In June 1967 The Buckinghams were booked to play on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, one of the hottest, and often most controversial, television shows at that time. Tom and Dick Smothers had brought a number of rock’s biggest hit makers and groundbreaking artists onto their show. Having just released their second LP, Time and Charges, this was The Buckinghams’ first trip out to the West Coast. However, on this appearance, the last laugh would end up being on the show’s production team. When The Buckinghams arrived at CBS Studios in Television City, they found their performance set was covered in the Union Jack. The set designers had done a beautiful job, but what nobody seemed to realize is that The Buckinghams weren’t a British group – they were from Chicago – and their band wasn’t named after Buckingham Palace; it was named after Chicago Central Park’s Buckingham Fountain. With no time to change the set design, The Buckinghams performed “Don’t You Care” and “Mercy Mercy Mercy,” introducing the Chicago sound to audiences across North America, surrounded by British flags. No mention of the mistake was made during the broadcast, but I’m sure somebody got in trouble for not doing better research on the guests.
One of the biggest hit makers of the late 1960’s, The Buckinghams led the pack of groups coming out of Chicago at the end of the decade. Comprised of Dennis Tufano (lead singer), Carl Giammarese (guitar), Nick Fortuna (bass), Marty Gebbs (keyboards) and John Poulos (drums), the group hit big with “Kind of a Drag,” which sped up to the top of the Billboard charts in February 1967. Over the next year they’d have another four Billboard Top Ten hits with “Don’t You Care,” “Mercy Mercy Mercy,” “Hey Baby, Their Playing Our Song,” and “Susan.” They distinguished themselves from their contemporaries by including a big brass horn sound behind them. The Buckinghams released four albums over three years before initially folding in 1970. But over a short time, The Buckinghams became one of America’s leading bands in the charge against the British Invasion.
But today original band members Carl Giammarese and Nick Fortuna continue to keep Chicago marked on the rock n’ roll map with the current incarnation of The Buckinghams. Reformed in the mid 1980’s with Carl taking over the duty of lead vocalist, The Buckingham have been keeping their brand of music alive to enthusiastic audiences looking to relive one of the most exciting eras of music in modern history.
I’ve been acquainted with Carl Giammarese nearly as long as I’ve been working as a writer, so when I put together a list of individuals I wanted to talk with for Vinyl Stories, Carl was right at the top of the list. He’s one of the nicest guys in the business, and reconnecting with Carl after many years has been just wonderful. Warm and interesting, it’s so easy to talk to Carl, who brings his years of knowledge and professionalism to every story he tells. But, in preparing for this interview, I also had the opportunity to take a deep dive into Carl’s discography including The Buckinghams’ original four releases – “Kind of a Drag,” “Time and Charges,” “Portraits” and “In One Ear and Gone Forever” – as well as albums which he and former bandmate Dennis Tufano released in the 1970’s under the name Giamarrese-Tufano. Carl indulged me by talking about all these albums, as well as the Chicago music scene, and revealed some of the things that he is working on right now.
Sam Tweedle: I want to begin by asking you a bit about the Chicago music scene. As an outsider, or perhaps as a Canadian, I think cities like Liverpool, New York, LA, London and Seattle, maybe Minneapolis and Detroit, get a lot of recognition for their music scenes but Chicago, despite its colourful history of producing incredible performers, doesn’t always get the recognition it should. From jazz through to pop and rock music, there has been a huge number of groups and artists that come out of Chicago. Off the top of my head I can think of The Buckinghams, The New Colony Six, The Shadows of Knight, Coven, Donny Hathaway, Minnie Riperton and, of course, the band Chicago. Did you find Chicago in the 60’s to be an exciting time to be in music?
CarlGiammarese: There was a real movement in Chicago in the 60’s. The music scene was very strong, and we had a lot of venues to perform at. There were a lot of clubs and dance halls around Chicago, and you could jump from one to the other every week. I was a high school kid, and I was playing every weekend and making up to three hundred dollars a week. But you know, as you mentioned, there was The New Colony Six, The Ides of March, The Cryan’ Shames, The Shadows of Knight. We’re all still going, and we do five or six shows a year together called “The Cornerstones of Rock.” Of all those groups, The Buckinghams were probably the only one that made it big nationally, while the rest of them were popular in Chicago and the Tri-State Area. But, yeah, there was a really great Chicago music scene, but on a national level, a lot of these groups never broke out.
