(Rock, British Invasion) Chad & Jeremy - Of Cabbages & Kings; The Ark (Japanese Remaster with bonus tracks, DSD) - 1967 & 1968, APE (image+.cue), lossless

Of the many British Invasion acts that stormed the charts in the wake of the Beatles, Chad & Jeremy possessed a subtlety and sophistication unmatched among their contemporaries, essentially creating the template for the kind of lush, sensitive folk-pop embraced by followers from Nick Drake to Belle & Sebastian. Chad Stuart (born in Windemere, England, on December 10, 1941) and Jeremy Clyde (born March 22, 1941, in Buckinghamshire, England) met while attending London's Central School of Speech and Drama. The two became fast friends, and after Stuart taught Clyde to play guitar, they formed a folk duo as well as a rock & roll group, the Jerks. Because he graduated a year ahead of his bandmates, Clyde relocated to Scotland and performed with the Dundee Repertory Theatre.
When the Jerks dissolved, Stuart dropped out of school, studied arranging, and wrote songs with composer Russell Franks. Clyde returned to London soon after, but in the face of an actors' strike, he resumed his music career, reunited with Stuart, and the duo landed a residency at the local coffeehouse, Tina's. Chad & Jeremy quickly earned a fan following, and in mid-1963 composer and producer John Berry signed the duo to the small independent label Ember Records. They released their debut single, "Yesterday's Gone," that autumn and it entered the U.K. Top 40. Remarkably, it would prove their only British hit of any real substance.
By the time their sophomore effort, "Like I Love You Today," was released in early 1964, Chad & Jeremy were headlining the West End landmark Hatchett's. Despite the increased exposure, the record flopped, and Berry bought out his Ember contract, relegating the duo's planned LP to producer Shel Talmy in the process. Soon after the release of Chad & Jeremy Sing for You, the Daily Express published a photo of a young Clyde (a graduate of the prestigious private school Eton and a descendent of the famed Duke of Wellington) in royal garb at the 1952 coronation of Queen Elizabeth.
Given the credibility afforded the working-class backgrounds of rockers like John Lennon and Paul McCartney, the publicity proved a near-fatal blow, effectively branding Chad & Jeremy upper-crust nancy-boys merely pretending at careers in music. But, as the album tanked at home, Chad & Jeremy's U.S. label, World Artists, scored a Top 20 American hit with "Yesterday's Gone," followed in August of 1964 by "A Summer Song," a gorgeously nuanced and pastoral folk-pop masterpiece that cracked the Billboard Top Five. When "Willow Weep for Me" also charted in the U.S., Chad & Jeremy relocated to California and signed with the infamous manager Allen Klein, who negotiated a buyout of their World Artists contract and landed the duo a new deal with Columbia.
In late 1964, Chad & Jeremy made their American television debut on The Hollywood Palace. William Morris agent John Hartman was so impressed with their performance that he offered his representation, which resulted in appearances on the sitcoms The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Patty Duke Show. Chad & Jeremy were television fixtures for years to come, additionally appearing on The Danny Kaye Show, Shindig, and Hullabaloo. Between tour stops and studio dates, the pace was relentless and, in the spring of 1965, Stuart was leveled by mononucleosis. When Clyde accepted a role in the London musical Passion Flower Hotel (a nine-month commitment), he and Stuart quickly recorded an LP, I Don't Want to Lose You Baby, while the latter continued his rehabilitation.
The duo maintained they were not breaking up, but rumors reached a fever pitch when Clyde failed to return to the U.S. for a scheduled Chicago performance and forced Stuart to take the stage alone with a cardboard cutout of his partner under his arm. Stuart next released a record called "The Cruel War" with his wife, Jill, while Clyde cut a John Barry-produced solo single, "I Love My Love." Neither earned much attention, and at year's end Chad & Jeremy reunited to make a new album, Distant Shores, and film a proposed pilot for NBC. The show was rejected (in favor of another project with a rock & roll theme, The Monkees) and Chad & Jeremy instead guested on two episodes of the blockbuster Batman.
Chad & Jeremy spent close to a year in the studio with producer Gary Usher to create 1967's Of Cabbages and Kings, a dense, ambitious record dubbed "a soundtrack without the film" by Clyde. The album served to alienate much of the duo's core fan base, however, and sales proved dismal. Usher nevertheless produced the follow-up single, "Painted Dayglow Smile," followed in early 1968 by "Sister Marie." Tensions between Chad & Jeremy continued, prompted in large part by the latter's burgeoning acting career, and after completing The Ark — a project so expensive it led Columbia to terminate Usher's contract — the duo split, although the soundtrack to the film Three in the Attic, essentially a Stuart solo effort, appeared in 1969 under the Chad & Jeremy aegis.
Clyde turned to acting full-time and appeared alongside Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones in the long-running stage production Conduct Unbecoming. Stuart, meanwhile, signed on as music director for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, followed by a stint as a staff producer with A&M Records. Chad & Jeremy reunited in 1977 to record a handful of unreleased demos, and five years later, they signed to RCA's Rocshire subsidiary to release a comeback LP, Chad Stuart & Jeremy Clyde. The record went nowhere, but their partnership continued, first in a London production of Pump Boys and Dinettes and then as part of the 1986 "British Invasion II" package tour. Chad & Jeremy continued touring intermittently well into the 21st century.

