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Track listing

Side one

1. “Baby Blue” (Dylan)
2. “The Sins of a Family” (Sloan)
3. “There’s Nothing Else on My Mind” (Pistilli-Cashman)
4. “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” (Dylan)
5. “Don’t You Wonder Where It’s at” (Sloan-McGuire)
6. “Ain’t No Way I’m Gonna Change My Mind” (Sloan-Barri)

Side two

1. “Walking My Cat Named Doc” (Tenega)
2. “She Belongs to Me” (Dylan)
3. “You Never Had It So Good” (Sloan-Barri)
4. “Sloop John B.” (Sloan-Barri-McGuire-Howe)
5. “What Exactly’s The Matter With Me” (Sloan)
6. “Why Not Stop & Dig It While You Can” (McGuire)

     After
Barry left the Christys, work was hard to find. He spent the Winter and
part of Spring, 1965 contacting producers, to no avail. But in April,
Barry went to Ciro’s in L. A. to see his old friends Roger McGuinn and
Gene Clark, whose band, the Byrds, was celebrating the release of their
single, “Mr. Tambourine Man.”
Bob Dylan was there, and so was
producer Lou Adler. During the show, Barry saw a guy on the dance floor
just bopping up and down while looking up at the ceiling. So he decided
to try it out himself, and was bouncing around on the dance floor. Lou
Adler spotted him and said, “Aren’t you McGuire?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, are you doing any singing?”
“Well, not recently.”
“Would you like to?”
“Well, yeah.”
Then Lou said, “Come over to my office next week. I’ve got some tunes I
think you might like.”

     Lou Adler was a man who knew the music business inside and out. He
had written songs for people like Sam Cooke, had been one of Jan and
Dean’s managers, had worked in music publishing and for various record
companies. By 1965, Adler, along with Jay Lasker and Bobby Roberts, had
started a publishing company called Trousdale
and a production company called Dunhill. P. F. (Phil) Sloan and Steve
Barri, who had written some surf songs that became hits and had a band
called the Fantastic Baggys, worked for Adler as songwriters and
musicians. Lou introduced Barry to Phil Sloan, who was now writing
songs that contained serious social messages born from an overwhelming
sense of frustration, disgust, and outrage at the system and the way
things were going in the world. Barry was ready to start singing songs
that reflected these ideas and feelings. “When I left the Christys,”
Barry says, “ I left looking for answers. I was in a kind of a
spiritual, philosophical search at that time. We were going through the
whole social question, turmoil of the day within ourselves. Why not do
this? Why shouldn’t we do that? How come we have to do this? Who says
we gotta do that? And then we started to get down to, well, what is the
basic ultimate truth, and what is life? What is the universe? Where did
it come from? Where is it going? What’s on the other side of death?
What was on the backside of birth? ‘Eve Of Destruction’ was just a
continuation down that road. At least I felt I could compile all the
problems, and I thought that’s what Phil did in the song. All the
problems, but no answers.” Unlike the cheery tunes of the Christys,
“Eve of Destruction” was a grave, prophetic warning of imminent
apocalypse. It was a song that expressed the frustrations and fears of
young people in the age of the Cold War, Vietnam, and the arms race.

     Barry signed with Dunhill in May, 1965, and started recording with
Phil Sloan (guitar, harmonica and co-production with Adler), Larry
Knetchel (bass), Tommy Tedesco (guitar). Barry played guitar and
percussion. Sometime between July 12th and the 15th, they recorded “Eve
of Destruction.” Barry recalls that the song was recorded in one take.
There were only thirty minutes left in the recording session. Barry
remembers, “I got my lyrics that I’d had in my pocket for about a week.
I smoothed all the wrinkles out of them, and we wrote the chords down
on a piece of brown paper that somebody got some chicken in or
something, and we folded little creases and hung them on the music
stands and went through it twice. They were playing and I’m reading the
words off this wrinkly paper. I’m singing, ‘Well, my blood’s so mad
feels like coagulatin’, that part that goes, ‘Ahhhhhh, you can’t twist
the truth,’ and the reason I’m singing ‘Ahhhhhh’ is because I lost my
place on the page. People said, ‘Man, you really sounded frustrated
when you were singing.’ Well, I was. I couldn’t see the words. I wanted
to re-record the vocal track, and Lou said, ‘We’re out of time. We’ll
come back next week and do the vocal track.’ Well, by the next weekend,
the tune was released. The following Monday, it was being played on the
#1 rock music station in Los Angeles, and it was incredible what
happened. It all just exploded.”

     It turns out that a photographer and record promoter by the name
of Ernie Farrell visited Lou Adler’s office on July 16th to see if Lou
had any records to promote, and he picked up a couple of 45s off of
Adler’s desk without Lou’s knowledge. That afternoon, Farrell was
scheduled to take photos at a birthday party at the home of the program
director at KFWB. Farrell was taking pictures, went to get some
flashbulbs out of the trunk of his car, and he saw the 45s there. He
played the 45s for the kids at the party, and they really didn’t
respond to any of them until Farrell played “Eve of Destruction.” They
demanded that he play it repeatedly. The kids took it into their father
and asked him to listen to it. He phoned KFWB and said, “I’ve got next
week’s pick to hit.” The folks at Dunhill rushed the one take of “Eve”
back into the studio to get it ready for immediate release, but Barry
wasn’t around that weekend, so they mixed it, pressed it and shipped it
out by that following Monday, July 19th (although the official release
date is July 21st). So Barry never got a chance to re-record the vocals.