Sam: Perhaps not, but those Chicago groups seem to have a cult following amongst music scholars and record collectors. They have a definite fanbase, still today, of people that lived beyond Chicago. I just bought albums by The New Colony Six and The Cryan’ Shames this year! Now, if you had to, how would you define the Chicago sound?
Carl: I don’t know how to describe it, other than it’s very eclectic. It’s coming from a lot of different places. It’s just a lot of different music ideas. The Buckinghams had a polished horn sound, a lot like the band Chicago eventually had. I mean, if you listen to “Portraits,” the horn arrangements sound a lot like those on the first Chicago album. We helped develop that sound because when we first recorded “Kind of a Drag,” our producer had a big band, and he got his trombone player to write the charts. That’s also probably why the horn section on “Kind of a Drag” is trombone-driven. So that sound was adopted by Chicago later on. But then you look at a band like The Shadows of Knight, and a song like “Gloria,” and it’s a raw rock sound that’s totally different. The Cryan’ Shames have a really sweet vocal sound. I don’t know if you could define what the overall Chicago sound was, but what I can say is everybody was really good because we really cut our teeth on playing a lot of different venues all the time. So, whatever the bands were doing, it was really done well.
Sam: Over the last couple of days, I pulled out all of The Buckinghams’ original albums, which I own in my collection, and I did a serious deep listen to them in the order that they were put out. What I found interesting is that, while in my head I felt that I knew what The Buckinghams sound like, when I listened to the albums in order, I feel that each one was very different in tone and sound, and that they are all very different from one another. Out of the four studio albums, the one that I felt sounded the most like The Buckinghams that I hear in my head was the second album, Time and Charges.
Carl: Time and Charges is the most symphonic and has the most big horn arrangements. I think our producer, Jim Guercio, was a big fan of Otto Preminger movies where the soundtrack’s real big. So, it was a strange transition from our first album to the second. We came from the Kind of a Drag album, which was just us in a studio with a raw sound. I mean, we weren’t really that good as far as musicianship on our first album. Heck, I had only been playing a few short years, and all of us were still trying to get a handle on it. So, the material on that first album was pretty raw.
Sam: I was going to say that Kind of a Drag has a real garage sound to it, which I’ll admit that I kind of dig. It’s a lot edgier in a way that The Seeds or The Music Machine would become fan favorites for a few years after you guys had put Kind of a Drag out. That raw sound makes it a pretty cool album.
Carl: It did have a very raw garage band sound to it, because we were in Chess Studios in Chicago, being recorded on a four-track machine. But as I was saying, our producer for our first album, who was named Don Belloc, had a big band and he’s the one that pushed for the horn sound and put some horns on “I’ll Go Crazy,” “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” “I Call Your Name,” and “Kind of a Drag.” So, by the time that “Kind of a Drag” took off as a single, our contract with USA Records was up. It was a good position to be in because we had the number one record in the country, and we didn’t have a record deal. So, we had our choice and we wound up with Columbia Records and recording at CBS in New York City with Jim Guercio at a sixteen-track recording studio, and we have his expertise behind us. It just changed everything, even though we were the same band to a certain degree. The vocals were still certainly there.
Sam: But vocally, The Buckinghams have always been tight. All you need to listen to is the intricate backing vocals on the chorus of “Kind of a Drag.” You guys weren’t known for being a vocal group, but the timing is perfect. But what I really was thinking about when transitioning from Kind of a Drag to Time and Charges was how it must have affected you as a guitarist. I mean, the addition of the constant horn section, which became the defining sound of the group, pretty much cancelled out your guitar work. You don’t even get to perform any guitar solos on the album. How did that affect you, as the group’s lead guitarist?
