The Journeys’ of Chad & Jeremy

Chad Stewart and Jeremy Clyde came to the Eastside Cannery in Las Vegas, NV September 11 and 12 to play a pair of shows.  Those shows featured just Chad & Jeremy and their instruments on stage.  It was a wonderful  mellow evening of music that  included their mega hits Yesterday’s Gone, Distant  Shores, and Willow Weep For Me.  It also included lesser knows songs from their discography from the past, current and future release recordings.  The show kind of reflected the Journeys’ of Chad and Jeremy. I was able to talk with Chad Stewart about that journey during a phone interview.

ZM: How did you and Jeremy meet?

CS: That was in Drama school and it must have been in 1959-60. Central school of Speech and Drama is the name of the place and it was very cool college because it was lucky enough to be situated in the old Embassy Theater.  What happened is that I wandered in one day with a guitar on my back and he had a guitar on his back and so it wasn’t rocket science, we kind of seized each other up and it just sort of clicked. He was very well connected and he was the grandson of the Duke of Wellington which I didn’t know at the time. His father was a film producer that I didn’t know at the time. He was altogether a much cooler character than I was... I was a hick from the sticks.  He had a World War II flyer jacket and he had his jeans. Everything was baggy then so he had his tailor alter his jeans. To top it off he rode an Italian motor scooter.  He was obviously hip and I was obviously not. So basically what I think happened is that I traded him guitar chords for an introduction into the in-crowd.

ZM: Tell me about the “Jerks”

I don’t know what we were thinking about the name. It baffles me till today why we call ourselves the Jerks. We were just drama students with long hair and we wore black shades and shirts and thought that we were cool, but we weren’t. It was a typical guitar band line-up. I played lead guitar, Jeremy played rhythm and we had a lead singer who was actually a very talented classical scholar that was big on Greek and Latin.  He not only wanted to be an actor but he also wanted to be Ricky Nelson. He was neither actually.  There was one famous scene where we were playing a ballroom in North London. The owner of the ballroom told us to never come back. He said your hair is too long and you can’t sing.

ZM: What was it like to hear yourselves on the radio for the first time?

CS:That was pretty exciting because who wouldn’t want it.  The first time I ever went into a recording studio I remember that the engineers wore white lab coats.  They were in a sense the high priests of recording. I certainly didn’t, and I don’t think that one day I would have thanks to Japanese ingenuity that I would have all sorts of wonderful equipment in my own studio and it would all be maybe about 6/10 the size of it.

ZM: I heard you said the Everly Brothers were one of your influences; how were you influenced by them?

CS: How do evaluate what your biggest influence was.  I think it was more a question of time and place. I mean when you're a teenager and you go to an Everly Brothers show then the Everly Brothers would make a big impression on you.  I remember I was sitting in Newcastle at the Newcastle Odeon and seeing these two guys walking on stage with matching guitars and all of the girls start screaming.   I just looked at that and said I want to do that.  

But Buddy Holly even more because he had glasses and made it cool. And it was alright to wear glasses. So it wasn't nerdy anymore. I mean it was but it was sort of nerdy cool. I think Buddy Holly was probably one of my biggest influences just because he wrote very simple songs that people could learn. For me it was a bit more complicated because I had been a cathedral chorister in my youth from the age of 10 until 14 when my voice broke.  I was in the Durham Cathedral and we sang all of the time. As a kid I didn’t think any thing of it because it was a bit like being at boarding school. But what it gave me was probably a better education.  I was a weird hybrid. I was one of those people who ultimately became an arranger.  I was an apprentice to a wonderful British composer. So on one hand I was into that.  

By the time Jeremy and I stumbled into a record I was actually writing arrangements for a band on BBC Radio and I was just getting into a strong hold of that. So I was one of those characters that from what I told  you  I was a bit of a split personality in a way.; which endeared me to Jeremy who loves to sing and write songs, plays the guitar but also has to act.  So he is definitely schizophrenia.

ZM: What was your biggest challenge during those first years?