It is said that finding someone who has actually listened to this album is harder than locating the rabbit hole that led Alice down into Wonderland. The '60s were indeed a wonderland in musical terms, especially when one got past the middle of the decade, at which point any recording artist with a contract was expected to create a deep, complex, and provocative masterpiece that could be compared to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It is ironic that the entire second side of this late period Chad & Jeremy album would be entitled "The Progress Suite," since for most listeners the music on this album hardly represented any kind of progress. This duo had been known for their beautiful harmonies and romantic, wistful music. Many a teenage couple had held hands to the sound of these British lads crooning the lines "Trees, swaying in the summer breeze." A case could be made that the efforts of Chad & Jeremy were just as important to the ambience of early-'60s radio as Mick Jagger and the lads, but the only kind of hands being held when it comes to Of Cabbages and Kings might be someone preventing someone else from putting it on. Yet it really isn't all that bad. True, it would be a lie of the first order to call it a masterpiece, which is often the temptation when a listener cradles the attractive cover in one's hand or thinks about what nice personalities these two performers seem to have. The biggest problem with the record is not that it aspires falsely toward greatness, but that the music composed by Jeremy Clyde and arranged and scored by Chad Stuart sadly lacks what is sometimes referred to in composition class as attractive melodic kernels. The writing tends to be drab and, worse, sounds like something one has heard thousands of times already. And this is really quite remarkable considering the amount of trouble the artists went to gaudying it up with all manner of orchestral trickery, all professionally done and sounding crystal clear in the mixes. Chad Stuart might write "Big deal" on the liner notes under his credit for playing a variety of string and keyboard instruments, but it is something of a big deal when the performer in question was thought of previously as "just" a cute guy with a good voice and cool glasses. He is talented, and took on much work putting together the arrangements throughout this album. The end result is similar to, for example, the music performed by the high school orchestra at the conclusion of the film Mr. Holland's Opus. Or it may remind some of a performance by their own high school orchestra doing an original composition by everyone's favorite professor. The influence of the Beatles is a bit much, as some of the music is almost directly lifted from "A Day in the Life" and "Eleanor Rigby." One might also want to blame the Indian music influence on the Fab Four as well, but other listeners may find Chad Stuart's use of sitar as a regular part of the orchestra diverting, and perhaps even more relaxed than the Beatles' own blotting up of classical Indian influences. The song material that enters off and on through the long suite has some effective moments, as well as showing the vocal timbre and harmony singing style that made this duo popular in the first place. There is also skilled use made of various sound effects and voices, none of which makes the material any less pretentious. The set of songs on the first side also doesn't slouch when it comes to ambition, mixing in a variety of pop music styles including some heavy guitar. There is excellent bass playing throughout the record, sometimes pushed to the top of the mix. One of the songs is written by James William Guercio, a musically pompous character who went on to great success with the horrible Chicago — the band, not the city. In summation, the album seems to make a case for tolerance; repeated listening with an open mind will reveal more substance here than might seem the case based on the type of quick dismissals this record often gets. But only an extremely tolerant individual, with lots of time on their hands, is going to bother.

Exact Audio Copy V0.99 prebeta 4 from 23. January 2008
EAC extraction logfile from 26. November 2008, 18:19
Chad Stuart And Jeremy Clyde / Of Cabbages And Kings
Used drive : TSSTcorpCD/DVDW SH-W162C Adapter: 0 ID: 0
Read mode : Secure
Utilize accurate stream : Yes
Defeat audio cache : Yes
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Read offset correction : 6
Overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out : No
Fill up missing offset samples with silence : Yes
Delete leading and trailing silent blocks : No
Null samples used in CRC calculations : Yes
Used interface : Installed external ASPI interface
Used output format : Internal WAV Routines
Sample format : 44.100 Hz; 16 Bit; Stereo
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TOC of the extracted CD
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Range status and errors
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Filename C:\Chad Stuart And Jeremy Clyde (1967) Of Cabbages And Kings\Chad Stuart And Jeremy Clyde - Of Cabbages And Kings.wav
Peak level 100.0 %
Range quality 100.0 %
Copy CRC AF5C4FC2
Copy OK
No errors occurred
End of status report

While The Ark contained nothing quite as elaborate as "The Progress Suite" that had taken up one whole side of Of Cabbages and Kings, it was another psychedelic mishmash of styles -- Indian one minute, musichall the next -- of a kind so many popular performers had been indulging in at the time in hopes of making the next Sgt. Pepper. The difference was that most of Chad & Jeremy's peers had gotten it out of their systems the year before. But C&J were upper-class types who took naturally to the pretensions of the form -- they thought they were making Art. Their listeners thought differently: The Ark missed the charts, and Chad & Jeremy broke up.

Exact Audio Copy V0.99 prebeta 4 from 23. January 2008
EAC extraction logfile from 26. November 2008, 18:31
Chad & Jeremy / The Ark
Used drive : TSSTcorpCD/DVDW SH-W162C Adapter: 0 ID: 0
Read mode : Secure
Utilize accurate stream : Yes
Defeat audio cache : Yes
Make use of C2 pointers : No
Read offset correction : 6
Overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out : No
Fill up missing offset samples with silence : Yes
Delete leading and trailing silent blocks : No
Null samples used in CRC calculations : Yes
Used interface : Installed external ASPI interface
Used output format : Internal WAV Routines
Sample format : 44.100 Hz; 16 Bit; Stereo
Use compression offset : 0
TOC of the extracted CD
Track | Start | Length | Start sector | End sector
---------------------------------------------------------
1 | 0:00.00 | 2:20.46 | 0 | 10545
2 | 2:20.46 | 4:10.18 | 10546 | 29313
3 | 6:30.64 | 4:52.06 | 29314 | 51219
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13 | 40:38.51 | 2:31.39 | 182901 | 194264
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Range status and errors
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Filename C:\Chad & Jeremy (1968) The Ark\Chad & Jeremy - The Ark.wav
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Range quality 100.0 %
Copy CRC 514D63B4
Copy OK
No errors occurred
End of status report