Carl: Well, the guitar was pretty much insignificant on Time and Charges. That horn section became our sound. It changed for me when we had the opportunity to record Portraits, which was our Sgt. Pepper, and more the concept album in the way the songs fit together. For Portraits, we rented a house in L.A. for a few months and rehearsed and practiced it, and there was a lot of guitars on it.
Sam: I noticed that when relistening to Portraits. You even had a few Jimi Hendrix moments on it.
Carl: But you can hear the guitar on some of the earlier albums too. There is a guitar on “Kind of a Drag.” It’s very low and you have to listen hard, but its there. On “Don’t You Care” I was playing an acoustic guitar, and you can hear it a lot better. If you took the guitar out, you’d notice something is missing. “Hey, Baby (They’re Playing Our Song)” had no guitar. We didn’t put a guitar on that track at all. It just didn’t need it. The rhythm track was really the piano, bass and drums, and then the horns. But “Susan” had a nice acoustic guitar in it. The guitar just wasn’t necessary or right for a lot of what we were doing.
Sam: You forgot a single in there. You guys had a giant hit with “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” on Time and Charges. That was a cool track.
Carl: Oh yeah. Jim had recommended that we record “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy.” It had been a jazz instrumental by Cannonball Adderley, and we all kind of looked at each other and wondered how we were going to do that song. Well, there was this R&B singer named Johnny “Guitar” Watson who had put some lyrics to it, and Jim played it for us, and we thought it was great. It was fairly different from the rest of our material, but we took that and tried it. I think it was pretty soulful, considering that we were five white guys, but it still made it onto the R&B charts. I’m so happy we did that song, because it gave us a chance to do something a little different. All the other singles were written by Jim Holiday, and they all had a certain connection to one another, but “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” was different. When the A&R, people at Columbia heard our version of “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” they said, “Man, that’s the next single,” and they were right because it was our biggest selling single after “Kind of a Drag.” for us to do that.
Sam: Out of your four albums, Portraits is the album that I think sounds the least like what I think the Buckinghams is all about, because it’s the most psychedelic, which is not the way I’d define your sound. But, despite that, it’s a really strong release and a very interesting album.
Carl: Yeah, I agree. There are some pretty crazy ways we connected songs together. We thought of it as our concept album. We were hoping it might be something that could possibly break us out of the pop singles category and that maybe we could get a little heavier sound going. But it wasn’t really accepted. We were locked into who we were, and that’s what our audience wanted.
Sam: I’m going to admit my very favorite Buckingham album is In One Ear and Gone Tomorrow. It’s an album I buy whenever I see inexpensive copies so that I can gift it to friends or kids that are just getting into vinyl. I think it’s a real gem. You’ve mentioned you feel Portraits was your Sgt. Pepper, but I see an increase of creativity on this one. I really think it’s the most interesting and often most brilliant.
Carl: Right before we went in the studio to do In One Ear and Gone Tomorrow we had fired Jim Garcia, and we had another producer that wasn’t a real hands-on kind of guy. He more just told us to do our own thing. As a result, Marty Grebb took a lot of the control of the album.
Sam: That makes a lot of sense, as it is very keyboard oriented. What’s funny to me is that, until relistening to it for this talk, it never occurred to me that there weren’t any hits on it. I guess I just think of all the songs as being hits because they are as familiar to me as your charted hits because I’ve relistened to it so much.
Carl: I argue to this day that “Back in Love Again” should not have been the single from the album, and that “You Misunderstand Me” should have been. I think it’d have done much better as a single. But what I think was good about In One Ear and Gone Tomorrow was that all five of us were really involved in it. We were really involved in Portraits as well, and we played everything on those two albums. But we weren’t so much involved musically in Time and Charges.
Sam: One of the biggest parts of my current research is watching music programs from the 60’s and 70’s. The Buckinghams appeared on a lot of the biggest national programs. Do you have any memories of doing television, and are there any that were your favorite?
Carl: Well, I would say that doing The Ed Sullivan Show was the big one. I mean, back then, to be invited on that show was the epitome of success. But we got to joke around with The Smothers Brothers. The Smothers Brothers appearance was our first time out to California, and it was exciting for us. But someone at the show mistakenly thought that, by being called The Buckinghams, that we were a British group. They didn’t know we were from Chicago. So, when you watch the video of that show we are performing in front of the Union Jack because it was too late to change the stage setting. I guess they didn’t do their research, but we thought it was funny and they had a lot of fun with it.
