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NEW YORK - In the world of "now" music, ya gotta have a name. And brother, do they have them! There's the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Jefferson Airplane, the Mamas and the Papas, the Lovin' Spoonful, the Kings, the Cowsills – the WHO?
The Cowsills
If you don't know what the Cowsills are, they are a singing group. They are also members of a family named Cowsill. They didn't make up the name.
And they are not just a couple of brothers who thought they'd give rock and roll a whirl. The actual singers are four brothers and their mother, but the entire family is involved in seven youngsters and two adults being Cowsills.
They are one of the hottest new things in show business.
Success began to hit them in a hot blast last summer, and in four months they have been signed with MGM records; they have put out one album and a single and are in the process of making a second album.
They have appeared on the Tonight show; and, most incredible of all - Ed Sullivan took one look at them, booked them to appear in October on his show and signed them to a 10-appearance contract through 1969.
So what's so special about the Cowsills? Well, for one thing they have a very nice sound. For another they write their own songs, and the lyrics have meaning and the words are honest.
And that's the key to their impact: they are honest, clean and genuine.
They come across as what they are: a large, musical American family that sings about things common to all of us.
The family consists of Bud and Barbara Cowsill and their children: Bill, 19, who does most of the song-writing and arranging; Bob and Dick, 18; Paul, 15; Barry, 13; John, 11; and eight-year-old Susan, the only girl in the family.
But the spring that winds the family very obviously is Barbara Cowsill.
Mrs. Cowsill is a small woman with blonde hair, large brown eyes and a sense of inner strength.
She is trim and smart and young enough to look like one of her boys on the record covers, but there are lines around her eyes that reveal the strain of raising that family, ocasionally without enough money and frequestly by herself.
Surveying the chaos of the three-room apartment into which all the Cowsills were jammed when they first came to New York, Barabara Cowsill tried, with constant interruptions from her brood, to explain what had happened to them, and how they got started.
"We've always been a musical family. My husband did 20 years in the Navy and when he'd come back from Europe he'd bring the kids something. I don't know why, but it was usually a musical instruent.
"Bill had a nice voice - it was a soprano then, but it was a good voice - and then Bob came along and by coincidence they had a natural harmony together.
"And Barry had a little set of bongos and then of course John wanted to play the drums, too, and it happened that those two had a natural harmony as well."
"But we never expected this kind of success, not the Sullivan Show, anyway," she said with a grin.
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