Reaching Out To His Bass

Rewind to 1960, when rock ’n’ roll has officially blossomed into a full-grown adolescent: kicking, screaming and improperly shaking its pelvis. Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry have become thunderous gods among whiny children, inspiring countless rebellious youngsters to pick up instruments and make nimble hands the devil’s playthings. The garage band epidemic spreads, and the lurching noises of guitars and drums are piling up in backyards, basements and school auditoriums all over the country, bursting with the pre-war vivacity and whimsy that defined the generation.

No one place-—no matter how fiercely sheltered—can keep at bay the allure of the rock. Not even the small town of Concord, N.H., where a 16 year-old named John Forbes Kerry attends the all-boys boarding institution St. Paul’s School. Joining with classmates Jon Prouty and future Harvard graduates Larry Rand ’66 and Peter Lang ’68, the four start a garage band called the Electras. While the group won’t amass fame or fortune, they will radically change the lives of one another. And perhaps one of them, decades after the band succumbs to the drifting interest of its members, will come to change the lives of immeasurable individuals around the world.

An Electric History

The prestigious boarding school of St. Paul’s provided many opportunities and resources for its students, but in 1959, Larry Rand realized his life was missing something the school couldn’t offer—music. He desperately wanted to play guitar, and fueled by this desire, he sought and found a fellow guitarist in Jon Prouty.

After jamming together on repeated occasions, they decided to form a band in the fall of 1960, adding bassist John Kerry and drummer Peter Lang to round out the traditional four-piece garage band lineup. The enthusiastic group called themselves the Electras, after the then-popular car model manufactured by Buick.

The Electras rehearsed in the band room beneath the school auditorium on Saturday nights and quickly drew a devoted audience that came to listen to them jam on a regular basis. Soon they were being invited to play school dances, private parties and debutante balls.

The band tended towards more instrumental pieces, since no one in the band was particularly comfortable behind the microphone. While they mostly performed covers of famous early rock favorites like “Great Balls of Fire,” “Blue Suede Shoes” and “Johnny B. Goode,” they did have a few original compositions, including a vibrant rendition of the nursery rhyme “Three Blind Mice.”

In 1961, the band added pianist Jack Radcliffe and maracas player Andy Gagarin to fill out their sound. They also recorded an album that year to sell to schoolmates, family members and friends. The supremely primitive recording session lasted only two hours, and the band relied on only one microphone dangling overhead as a one-track Ampex tape recorder captured thirteen songs from the Electras’ repertoire. They took the recording to the custom manufacturing division of RCA Records and pressed 500 vinyl copies of the self-titled release.

When Kerry, Rand and Prouty graduated in 1962, the band added five new members: David Allen and Julian McKee on guitar, Bart Baldwin on bass and Don Roach and Brink Thorne on saxophone. When the last of these members graduated the following year, the band was officially dissolved. In total, there were thirteen different Electras over the band’s three-year lifetime.

Much has happened during the years since the Electras’ last performance. The face of popular music has undergone some serious cosmetic surgery, from the Beatles and the Who to Madonna and Run-DMC to Terror Squad and Simple Plan. America has endured its fair share of wars and scandals, and so has the music world.

Members of the Electras went their separate ways after prep school. Prouty went to Colorado College and then the University of Colorado Law School before opening three restaurants and deciding to follow his true passion of architecture and planning.

Lang went to Harvard, where he continued playing rock ‘n’ roll, and following his graduation, attended University of Cincinnati Medical School.

Rand studied government at Harvard University, where he played with the rock band the Dielectrics. He currently teaches constitutional law and history at Kent School in Connecticut. He continues to play his guitar.

Meanwhile, Kerry went from St. Paul’s to Yale to the U.S. Navy. He became a decorated Vietnam War hero and, afterwards, an outspoken peace activist. Kerry met one-time lead Beatle and Electras hero John Lennon at an anti-war rally in New York’s Bryant Park on May 12, 1972.

After graduating from Boston College Law School, he entered into politics in Massachusetts. Kerry has been the junior senator for Massachusetts since 1984 and now he is the Democratic presidential candidate in a race with a finish line only days away.

Looking Back

Now, 43 years after the fact, Rand and Prouty look back fondly on their past rock ‘n’ roll days. “We played music. That was the best fun that I had there and I have John Kerry to thank for that,” Rand says.

To Rand, Kerry’s dedication and passion were key to the success of the Electras. “He was the essential ingredient,” he says. “We, as a band, had tremendous fun together and that would not have been possible if we hadn’t worked together. John was a very resolute, dedicated musician.”

Kerry extended that dedication to everything he did, says Rand. “He was a scholar. He was an athlete. He was a musician. He was a great debater and he was also involved in social work,” he says.

Rand also points to a general worldliness, perhaps attributable to his upbringing. “His father was involved in foreign services,” notes Rand. “John had a cosmopolitan upbringing. His family was not particularly wealthy, but he had exposure to different countries and different cultures.”

