The idea worked perfectly at first: In 1967, Gary Puckett dressed his rock ‘n’ roll band in Union Army uniforms, catching the attention of an important Columbus, Ohio, DJ, who happened to be a Civil War buff. Soon Puckett and the Union Gap had a smash single, “Woman, Woman,” and a reliable gig at a Cleveland hotel basement club.
But there was a problem. As the Union Gap grew bigger, it had to tour the South. In their Northern uniforms. In the ’60s. “We were a little hesitant to go,” recalls Puckett, 75, by phone from his Clearwater, Fla., home. “We got this concert in Birmingham, Ala., when they used to do the big radio-station promotional things. We thought, ‘Gosh, what are we going to do? What if we walk out on stage in these outfits and the people go, ‘Boo’? So we got this Confederate flag that was probably 4-by-7, and we rolled it up and laid it over the keyboards. When they introduced us, we walked over and two of us grabbed a corner of the flag — and 6,000 people gave the rebel yell. And we were in.”
Puckett has no second thoughts. The band wore Northern uniforms in the first place simply because they looked sharp, and possibly because an earlier group, Paul Revere and the Raiders, had already thought up the idea of Revolutionary War costumes. The Confederate flag was just a survival mechanism. “It never occurred to me it would be that vital to those people, or they would harbor feelings against us,” Puckett says, in his fast-talking way of repeating the Union Gap’s post-British Invasion biography. “I never did that with any intent about slavery, or about the Civil War. It was just an idea. An outfit. We looked great! I was just out to conquer the music world.”
Puckett’s musical story begins when he was small. His parents met in their high school band and went on to be touring members of Dick Halverson’s big band. Puckett’s mother played piano every day and his father was a saxophonist. (They eventually quit the band because tour buses were “drafty and cold and uncomfortable” back then,” he says.) While Puckett’s dad invited singers to the house to rehearse for barbershop quartet competitions, and his mother performed in a corresponding group called the Sweet Adelines, Puckett and his four younger siblings were required to take music lessons. Puckett chose piano.
“I grew up in the rock ‘n’ roll era, and (my parents) were a little dismayed at that,” Puckett says. “Rock ‘n’ roll just reached out and grabbed my soul.”
Born in Hibbing, Minn., raised in Yakima, Wash., Puckett added guitar to his repertoire as a teenager. He went to college for two years in San Diego, then dropped out to work in bands, including one called the Outcasts. Puckett had pitched a song demo to Jerry Fuller, a writer and producer, who came to see the band perform at a bowling alley and helped them sign to Columbia Records. By this point, the band was called the Union Gap, named not for the Civil War but for a city near its home base of Yakima.
“Woman, Woman,” setting Puckett’s oddly evocative high pitch against horns and strings, hit the Top 10 in 1967, and Fuller’s plan was to reproduce the success over and over. “Young Girl” went creepily overboard — in his haunted baritone, Puckett warned a girl “you better run” because “my love for you is way out of line” — but was nonetheless the band’s top hit. When the Union Gap’s chart success began to recede, CBS and the band’s managers changed the financial terms for the band, forcing defections. At one point, Fuller put together what Puckett calls a “big band” of 40 pieces to record a non-rocking single, “Don’t Give In To Him,” which opened a rift between the producer and the singer.
The band broke up in 1970. Puckett went solo, without much commercial success, and he tried throughout the ’70s and ’80s to make it as an actor. It wasn’t until 1984, when he joined a tour with fellow not-quite-forgotten ’60s rockers, then opened for the Monkees, that he found a renewed audience on the oldies circuit. He continues to perform with a new Union Gap — and he continues to regret not surrendering himself more completely to Fuller’s original Columbia vision for extending the band’s hit cycle in the late ’60s.
“I knew that he knew what he was doing, but I was young and bulletproof and full of my own desires to be more in control and write more and produce more. I should have said, ‘Jerry, I’ll go along with you, I’ll do whatever you want me to do,” Puckett recalls. “It was all starting to get upside-down, and the ’60s became the ’70s, and it was a whole new generation — from David Bowie to T. Rex, all the way to disco. We got left behind.
“So, yes, regrets,” he continues. “But I ended up being what I am today. I’m making a great living, I have a wonderful family, two beautiful grandchildren. You can regret things, but you go, ‘You know what? I may not be in the place I am today.’ “
Steve Knopper is a freelance writer.
onthetown@chicagotribune.com
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