Sam: I found an early performance of you guys performing “Kind of a Drag” on American Bandstand. Any memories of that show?
Carl: Dick Clark was a dear friend because we wound up doing live shows with him, even in the 80’s and 90’s. He used to do these MCV corporate dates, and they would often use us, and we were always good friends with him. But I remember doing our Bandstand appearance, Dick interviewed Dennis, and Dennis kind of froze up and couldn’t get his words out. He came off as being very timid. We gave him a hard time about that afterwards. But Bandstand was a great show to do. We didn’t have social media so the best thing that you could have happen is having a song played on Bandstand, or get invited to perform on any of those great TV shows.
Sam: Why did The Buckinghams break up initially?
Carl: By 1968, music seemed to be changing, and a lot of groups like us were left behind. By the time of the Monterey Pop Festival, things were going in a completely different direction. The sound of the day was heavier, and you had Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and The Jefferson Airplane. In two years, we went from AM to FM, and suddenly we couldn’t make four-minute singles or concept albums. It seemed like overnight we were in a whole different category. Groups like us and the Turtles, Gary Puckett and Union Gap, and The Association were just thought of being passé at that point. We lost the audience we once had and everything just changed. We didn’t feel it at first, but by 1970, Dennis and I didn’t even want to do The Buckinghams anymore. We were hearing a lot of different kinds of music and we started writing songs. I got myself a really nice Martin acoustic guitar and began writing a lot on that. We just wanted to go in the whole other direction.
Sam: Which led to the Tufano-Giammarese albums of course. I’ll admit it’s been quite a while since I’ve listened to the Tufano and Giammarese albums that I own, but after revisiting them for our visit, I was really struck by how, in a lot of ways, they really sound like albums of their time. The singer-songwriter had really come into the forefront in the 70’s, with artists such as Seals and Croft, Neil Diamond, Carol King and James Taylor, and you and Dennis really worked well within that world. These albums are very lyrically driven, with a nice sound that is very stripped down compared to the music you made with The Buckinghams. It’s some really nice stuff.
Carl: It was a great opportunity, because we had the power of Lou Adler and Ode Records behind us, and we were the right age for it. It was just me and Dennis with a percussionist and a bass player, but other than that, it was just our two voices. Dennis and I embraced that whole singer-songwriter thing, and when Lou Adler first signed us and brought us to L.A., he wanted to hear our whole repertoire of material. We sat in the studio with two microphones and our guitars and went through all our songs, and in and out was Carol King and Joni Mitchell and all these various artists that were hanging out, and being able to meet all of those people was one of the blessings of that period. Yeah. Joni Mitchell. Gosh, I was in love with her. I listened to her record in the studio. I’d sit in the back of the studio at A&M. While we were recording next door, on breaks I’d go in there and just sit in the back and listen to her do vocal tracks. She was just unbelievable.
Sam: Now I have the first two albums that you and Dennis did, but I just found out that there was a third album titled The Other Side, which, until now, I wasn’t aware existed. That is the only one of your albums I don’t currently own. It’s now on my always growing “want list.”
Carl: The Other Side was the last album we did out in L.A.. That had to be around 1976. We were excited to do that album because we took a little different direction, and it was an opportunity for us to work with some of the creme de la creme of studio musicians in L.A. at the time. The album was produced by Tom Scott. Tom was a premier sax player. His band was the L.A. Express, and he was doing music for some of the TV shows that were big in the 70’s, such as Starsky and Hutch and Beretta. But he was also signed to produce albums at Ode Records. So, with Scott, we got to work with some of the finest musicians, and it was a real joy to make that album. But, unfortunately, we didn’t have much success with it. It was a good album, but we weren’t writing the hits. That’s the problem. We wrote some nice songs. A song I wrote for our first album, “Music Everywhere,” got a lot of airplay, and it did move up the Billboard Charts into the 60’s, but then that was it. We just couldn’t break through with another single that would propel us into a greater success.
