Requiem for a soft-rocker
The members of the Association were still wearing suits and ties when they played the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, the opening act on a bill including Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company and other heroes of the new counter-culture. Their qualification for inclusion might have been their first Top 10 single, “Along Comes Mary”, a three-minute proto-psychedelic masterpiece written by Tandyn Almer.
The follow-up, “Cherish”, a No. 1, had swiftly recast them as purveyors of soft-rock before the great “Pandora’s Golden Heebie Jeebies”, with its koto intro and inner-light lyric, earned praise from no less a psychedelic authority than Dr Timothy Leary, despite going no higher than No. 35. But then “Windy” (another No. 1) and “Never My Love” (No. 2) put them firmly back in the middle of the road, where they have remained in the public mind ever since.
Anyone interested enough to turn over “Never My Love”, however, found a B-side that restated their claim to hippie credibility. It was called “Requiem for the Masses” and it begins with military snare drum rolls introducing a choir singing acappella: “Requiem aeternam, requiem aeternam…” Then a young man’s voice sings the opening lines against an acoustic guitar: “Mama, mama, forget your pies / Have faith they won’t get cold / And turn your eyes to the bloodshot sky / Your flag is flying full / At half-mast…” The snare drum tattoo continues behind the second verse: “Red was the colour of his blood flowing thin / Pallid white was the colour of his lifeless skin / Blue was the colour of the morning sky / He saw looking up from the ground where he died / It was the last thing every seen by him…” The backing falls away and the unaccompanied choir returns: “Kyrie eleison, kyrie eleison…”
And here’s the chorus: “Black and white were the figures that recorded him / Black and white was the newsprint he was mentioned in / Black and white was the question that so bothered him / He never asked, he was taught not to ask / But was on his lips as they buried him.” The song ends with a lonely bugle against snare drum and muffled tom-tom.
In 1967 this song could be about only one thing: the war in Vietnam. Of course there already had been “Masters of War” from Dylan, “Universal Soldier” from Buffy Sainte-Marie and “Eve of Destruction” from P. F. Sloan. And perhaps “Requiem for the Masses” is not a truly great record, but it stands alongside things like Country Joe and the Fish’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” and Earth Opera’s “The Great American Eagle Tragedy” as an ambitious and powerful contemporary statement from the world of white rock music.
Its composer was Terry Kirkman, a founder member of the group, who sang, played percussion and brass and woodwind instruments (maybe including the bugle part). Before “Requiem for the Masses”, he had written “Cherish” and another soft-rock classic, “Everything That Touches You”. Born in rural Kansas, he was brought up in Los Angeles, where he studied music, but it was while working as a salesman in Hawaii that he met Jules Alexander, with whom he would go on to found several groups in LA, including the Inner Tubes (with Mama Cass and David Crosby), before the Association came together as a six-piece band in 1965. He left for the first time in 1972, returned in 1979, left again in 1984, and thereafter took part in various reunion concerts while working as an addiction counsellor.
Terry Kirkman died this week, aged 83. It would be absolutely wrong to underestimate the courage it must have taken for a band famous for their soft-rock hits to record such an unequivocal song of protest during a year in which the B52s were pounding Hanoi and Lyndon Johnson was sending ever more ground troops into the fight against the Vietcong, still with support from the majority of the American public. Respect to him, then.
thebluemoment.com 
It’s Buffy St Marie!!
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Thank you. Now corrected. One of my better errors, I think.
Interesting story – shows you should never judge people. I always had the Associati
Never knew about the Inner Tubes! I can also say I thought I would go to my grave being the only person in the universe who dug Requiem For The Masses. So very pleased to hear there is another person who loves the song and gets the message. This is a very thoughtful piece and I have sent it on to half of southern California.
Well I never. Sad about Terry Kirkman. Requiem for the masses – and I thought that my schoolmate Paul and I were the only people, at least in the UK, who loved that song. And now I find out that I was wrong. In the midst of all the other ’67 hipness going on, we had the Association down as our guilty pleasure back then. White guys wearing suits at Monterey – now that was really stepping outside the norm. Many thanks for bringing all that back to mind, and great to learn fifty six years later that we were not alone!
