Lies

It’s 1965, your group is gifted with a talent for mimicry and badly wants to achieve commercial success. You need to build a song around a sound that’s already captured the collective imagination of teens around the world. Let’s see... the Rolling Stones are big, James Brown is up on the good foot, the Temps, the Byrds, Sonny and Cher, they all have hits. So do The Animals, The Lovin’ Spoonful... jeez, Gary Lewis and The Playboys are a possibility! But above all others, the cherry on the cake, the sound most worth copping comes from Liverpool.  Let’s step back for a moment.

The Knickerbockers were born in a Bergenfield, New Jersey basement in 1962, founded by brothers Beau and John Charles. Several years later they hooked up with singer and saxophone player Buddy Randell. The group migrated to LA and wrote the classic rock song, “Lies” in a half hour or so. The uncanny Beatles sound-Randall’s Lennon-like lead vocal, a gnarly Harrison-ish guitar lick played by Beau Charles on a Rickenbacker guitar, and a series of whoops and shouts that recalled “You Can’t Do That,” “Twist and Shout,” and a number of other Beatles hits-caused quite a sensation. “Lies” peaked at number 20 on the pop charts, elevating The Knickerbockers into the outer circles of pop celebrity.

Jerry Fuller, a songwriter (“Traveling Man,”“Young Girl”) was an executive at Challenge Records when he saw The Knickerbockers perform in Albany, New York and brought them to Los Angeles. “Lies” was the group’s third single on the Challenge label. “We desperately tried to write something that sounded like the British Invasion,” said Beau Charles. “We wrote 'Lies' in less than an hour and recorded a demo in New York." 

The single version of “Lies” was tracked at Sunset Sound in LA with Bruce Botnick (who was about 20 years old at the time) at the desk. Fuller felt that the four track master was lacking something and so the group headed up to Leon Russell’s home in the Hollywood Hills and added Beau Charles’ signature guitar part using a Fender amplifier.

Structurally, “Lies” is unusual. It abandons the verse-chorus-bridge structure, as a number of Beatles songs do, and smashes the listener in the face with the central motif from the get go. The lyrics reflect Lennon’s caustic attitude towards relationships (“Some day you’re gonna be lonely, but you won’t find me around”) and Randall adroitly mimics the master’s inflection by omitting the r sound on the word girl. 

Building a sound on another group’s may work for a moment, but it can’t sustain a career, as The Knickerbockers discovered. The group continued to record, and were a presence on the WABC television show Where The Action Is  for several years, but “Lies” remains their lone recording success.