Sam: Only a few years after The Other Side, The Buckinghams ended up reforming. What were the circumstances that brought you guys back together?
Carl: The Buckinghams got back together in 1980 when we were asked by WLA Radio to play at their stage at Chicagofest. I managed to get Nick and Dennis together. Marty wasn’t available because he was playing with Chicago at the time, and John was sick and passed away that same year. So, we reunited for that one show at the time when the music of the 1960’s was going through a resurgence.
Sam: That resurgence in the 1980’s was such an important time for me in my musical journey, and probably has a lot to do with the music fan I am today. That was when I first discovered The Buckinghams as well. I used to take my allowance to the local Kmart and purchase these strange off-brand 60’s music compilation cassette tapes, and they’d have tracks by groups like The Vogues and The Shangri-Las and Jan and Dean and so forth, and I know for a fact that it was on one of these cassette tapes that I first heard “Kind of a Drag.” This was also around the time that The Monkees had a resurgence on MTV, which was a massive touchstone for me. By that time, I was pretty much just listening to 1960’s music exclusively and paying no attention to the Billboard charts.
Carl: Well, that resurgence helped The Buckinghams a lot. After Chicagofest we kept getting offers to play various shows or whatever. But in 1984, promoters Howard Silverman and David Fishof were producing a tour called The Happy Together Tour with Gary Puckett, Spanky and Our Gang, The Association, and The Turtles. That tour was so successful that they went on to do the 1985 tour, and they got The Turtles, Gary Lewis and the Playboys, The Grassroots, and asked us to join the roster. I don’t remember how many dates we played. It was seven months long and we crisscrossed the US and Canada for months and months. We probably did over two hundred shows. Well, that was the start of us going back out on the live stage again. Right after that tour the same producers put on the Monkees tour, which was one of the biggest tours of 1986.
Sam: So, with those dates in mind, next year you and Nick will be going on your fortieth year since the Buckinghams reformed, and when you took over as lead vocalist. That’s pretty amazing! Now I know you have recorded some original material, including “Reaching Back” and a Christmas album, as well as produced albums for other musicians. Are you working on any projects currently?
Carl: I’m very much into the digital recording these days. I use a logic system, which is an Apple system, to record multi track digital recordings. I’m about halfway through putting out a solo album. I play a lot of the guitar tracks, and I’ve had other musicians help me out. I’ve programmed drums and played bass and had some keyboard players working at it with me. I do it because it helps keep my sanity. I need to be creative and do original music. I did a song with a singer from the Chicago area named Lisa McClowrey, which has gotten some airplay and is on Spotify. Lisa is a fantastic singer, but she actually has made her career out of impersonating Cher, and she is in demand. I mean, she works everywhere. They had a show in Vegas called Legends and they had all different characters in the show, and she was Cher. But anyway, she and I did a song that I wrote, called “I Would Love You Forever,” which I’m really happy with, and it has got some action.
Sam: That’s great, and I can’t wait to hear the solo project when you drop it. I also know from your website and social media feeds that The Buckinghams are still going to be going strong in 2025.
Carl: You know, what keeps my sanity is The Buckinghams are still going and we’re still doing good. We just played a small theater up in Wisconsin for two nights, and it wasn’t a big room. It was about a two hundred and fifty seat theater, but it was packed. It was a full house, and people continue to be very enthusiastic. We’re very grateful we have such a great audience that still comes out to the shows.
I always love talking to Carl Giammarese. Not only is he a great conversationalist full of interesting facts and stories, but he is also one of the true gentlemen in the music industry. Reconnecting with him has been a great joy. The Buckinghams have dates throughout the US all through the fall and winter of 2024, and will be booking more dates into 2025, which will mark the 40th Anniversary of their first outing with The Happy Together Tour. A Buckinghams show is always a good time, so don’t miss the chance to truly celebrate the group’s legacy in the next year by seeing them when they come to a city near you. For more information on their current projects and upcoming appearances, visit The Buckinghams website at https://thebuckinghams.com/.