Prouty describes the teenage Kerry as shy, not to be confused with standoffish.

“Some of which has been misinterpreted as aloofness is quite simply that he’s shy and reflective and intellectual and gives matters consideration,” says Prouty. “Some people that have those qualities of being reserved and reflective are perceived as being aloof. And the truth is, reflecting from those years when we knew him so well, that simply wasn’t the case.”

Prouty is hopeful that the recent attention to Kerry’s high school life will shed some light on the other, more fun side of Kerry that does not always come out in debates and conventions.

“John Kerry was a fun human person with a dimension and a side of him that we were cognizant of way back when,” says Prouty. “This isn’t just a political exercise in trying to describe how he is today. This is how he was.”

He adds, “We were with him for four years in school and two years in a band. We hope our observations about him will help people appreciate this human, warm, fun side of Kerry, and also some of his more serious attributes of character in making their decision to change leadership in this country, which we desperately need.”

One of Rand’s most amusing memories from his time with the Electras took place during a performance at Concord Academy, an all-girls school in Massachusetts. At the end of their tenth song, “Rawhide” by Duane Eddy, the band suffered what was for them a major embarrassment—the rumbling noise of unintentional feedback sounded from the stage.

“Both of us [Rand and Prouty] were thoroughly embarrassed by this sound that we did not plan to make. And in those days that was not part of the music that you played except for possibly one or two performers that might have dabbled in it, but this was totally unintentional,” says Rand.

While the other band members looked around furtively to identify the source of the noise, Kerry appeared unperturbed, even focused.

“John was simply looking at his amplifier very calm and collective,” says Rand. “So maybe he was experimenting with feedback in music before Jimi Hendrix.”

The band was actually recording the performance that night and captured the impromptu feedback on tape. Rand only recently discovered that tape and it has caused some discussion that it may mark the earliest recording of the feedback technique, which was made standard during the psychedelic era a few years down the road.

The recent fame that this presidential race has shed on the Electras has led Rand and Prouty to remaster their 1961 album. The original master tapes were so primitive that the sounds bled together.

In order to amend this problem as best as possible, Prouty and Rand gave the tape to Bob Ludwig, the man responsible for remastering albums by such luminaries as the Velvet Underground and the Rolling Stones. The re-mastered album is now being sold on the band’s official website, www.theelectras.com.

Samples of many of the re-mastered songs are also online, as are some songs from the live recording in Concord. Listening to the recordings is like taking a trip back in time to rock’s heyday, replete with perky guitars and happily tapping drums.

The music has even elicited the praise of Who guitarist Pete Townshend, who in a recent USA Today interview proclaimed, “The band sounds great to me.”

Amazingly, copies of the original vinyl album that sold for $5 at shows back in the ’60s now sell for as much as $2,500 on Ebay.

Together Again

Keeping in touch with Kerry and the other members of the band has been difficult because of busy schedules. However, Rand and Prouty have been incommunicado ever since the media broke news of Kerry’s past rock ‘n’ roll life early this year. The two old high school friends, apart from remastering their old album, recorded a new political CD in Nashville entitled Electras for Kerry.

An Electras reunion is also in the works. They hope to bring together all thirteen members who played under the Electras banner to celebrate the 45th anniversary of the band next year.

“I’m almost positive we’ll have a reunion if John is elected. And if he’s not elected, we might have a reunion anyway,” Rand says. “After John accepted the Democratic nomination, in one of the interviews the camera panned in on him and he was holding an Electras record and he winked and said to the reporter, ‘I’ve heard a little about a reunion.’ There’s nothing I’d rather do than play at John Kerry’s presidential inaugural ball.”

In the meantime, there will be a reunion of sorts when Rand and Prouty perform on Wolf Blitzer Reports on CNN today at 5:00 p.m. “It will be the first public performance by any combination of the Electras in 43 years, so we’re working on it,” says Rand.

The band is also coming together politically in support of Sen. John Kerry—for the most part. Three members are rooting for the other guy.

“I can tell you that the four founding members of the band are probably behind John Kerry,” says Rand. “And we’re doing a little word play here, but what we call the Electral E-L-E-C-T-R-A-L College are overwhelmingly for Kerry, in spite of the fact that he’s a Yale graduate. But we don’t have much choice, do we? They’re all Yale graduates. Anyway that was a 10-to-3 vote.”

When asked if he thinks Kerry will win the election, Prouty answers, “Yes, I do. I think in people’s guts, when you get rid of all the flim-flam, it’s time to have somebody you would trust and respect as president, not somebody you would like to have a beer with in a tavern.”

Come Nov. 2, Prouty, Rand, Lang and the rest of the nation will decide whether they’ll be sharing the inauguration stage with Kerry, or no more than a pub pint.

—Staff writer Sarah L. Solorzano can be reached at solorzan@fas.harvard.edu.