Beverly Bivens - 1966-67: Split of We Five

1966-67: Split of We Five

We Five were in the vanguard of the San Francisco bands, including Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, that reached international prominence in the "Summer of Love" of 1967. However, the original band had disbanded by then. Jerry Burgan and Pete Fullerton reformed We Five. Burgan's wife, Debbie, née Graf, who sang with a group called the Legendaires and had sometimes worked with the Ridgerunners (as they then were), took over from Bivens as lead vocalist. A group known as We Five was still performing forty years later.

In his notes for We Five's second album, Make Someone Happy (1967), released after they had split (an episode that later give rise to unfounded rumours that Bivens had been killed in a road accident), George Yanok observed that

"We 5 was the first "electric band" to come out of San Francisco. It predated the entire present "happening" in the Haight-Ashbury with all its attendant trippery and hang-overs …".

Yanok asserted also that "there was nothing psychedelic or arcane about We 5's music". However, various elements of the music of the psychedelic era, notably Bivens' vocal delivery, which Yanok described as "a major reason for this special something", were plainly discernible in We Five's output (for example, on Let's Get Together and such tracks as If I Were Alone, Love Me Not Tomorrow, You Let A Love Burn Out and Bivens' blues solo on Judy Henske's High Flying Bird, which she has described as "like her heart song").