her epic bluesiness ... was something only another woman – only a Beverly – might really grasp": ibid. who made their names in England in the early to mid-1960s as the lead singers of folk-oriented groups. Others whose vocal delivery has borne comparison have included in the 1960s Judy Dyble (the original lead singer of England's premier folk-rock band, Fairport Convention), Kerrilee Male and Dorris Henderson (successive lead singers of Eclection), and more recently Lavinia Blackwall of Trembling BellsSee, for example, John Mulvey in Mojo, October 2010 regarding the Bells' being "aligned" with Fairport Convention and "ending up today as a band with a palpable crush on Jefferson Airplane". and Zooey Deschanel in her recordings with M. Ward as She & Him.For example, the albums Volume One and Volume Two (Domino, 2008 & 2010) and cover version of the Smiths' Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want for the film (500) Days of Summer (2009). The Sunday Times described Deschanel's songwriting as "steeped in sublime West Coast harmonies and references to the classic folk-pop of the 1960s and 1970s" (Hardeep Phull, Sunday Times Culture, March 21, 2010). Jerry Burgan has also cited Stevie Nicks of the Anglo-American band Fleetwood Mac.
Personal interests and images
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.See, for example, Lisa Law (1987) Flashing on the Sixties. The mini-skirt really only took off internationally after British model Jean Shrimpton caused much controversy by wearing a shift dress four inches above the knee at Derby Day, first day of the Melbourne Cup Carnival in Australia on October 30, 1965: see Shrimpton (1990) My Autobiography.