Could I add The Byrds’ “Draft Morning” to the list of anti-war songs.
PS I treasure a good typo.
‘Silent Night / 7 O’Clock News’ by Simon & Garfunkel too.
Lovely stuff Richard. For nigh on 55 years ( I never heard it until early ’69) I’ve sworn by ‘Requiem…’ and thought I was alone in this. Still desperately uncool – a pal recently laughed in my face when he saw the cover pic to the excellent two disc Rhino comp – The Association did make some very fine records
Here’s the ‘obit’ from THE NEW YORK TIMES:
Terry Kirkman, Whose Band Was a Late-1960s Hit Machine, Dies at 83
A singer, songwriter and virtuoso musician, he was a founder of the clean-cut group the Association and wrote one of its biggest hits, “Cherish”.
By Alex Williams
Sept. 26, 2023
Terry Kirkman, a multi-instrumentalist, vocalist and songwriter who was a founder of the 1960s pop group the Association, whose lush vocal harmonies and sugary melodic hooks propelled a string of indelible hits, including “Cherish” (which he wrote) and “Along Comes Mary,” died on Saturday at his home in Montclair, Calif. He was 83.
His wife, Heidi Kirkman, said the cause was congestive heart failure.
A gifted musician who could play up to two dozen instruments, Mr. Kirkman and Jules Alexander, a guitarist and songwriter, formed the six-member Association in 1965. With a folk-inflected sound that was both sunny and sophisticated, the Association proved a veritable AM radio hit factory in its late-1960s heyday.
The band’s debut album, “And Then … Along Comes the Association,” released in 1966, spawned two signature hits of the era: “Along Comes Mary,” which hit No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 that June, and “Cherish,” which reached No. 1 in August. The group’s third album, “Insight Out,” released the next year, included two more Top 10 hits: “Never My Love” and “Windy,” the group’s second No. 1 record.
Along the way, the Association made dozens of appearances on “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” and other television variety shows. It also made a mark on the big screen, recording four songs, including the title track for the 1969 film “Goodbye, Columbus,” starring Richard Benjamin and Ali MacGraw and based on a Philip Roth novella.
Despite the Association’s chart-topping success, the group was dismissed by some critics, in part because of its blazer-and-tie image and parent-friendly sound, which seemed dramatically out of step in a Los Angeles rock scene dominated by hard-edged, psychedelia-tinged bands like the Byrds and the Doors.
In a fitting symbol of the Association’s curious place in the 1960s pop pantheon, the band opened the first night of the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967 but stood out as an odd fit at a boundary-pushing musical showcase in which Jimi Hendrix famously ignited his Fender Stratocaster onstage after a mind-warping set.
The three-day explosion of rock and paisley, held at the height of the so-called Summer of Love, is still celebrated as an apotheosis of the hippie era, thanks in part to “Monterey Pop,” the landmark 1968 documentary directed by D.A. Pennebaker. “It was an honor, it was historical, and it was really bad,” Mr. Kirkman said of the band’s Monterey performance in a 2015 interview with the music blogger Bo White. “We were the soundtrack and lighting check for the Monterey Pop Festival.”
Their performance included a high-school-level comedy skit that they had used on television, in which the band members pretended to be robots booting up one by one. It was, Mr. Kirkman added, “one of the worst mistakes that we ever, ever, ever, ever did,” Mr. Kirkman added.
He said that John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, who was one of the festival’s organizers, “just said to me bluntly a couple of years later, ‘So sorry you weren’t in the film. You didn’t fit the image.’”
But the Association’s relatively square public profile also helped broaden its audience to multiple generations. Mr. Kirkman’s intricate compositions like “Cherish” and “Everything That Touches You” called to mind Burt Bacharach.
Mr. Kirkman laid down the basis of “Cherish” in less than seven minutes, he said in a 2015 interview with the music website The College Crowd Digs Me, while sitting down with his first wife, Judith, who had just turned the television dial to “The Tonight Show.” “When I finished it, I was just barely into Johnny Carson’s monologue,” he said.
