It’s hard to think about the 1960’s music scene minus The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and The Beach Boys, but there was a parallel road well traveled by musicians who found audiences across the country and in Dick Clark’s universe. Dick and Dee Dee was one such duo, who throughout the ’60s recorded eight chart singles, five of which made the top 30 nationally. For a certain age group, their hit single ‘The Mountain’s High,’ brings it all back. L.A. natives Dick St. John and Dee Dee (Mary Sperling) first met at Paul Revere Junior High in the late 1950s, and reconnected five years later over their love of music. Their career is recapitulated in Dee Dee Phelps’ memoir ‘Vinyl Highway’ (Trafford Publishing), which she will highlight on Thursday, February 8, at 7:30 p.m. at Village Books on Swarthmore. A 20-year Palisades resident, Dee Dee looks back on the 10 years she performed, with finely observed details of the innocence of the pre-Kennedy assassination era and dissolution of the 1950’s hopefulness following his death. In describing the group’s first cross-country bus tour in 1963-64, she reminds us that ‘You still dressed up to go on a airplane, and people were more respectful of one another.’ The group endured a musician’s grueling schedule–performing one-night stands in cities across the country, catching naps whenever they could and adjusting to unfamiliar venues. Because they couldn’t afford a fulltime band, they often found themselves dropping off their music to hired bands an hour before showtime. ‘We did have a guitar player who also rehearsed the bands,’ Dee Dee says. Dick and Dee Dee tried for four-chord progressions to make things easier for the bands. On one tour in 1963 the duo learned they would be backed up by an up and coming surf band, The Beach Boys. She recalls their first meeting: ‘The group picked up their instruments and launched into their hit record ‘Surfin’ Safari.’ ‘They played it with great enthusiasm and volume. It sounded slightly off-key and I wondered if they had tuned their guitar.’ Dick handed the boys the chord sheet to ‘The Mountain’s High,’ and told them it was a basic four-chord progression in F#. ‘Dennis Wilson laughed. ‘They only play in the key of C,’ he said. ‘They haven’t learned any other keys yet.” Throughout their years together Dick and Dee Dee survived the professional discordance, it appears, because of Dee Dee’s forbearance and respect for Dick’s talent. ‘Dick had a lot of smooth swings,’ she says. ‘He had a four-octave range and was a good songwriter, but he saw himself as superstar. When he was up and being funny, he was the funniest person I have ever known.’ In the book, she portrays a man with great ideas, a compulsive nature and healthily self-absorbed. ‘He was off the wall,’ she says. Dick and Dee Dee performed on the hit T.V. Show ‘Shindig’ throughout 1964 and 1965 and appeared on numerous American Bandstand programs, but times were changing, and in 1969, the duo dissolved the act. Dee Dee moved to Big Sur to write and record an album with her husband Kane. In the 1980s, they moved back to L.A. and for the last 15 years has dedicated herself to writing. Dick, also a Palisadian, continued to write songs and performed with his wife, Sandy, until he passed away in 2003. ‘When I started to write the book, I ran into him in the village, and it was awkward,’ Dee Dee says. ‘We’d talk about our mutual friends, but I didn’t tell him about the book. ‘I remember asking my classmates in a memoir class I was taking if it was all right to use people’s real names and wondering if I should change all the names. They all told me that if it’s honest, go for it. No need to change the names.’
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