Make Someone Happy

Quoted from back cover: There is a strange sort of double standard involved in hearing this album. One is at once glad and sad to have it in hand. Glad because it has been eagerly awaited and a long time in coming - yet the sad fact is, that this is the end. There is this album and there will be no more albums because there is no more We 5. The music business has always been one of constant flux and change - ever since the Beatles revolutionized popular listening habits several years ago. Now, past mid-decade flux becomes vibration and change is constant. That groups break up, change and re-form is no longer surprising. It is now virtually impossible to pick up a national magazine or a Sunday supplement without reading of the San Francisco "movement." There is revolution, undeniable, in clothing, hairstyles, music, art and, most important - in ideals and goals. 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 trappery and hanger-overs, both musical and social. Thus for many reasons this album is a rare one. For one, it is an album which bears repeated listening. There is something going on here that can't be pinpointed - a sense of spirit and committment that can't be arbitrarily disassembled like a trick clock to find the mechanical gimmicks and trickery which gives it being. A major reason for this something special is, of course, Bev Bivens. A lot of singers in a lot of places have heard Bev. You need only turn on a radio to hear them. Bev Bivens evokes one simple response - there just isn't anyone better. She is tender and lyrical with a ballad, and not afraid to belt out the rousers. She is totally honest, gifted and possessed. As a performing unit, the five bright youngsters who made such an enormous musical impression with their very first single and album, YOU WERE ON MY MIND, have gone their separate ways. Mike Stewart has joined another group, Jerry Burgen and his wife, Debbie, have formed a new aggregation with Peter Fullerton; Bob Jones and Bev Bivens are making individual plans of their own. So this album is, in a sense, both climax and denouement of an exciting musical idea called We 5. There is nothing psychedelic or arcane about We 5's music. What you hear on this album is honest, imaginative, straight, straightforward and...fun. It is unfortunate that "fun," in this age, has become equated with frivolity and dismissed as trivia. We 5 were fun - this album is fun, and it's damn fine music as well.