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In 1965, the Cowsills were formed by brothers Billy, Bob, and Barry. In 1966, brother John joined. Sister Susan, brother Paul, and mother Barbara followed after that. Nowadays, Bob, Paul, and Susan are keeping the songs, memories, 'and other things' alive - and they're just as thankful as all of us for it.
Happy Together Tour "is a night of close to 30 hit songs all performed right there in one session," says Paul Cowsill, and he should know - him and his sibling band has been part of it for 11 years. The Cowsills, the band that shot to stardom in the 1960s with hits like "Hair," "The Rain, the Park, and Other Things," and "I Love The Flower Girl," were the inspiration for The Partridge Family, and while that is a cool feather in their cap (or, shall we say, flower in their cap), it is the songs themselves that put this Rhode Island family on the map - and keep them there, at least in terms of a certain audience.
Their relatable, sunshine-y tunes were total earworms, unapologetically bright and cheerful, and honest in their small-town warmth that many people didn't even realize they needed; or, as we discussed with Paul, what some people didn't allow themselves to admit they loved. (Teenage boys of the sixties - we're talking about you, but thanks for hopping on this sugary sweet bandwagon now while the Cowsills are still shining.)
Speaking of sugar, the Archies frontman, Ron Dante, is now an honorary member of The Turtles - the "Happy Together" singers who the tour is not only named for, but who started the traveling summer throwback shows. You'll hear all of those songs and so many more at a Happy Together concert, and this year's bill is stacked with the aforementioned Cowsills and Turtles, but also Gary Puckett & the Union Gap, Jay and the Americans, Little Anthony, and the Vogues.
The run of shows, which hit our area annually around this time of year, arrives at the beautiful bergenPAC on June 11. Make sure to head out if you're looking for an evening of peace, love, nostalgia, hope, and truly mutual appreciation for pop hits, acts with longevity, and positive energy.
Thank you for being part of this tour, Paul. It's always a great night. There are no skips and no lulls- nothing but a good time.
They've done a good job with it, Mark Volman of Flo and Eddie, the Turtles guys, and Howard Kaylan, too, back in the day, along with Ron Hausfeld and also the agency. I gotta tell you - they've been working on this a long time and the logistics, Debra? Phew! Have you seen this tour? I mean, it is night after night, [Laughs]. It’s crazy. It's so much fun, though! Here we are, a bunch of 70 year olds - well, not my sister, Susan. She is not a 70-year-old. She's a little kid to us! Still, we're all out there, and it's a joy for us to be able to do this. People always go, "Don't you get tired of singing those songs every night?" And I go, "Well, do you get tired of hearing them?" They don't. We don't. So, this is gonna go on forever, Debra.
I am so happy about that, because it's really the audience's treat on any day and at any age!
Absolutely. Oh my God, when we see these people roll in ... yeah, we might have to hold our show for five or 10 minutes because with our gang, it might take a little bit more time for us to get situated. That audience, though, and the fans of this genre of music? It's not about the bands anymore, it's about the songs, you know? We've been well forgotten, but the song is never forgotten, so to just be out there on stage is special. When we do "Hair," which has the whole beginning track, we never even thought they'd put that on the radio, but they did! To hear the whole audience singing the beginning of that song in rhythm with the exact proper words now? I don't think there's another generation that this is going on with.
Some people may not have even heard the song in quite a few years, but it's like muscle memory. The lyrics come right back to them.
It is. What they're hearing brings them right back; I know because I'm one of them. Songs take me back to junior high or high school, and being on whatever bus I was on, making my way to school. These are the songs you heard. Out in the audience, everyone is reliving those times. It's like getting into a time machine coming to this show.
The visuals behind you guys on the screen do that, too.
Yes!
The color scheme of the posters, as well, and even the fashion that people come out with and wear to the shows are vintage and cool. Nothing is overly nostalgic, though, and I want to remind people of that. These songs are still within you, and once you arrive to the show, you don't have to go searching too far back in your mind for them, because if it grasped you then, it's in you now.
It is. I will tell you this: Susan, she turned 64 not too long ago, I think, and as I'm introducing us on stage, I say the ages, but I wasn't saying Susan's age. I was asking everybody in the audience, I said, "Hey, you guys, when you all woke up and it was your 64th birthday, what was the very first thing you all thought?" And I'm telling you, there could be thousands of people in the audience, but they all know, and they all go, " 'When I'm 64' by the Beatles!" Not one of us thought we'd be at a concert discussing that when we would be in our seventies, but it's the most beautiful thing. The people love it. It's a phenomenon. Somebody should do a documentary about the psychology that's going on here. I don't really know if the seventies, eighties, nineties, or anything in the 2000s in 60 years are going to be able to fill up a place like the bergenPAC with their fans with everyone in sync. The bands are in sync with the audience, too. Maybe it's because we didn't have VH1 or MTV to watch for things, so we had to go and find the bands ourselves. We heard it on the radio, then we got the record, and we looked at the records and we read the record. Then we found out where this band was gonna be playing. When I talk to the people at the show, or after the shows, or before the show, we say, "We're never stopping!" This is what we did as kids, and now we're all retired, but who else can book a show on a Monday or Tuesday and feel confident that people are gonna be there only for us? [Laughs].
You make a good point with that!