     In the first week of its release, “Eve” was at #30 in the Cash Box
charts, and #103 in the Billboard charts. By August 12th, Dunhill
released the LP, Barry McGuire Featuring Eve of Destruction. The LP
reached it’s high of #37 on Billboard the week ending September 25th,
the same day that the single “Eve of Destruction” soared to #1 in both
the Cash Box and Billboard charts. One would think that any musician
whose single had such quick and huge success would be propelled into
ever-increasing stardom and opportunities in the music industry. But
“Eve of Destruction” actually had the opposite effect, because its
success came in sales before success in airplay. It was a song that
captured the ear of the public before it caught the attention of most
radio stations. A lot of radio station managers, DJs, and playlist
controllers were upset that “Eve” made it big without going through
them. Barry says, “I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I heard that
the word was that no matter what I came out with next, nobody was gonna
play it because I was a loose cannon in the music business. They didn’t
have control of the last one, and they weren’t gonna let the next one
get away from them.”

     Then
there was the reaction of the media. Phil Sloan remembers, “The media
frenzy over the song tore me up and seemed to tear the country apart. I
was an enemy of the people to some and a hero to others, but I was
still only 20 years old and nobody really was looking. I have felt it
was a love song and written as a prayer because, to cure an ill you
need to know what is sick. In my youthful zeal I hadn’t realized that
this would be taken as an attack on The System!

     The media headlined the song as everything that is wrong with the
youth culture. First, show the song is just a hack song to make money
and therefore no reason to deal with its questions. Prove the 19-year
old writer is a communist dupe. The media claimed that the song would
frighten little children. The United States felt under threat. So any
positive press on me or Barry was considered un-patriotic. A great deal
of madness, as I remember it! I told the press it was a love song. A
love song to and for humanity, that’s all. It ruined Barry’s career as
an artist and in a year I would be driven out of the music business
too.”

     On top of all this, there was flack from both conservatives and
liberals. On the right wing, a group called The Spokesmen released an
“answer” record called “The Dawn of Correction,” and a few months
later, Barry Sadler released “Ballad of the Green Berets.” On the left,
musicians who had been writing and singing protest songs for years were
not happy that a kid who wrote surf songs and a former member of the
Christys had found success with a protest song of their own. Phil Ochs,
for example, said that the quality of “Eve of Destruction” was
terrible, and called its philosophy “juvenile.” He cautioned that
protest songs by their very nature could never maintain a popular
status, adding, “The Top Forty revenge is one of the fastest revenges
in the country. When people get turned off, that’s it: instant death. I
think the protest thing will die out pretty fast.”

     There were some exceptions to the ill treatment “Eve” received.
For example, on September 20th, 1965, Barry sang “Eve of Destruction”
on NBC’s Hullabaloo. But Barry looks back now and thanks God that the
reaction to “Eve of Destruction” kept him from further fame and
fortune. He believes it would have killed him. “It’s just as well I
didn’t get another hit tune,” he says. “I would have gone the way of
Jim Morrison, Hendrix, or Joplin. I say ‘Thank God,’ and I do thank God
for that, too, because I wouldn’t have survived. I think God did ‘Eve
of Destruction.’ It was supernatural. I was just dumbing my way through
the day, and it all happened. I came up with some great tunes after
‘Eve of Destruction,’ and none of them happened, and I couldn’t figure
out what was going on. But I’m sure glad nothing did, because I would
have been history by now.”

Nelle
due presenze al Festival ne vincono uno con: Se piangi se ridi, nel
1965.
Quindi una percentuale di vittorie del 50%.
Formazione del gruppo che conquistò la città dei fiori: Karen Gunderson, Ann White, Larry Ramos, Art Podel,
Clarence Treat, Paul Totash, Barry Kane, Nick Woods e Barry McGuire. Nel
corso degli anni subisce poi oltre quindici cambiamenti d’organico.
Gruppo folk,
erede del Christy Minstrels fondato nel 1942 da Edwin Pop
Christy. Fino all’arrivo al Festival di Sanremo del 1965 il nome ufficiale
del gruppo era New Christy Minstrels al modo che lo ribattezzò Randy
Sparks che lo aveva rifondato nel 1962. Sui dischi che riportano le canzoni
cantate al Festival di Sanremo appare solo il nome Minstrels. Il
repertorio è ispirato soprattutto alle folk-songs tradizionali americane
e si dice che fosse questo il gruppo preferito dal Presidente degli Stati
Uniti Lyndon Johnson. Uno dei componenti, Barry McGuire, nelI’estate del
1965 incide Eve of distruction che arriva al primo posto delle classifiche
americane.
Repertorio musicale: Se piangi se ridi, Le colline sono in fiore, Green
green, Saturday nights, Miss Katy cruel.