CS: The biggest challenge was everything. I mean it’s your youth, your ignorance, the fact that people were always telling you what to do because you were a child, mentally. Also the machinery of touring hadn’t really been perfected. I mean all they could come up with was a bus which made a Greyhound bus look like luxury accommodations.  These busses were hopeless. They were glorified school busses.  Then you got to the gig find some antiquated PA equipment.  Not only that but you would be performing on a bill with loads of other acts.  It always puzzled me that looking back on the humongous popularity of the Beatles that they still at the height of their fame only played a short set with loads of supporting acts.

ZM: Can you appreciate more now what you did back then?

CS: For sure; we tried occasionally before to re-group because we missed the fun and the games that went with it. But it wasn’t until 2003, when PBS invited us to do that special that Jeremy put his foot down and said I really want to make this work. So he’s been coming over for extended periods of time.

ZM: How did you end up living in the US?

CS: We both moved over here because we were the first ones to get our green cards. And again Jeremy was very plugged in because his dad was a movie producer and a partner with Douglas Fairbanks JR; we stayed at Dean Martin’s house. We were not your run of the mill British invaders. We were in fact scrapping a living working as folk singers in London. I was working as a copyist and I would at lunch time grab my guitar and meet Jeremy and we would play at this place call Tina’s. That is where we were literally discovered.

We were folk singers. We were nothing remotely resembling the so called beat groups. So we just snuck in under the radar. But we caught on and one of the main reasons was word got out because the man who signed us at the William Morse agency was a television agent; so he put two and two together that we were drama students. The first people to grab us were the Dick Van Dyke people. Then there were all of those television shows and even a pilot for our own TV series. Which didn’t sell but it would have been an interesting idea if it had. It was a western and it was a great idea that we were stranded in the west with a trunk fell of costumes. But in retrospect we were just a little too young.

ZM: Why were you more successful in the US than England?

CS: It was very simple and very sad. What happened was we got our first hit in England; “Yesterday’s Gone”.   It didn't get very big it staggered until about 45 in the charts because we were signed to this little label Ember. John Berry who was a big producer at EMI was seduced away by Ember Records.  What happened and I can't remember which came first,; I think we might of found out that “Yesterday’s Gone was climbing the charts in American.  

But what was our undoing was caused by I think it was the Daily Express published a picture of young Jeremy carrying his grandfather’s train at the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Once the British public took a hold of that, forget it. We were automatically cast as people who had no right to dabbling in something that they had no right to dabble in.  I mean Pop music and boxing and soccer are all avenues for the working class people to get out of their class. England at the time was very class-conscious I mean no questions about it. We had first class –third class railway cars.

ZM: What is the difference in the business between then and now?

Now it is completely insane and it is trying to re-invent itself. Back then the bad part was that no one had written a manual to show you how to do it. Now a day’s you can read a number of books.  Now a day’s kids get lawyers first. And that is probably the smart thing.   In those days you know you just woke up and you were surrounded by pick pockets and thieves. What was good about the dark ages was that radio was alive and well. Everybody had a chance to get played. The music directors and DJ’s were all part of the game and they would try and spot kids.

CS: Now it’s all changed, radio is not exactly dead but not terribly well. It’s directly traceable to the influence of accountants and lawyers.  The suits came into the picture and starting doing formats. But now a day’s it’s getting to be exciting again because now you have all of these different ways like u-tube and all of these different ways to market yourself.  Everybody has a fighting chance.  I think its great and I’m all for it.  

People say wouldn’t you like to have another hit. Well sure, everybody would like to have another hit. That’s not going to happen Keith Richard often says, you take up guitar not because you want to be rich and famous, but because you have to.  That’s basically it. The music is in your heart and soul; you do it anyway. There are a lot of things coming down the pipeline. I’m going to continue basically my little legacy, and mine and Jeremy’s legacy, and Jeremy’s legacy. I am going to do a solo album of him, a solo album of me. The I'm going to do Another Side of  Chad & Jeremy, an album of songs that did fit into any style  of the other CD’s.  I don't care if they are big sellers or not. If any body want to buy them or down load them that’s terrific. I'm not going to hold my breath. We're not going to set the world on fire.

Chad and Jeremy continue to perform with their heart and soul that shows in their music.