If you had a hit single in 1967, you didn’t walk around thinking you’d still be performing it in 2023. That was back when rock was young, and long before anyone heard of the Happy Together Tour.
“Back when we were 17, nobody was thinking that the songs would be serving us our whole life,” says Paul Cowsill of the Newport-raised family band. “I would have just said, ‘Yeah, if we’re doing this after 50, just get us off the stage fast.”
Adds Vogues frontman Troy Elich , “Believe me, nobody back then thought they’d be doing these songs 60 years later. If they had, they never would have sung in those keys.”
Now the biggest ‘60s pop tour, Happy Together has lasted far longer than the ‘60s themselves. The package tour was launched in 1984 with the Turtles as headliners, and named after their greatest hit. Faces have changed over the years: The Turtles will still close the show Sunday night at the Lynn Memorial Auditorium but their lead singer Howard Kaylan has retired; his place is being taken by Ron Dante, the voice of the Archies. The Cowsills are now on their eighth go-round, the Vogues on their second. Joining up this year is the silken-voiced Little Anthony of Imperials fame, plus perennials Gary Puckett and the Classics IV.
The Cowsills spend part of the year doing new music together and separately (They made a new album “Rhythm of the World” last year), but are glad to hop back on the bus every summer. “It’s like music camp,” says Susan Cowsill. “The vibe is that we’re going to have a beautiful summer and we’re going to make a lot of people happy.” Adds older brother Bob, “This feels like a validation. We knew we belonged on this tour but I took a few years to land it. The personality changes every year, the new guys get acclimated and the veterans are smiling as they go through what we did.”
The siblings were all teenagers (or younger in Susan’s case) when “The Rain, the Park and Other Things” hit in ‘67. “We’d already been dropped by two labels, then they added our mom to the group. So we sure weren’t saying ‘We’re going to have a hit now’,” recalls Bob. And Paul says there are a few echoes with those days. “We’re on a bus tour and we’re going out there every night and killing it. It’s always good to see audiences from our past, but now it’s our present.”
The Cowsills are the closest to original lineup on the tour; Bob, Paul and Susan were all in the ‘60s group. On the other hand the Vogues have no originals, but there’s still a direct connection. Frontman Elich is a second-generation member who had to audition for his dad; he has sung with the founding members who have died or retired. And though he joined in the 2000s, Elich is well schooled in the group’s history.
“I was a Vogues fan long before I joined, when I was a teenager and my dad was in the group,” he said. “I even told the guys how much I liked those really bizarre singles they made before their hits, which they thought were garbage,” he said. The Vogues actually had two hit stretches in the ‘60s– the first hits had working-class themes and a Philly soul-inspired sound; the later ones were pop standards with orchestra. “Nobody could believe it was the same group,” Elich said. “But if you look at [their greatest hit] ‘Five O’Clock World’, that was their lives; they were all working in factories and steel mills. That song could not have mirrored their lives any better than it did.”
He says that Happy Together has given him a taste of ‘60s style touring, “Little sleep, lots of travel and big venues, but it’s great. For a group like us this tour is the only chance to work 60 times in a summer. It gives us all a chance to feel like rock stars.”