A delicate, intricately crafted love song, “Cherish” became ever-present on oldies radio over the decades, and wove its way into countless movies and television shows.
But, Mr. Kirkman told the site, “It’s not always a compliment,” adding, “‘Cherish’ has been used as a gag for being a kind of conservative, old-fashioned song in an otherwise hip movie.”
This was particularly galling to Mr. Kirkman, a staunch liberal who included an antiwar song, “Requiem for the Masses,” as the B-side of the “Never My Love” single.
“I am a natural-born civil rights activist from Kansas, and I was on the road with three guys who were really conservative, reactionary people,” he told Mr. White. “I stood back thinking, ‘That’s cool. That’s completely fair.’ You know, walk and talk, live your life. But it’s not the art that I want to make. I want the art to be about something besides jumping in the back seat, kiss me, doo-wop, doo-wop.”
Terry Robert Kirkman was born on Dec. 12, 1939, in Salina, Kan., the youngest of two sons of Millard and Lois (Murphy) Kirkman. When he was a child his family moved to Chino, Calif., near Los Angeles, where his father managed an auto-parts store and his mother taught music.
After receiving an associate degree in music at nearby Chaffey College, he became enmeshed in the flourishing scene at the Troubadour, the famed West Hollywood nightclub that served as a launching pad to stardom.
Before long, Mr. Kirkman and Mr. Alexander — whom he had met at a party in Hawaii in 1962, when Mr. Alexander was in the Navy — formed a loose-knit folk ensemble called the Inner Tubes, featuring some 20 members, to perform at open-mic hootenanny nights at the club, with guest appearances by the likes of David Crosby and Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas. The Inner Tubes eventually evolved into a 13-member band called the Men, which after a year winnowed down to the Association.
In addition to his wife of 30 years, Mr. Kirkman is survived by his daughter, Alexandra Sasha Kirkman, from his first marriage, which ended in divorce, and two grandchildren.
Mr. Kirkman left the Association in 1972, although he would later rejoin the band for tours in the 1980s and ’90s. He eventually retired from the music business and worked for decades as an addiction counselor.
But he could never escape his most famous creation. “My whole name for 45 years was, ‘I would like you to meet Terry, he wrote “Cherish,”’” he told Mr. White. “That was my whole name.”
He added, “I’m just going to shorten my name to Cherish.”
END OF OBITUARY
Mention of THE MEN is interesting, in that Doug Weston described them, when advertising their appearance at The Troubadour around July 1964, as “THE WORLD’s FIRST “folkrock” ORCHESTRA AND CHORUS’ – possibly the earliest press mention of the term “folkrock”, even if unhyphenated.
When an interview with Weston appeared in THE LOS ANGELES FREE PRESS in August 1964, the hyphen was inserted. The article was accompanied by a photo of the group apparently in a recording studio.
The hyphen was also used when THE MEN appeared in the “FOLK-MUSIC REVUE” at The Music Box Theatre the same month. It was described, in the advertisement as, “The Rockinest Swinginest Folksinginest Show in History”. Doug Weston was the co-producer.
Weston later claimed that Dylan attended one of The Troubadour shows and this inspired Dylan’s switch to ‘electric’ the following year. The timing is possible, in that Dylan passed through Los Angeles around this time en route a concert in Hawaii on 1 August 1964.
There is, however, clear evidence that, in May 1964, Dylan attended the Marquee Club in London and, most likely, saw Manfred Mann that night. The support act was John Mayall and his Blues Breakers.
On his return to the States, Dylan recommended the Marquee to others and, without actually naming them, commented favourably on the groups he had seen in Britain. I have never seen any comment from him on The Men.
Anyway, Terry Kirkman may have played a small in the evolution of ‘folk rock’.
I had a fondness for B sides on jukeboxes back in the day. I’m another who had appreciated “Requiem for the Masses.” One could say it was pretentious, and make an objective case. I just don’t think pretention is disqualifying.