We're retired! We've got time on our hands! I moved from Newport, Rhode Island, all the way to Oregon. When me and my wife moved to Oregon, and we got a farm and stuff like that, but I put myself right back to where I grew up. Newport was an island, and the ocean was close by, but I ran the parallel all the way to Oregon. I live on the same parallel that I lived in when I was a kid. There's just no ocean and there's a lot of mountains. We enjoyed our younger years, our youth, our generation. There were struggles and whatnot, but, boy, we were all living the music at the time, you know? Even my kids that are now in their fifties, they knew the Beatles' songs, and they knew all of the songs of the classic rock genre. They knew those songs and the words to them, and they still do. That was just our generation pushing this music. It was all about music for us as kids. It was incredible. It's still incredible! The great thing here is that back in the day when we all had concerts, kids and audience members were able to make their way to the stage somehow to say hi to us. There wasn't this big separation. The Cowsills would do a show, and we were not done after it that evening - our parents made sure of that. Susan was seven! We were not done with that evening until we signed something for every person that wanted an autograph. Back in the day, they could just linger in the theater or the venue. We'd sit on the edge of the stage and we would talk, so we kind of grew up our fans. We all feel like we're family members and that we grew up together, you know? All the bands back then were approachable. If you had the wherewithal, you could talk to [Mick] Jagger. If you could find where someone was going to be back then, it was a little puzzle to figure out how to get to there, but it was pretty easy to find who you wanted, because us as artists and bands, we wanted to meet these people.
[Laughs]. Absolutely. Even though you (and Jagger) became global sensations, you all wanted to form connections, and there were no worries around who it was with.
Yeah! And 55 to 60 years later of all of us doing this? Wow. Our people, our fans, our audience have been doing this right along us. When we are on stage and when they are in this audience, we're all a bunch of kids again. Trouble leaves you when you go through the doors at a Happy Together show. You just know that this is gonna be an hour-and-a-half to two hours of time in your day that you can just go, "Man, I needed that. That was great." [Laughs].
It truly does feel like that time and time again. Every band brings their A game, and you kick it off every year, and everyone leaves smiling.
It blows our minds. The six of us, whatever bands are out with us, they do a great job. The Happy Together Tour likes to change it up, and I think it's a good idea, but let me tell you something: there is not one person backstage that is sitting there going, "Ugh, we gotta do this again." [Laughs] That is not happening! Everybody back there ... we are fired up and excited. Deservedly or not deservedly or whatever, we know that as soon as we hit that stage that we are being loved, and you can feel the love from an audience, you know? It's an incredible feeling that they are there because of the songs, and we are there because of the songs!
These shows are like hearing our transistor radios blasting out at us again. I remember hearing The Beach Boys, The Association. These bands would come on the radio and it didn't even have to be your radio, because all the other radios were listening to the same station and playing the same music. It was a unity thing, you know? It was crazy how that happened. I remember it as a kid, and now as an old person, too, because we're up first up. The Cowsills get to open the show, and you're right, Debra - everybody is bringing their A game, because it's really important for us to be as good as we can be so that these people can hear what they want to hear. We take that as a responsibility. All the acts do. Everybody wants to do their best every night. What I always say to the gang is like, "Guys, this is an audition. Think of this as an audition. Then get out there and make sure people are happy. You can really work it. You can bring the energy." Wherever it comes from in our old bodies, it resurfaces then [Laughs]. After the show and before the show... not so much. We are younger, we're not in our eighties, but most of the cats on the roads are in their eighties, and they are getting through their day any way they can, but, boy, as soon as they get on stage, they are 17 again. They're 20 years old. We're all living like we're kids. When we hit this tour, me, Bob, and Susan will always go, "Hey, we're going to Summer Camp," [Laughs]. It's so much fun that we get to relive what we did, and the audience gets to relive what they did. We realize when we look at the audience that without them coming here, there's no us. We wouldn't be meeting like this if they didn't come, and this has to keep going, and everyone says that they are gonna keep doing this until they can't.
We all look forward to it, too. During the winter, most of us are hunkering down, unless we live in Hawaii or some beautiful place that doesn't get cold, but I remember the snowy rainy days in Newport then. We’d be playing pool or something back then and "Strawberry Fields Forever" would come on. When I hear "Strawberry Fields Forever" now, I constantly shoot back to that pool game that I can't even remember anything about except that we did it, you know? It's crazy how the music grabs you back. All of a sudden now I'm seeing myself at a junior high dance that I hadn't thought about in a long, long time, but then all of a sudden a song comes on and you go, "Oh my God. That's when I had that dance with that person," or "That's when I got in a fight outside the canteen!" [Laughs] The music is the vehicle and we're really lucky to be able to have these great songs that Bob and Susan and myself get to sing every night. Every night's different, but singing with my siblings is just about the most perfect thing that could be happening in life. Every time it feels that way. We're still singing together! We've lost some people in our family, of course, but the music goes on, and thank God that God has given us this talent, because when you're in your seventies, you expect that warbly voice to come out, but we haven't gotten that yet, so we're just still working our tails off so we don't lose it.
It even goes deeper, too. The big Jimi Hendrix fans, the big Who fans, the big Led Zeppelin fans - back in the day when we were kids coming up, there was a lot of pigeonholing. So, because we had light and happy music during what was happening, we were considered bubblegum or something. You had a whole sect of people that would probably not go to a Cowsills concert just because it wasn't cool. Well, now that Jimi Hendrix fan, that Who fan, that Zeppelin realizes that he was a fan of the genre the whole time, and that all of the music is good! There are people out there that might have gone, "Oh, the Cowsills? I don't know." Those are the people that are now going, "Oh, wow! They did that song? I love that song. They're ok!" And all those hard-edges from the sixties? They have all become a lot softer around the edges and say, "Man, this whole genre of music was great. I see that now." We're still getting new people out! It's never too late! Come to Happy Together and enjoy like you would've as a kid, and feel like a kid again, too! We all do!
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