Ray Columbus & The Art Collection

In July, 1966, a young Australasian pop star, Ray Columbus, disembarked from his New Zealand - San Francisco flight. The first newspaper headline that caught his eye was the tragic tale of a young student who plummeted from a 20th storey window, while out of his gourd on LSD. He was on his way to Europe. Drug-free Columbus seizes on the headline, Student Flies Out of Window on LSD. “What? Pounds, shillings and pence?“ (whose abbreviations resemble the letters LSD), wonders Ray. He’ll soon wise up: acid was just about to hit the San Francisco Bay Area wholesale and soon everyone he knew in the biz would be on it. The incident inspired Ray’s best post-Invaders record, the fuzz propelled Kick Me, flip-side of his U.S version of Australasian hit, She’s A Mod, released on Columbus’s own American label, Colstar Records, and backed by one of the Bay area’s many Stones/ Who inspired white R & B bands, The Art Collection. What’s Columbus doing in San Francisco and where are The Invaders? Social End Product talks to Ray about his little reported American sojourn and the break up of Ray Columbus and The Invaders. Flashback to Auckland - August 1965 - Ray Columbus and The Invaders have just split up, leaving a trail of hit records and fans throughout Australia and New Zealand. The break up has been building for a while its seed planted two years earlier in a performing contract ex-pat Kiwi promoter Harry M. Miller had offered Columbus. Miller wanted only Columbus. It mattered little to him who The Invaders were. Columbus disagreed. The band was one of the best around and a vital part of the hit sound. He’d known Billy Kristian and Dave Russell since they were fourteen. The band would carry on as the contracts kept getting better and more tempting. Columbus wanted to try his voice in the United States where The Invaders had made some inroads with She’s A Mod and Till We Kissed. Early attempts to cash in on the records came to naught, however, as the band was refused amittance to the United States after objections from the American Musicians’ Union. So there they were, living in Auckland, teen scream famous to the point they couldn’t walk the streets unmolested, but depending solely on record royalties and concert fees. Which wasn’t a problem for those who spent the money wisely, but some band members were struggling, the sparsity of their bank balances exacerbated by Columbus’ policy of not lowering The Invaders’ booking fee which cut off lesser paying club dates to the band. The tensions manifested themselves in an argument over where the band should live. Columbus: "Wally Scott and Dave Russell were happy to live in New Zealand but Billy and Jimmy wanted to live in Australia. Of course there was more money to be made by being in a band there, but I like the idea of being an overseas act in Australia. We always got overseas star status when we played there.” Ray Columbus and The Invaders finally called it a day in July 1966. Billy and Jimmy moved to Sydney to join Max Merritt’s Meteors and Columbus embarked on a solo career which often utilised Invaders’ Wally Scott and Dave Russell; the latter being Columbus’ main musical collaborator. Despite an enthusiastic reception for his solo act on the Tom Jones and Herman’s Hermits tour later that year Columbus found the audience indiscriminate. Columbus was good enough to spook Tom Jones’s manager into refusing Columbus’ use of his star’s backing band, The Squires. One of his tunes pricked the ears of Herman’s Hermits and The Yardbirds' mananger Harvey Lisberg, who was knocked out by the Columbus/ Russell original Now You Shake, and desperately wanted it for The Yardbirds’ next single. ‘Great’ thought Ray, but it wasn’t to prove that easy. “I had a couple of bad experiences with publishing. Now You Shake and Yo Yo were picked up in England. The Yardbirds wanted to cover Now You Shake - a brilliant Dave Russell riff which The Rolling Stones had loved on their tour with us - we used to open our shows with it.” Unfortunately Lisberg also wanted the song’s sub-publishing rights for Britain. The Invaders’ publisher, Southern Music, quashed the idea (and possible future fame), much to the disgust of Columbus. It was obvious he a bit to learn about that side of the business. In future he’d retain the rights to all his new songs. Meantime he was busy securing green cards and passports for the family to move to the United States. Ray was married to an American citizen, Levonne, which made thing easier. They were headed for San Jose, a large city in the South Bay area, thirty five minutes south of San Francisco where Columbus had been offered a performing contract. As he and Levonne settled into their new home, it became obvious his new manager was aiming Ray at the supper circuit. Columbus wasn’t ready to surrender his teen appeal just yet and switched to Topstar Management run by promoter Al Zehner, gentlemanly manager Ken Roed, and “an American-Italian guy who’d later disappear.” Columbus: “I could have got on Ed Sullivan’s show for instance. They rang and invited me as long as I did a song and dance type routine. But if I wanted to do pop or rock, I had to have a single in the charts. They’d made that rule because Dean Martin’s son had a band, Lucille Ball’s son had a band, and they were leaning on Ed all the time to get their kids on.” Topstar quickly hooked Columbus up with a band of young Anglophile R & B ravers' The Newcastle Five who were soon re-named The Art Collection. For his evening club shows Columbus had a separate, older group based around the club band at Losers North; the site of his first U.S appearance. Ray Columbus hadn’t forgotten about The Invaders’ previous American releases: “The first thing I did when I got to Los Angeles was go to Mercury Records and find out what had happened with the release of Till We Kissed, because it got a best bets rating in Cashbox, and a Top 60 rating in Billboard, the first down-under record to do that. It was normally a guarantee of being a Top 50 hit; usually Top 20.” Turned out they’d test marketed it for a skimpy two weeks in San Bernadino and another forgotten city, and when it didn’t move they pulled the plug on it — again, much to Columbus’s displeasure. Chalk it up to another lesson in the music business. Columbus did manage a solo show at the San Jose Civic Auditorium in November 1966 alongside such hot outfits as The Chocolate Watchband, Love, and The Turtles. Earlier that month, he’d played with The Music Machine, who were riding high in the charts with Talk Talk. Things were also starting to happen with The Art Collection. By early 1967, they were hitting local clubs like the Bold Knight in Sunnyvale. Ace Bay Area magazine Cream Puff War caught up with The Art Collection’s guitarist, Rich Martin, and plumbed his memories of the Columbus days: “Ray was a good singer with a much more professional voice than most local musicians. But he was not popular. He’d come out in a suit doing the Mod’s Nod and nobody could identify with him. He was ‘very European’; didn’t relate too well with the scene, he was really in another world. He was still trying to have hit records.” Columbus barely remembers the band - Rich Martin (guitar), Tom Martin (rhythm guitar), and Steve Chriest (drums) - although he is still friends with bass player and main vocalist Scott Arbulich. He confirms Martin’s observation of the reaction to his ‘outrageous image’, suggesting more hip audiences loved it, but that middle America was a bit bemused. The local cop followed him around for two weeks believing him to be an undesirable influence. On the whole, he found Americans surprisingly conservative and square and the Californian music industry less professional than the Australian one. In early 1967, Ray Columbus and The Art Collection entered San Jose’s Westmont Studios to record his first US single since The Invaders’ Till We Kissed. Kick Me backed with She’s A Mod is a Bay Area classic little heard in New Zealand until its release on the second Australian Ugly Things compilation in the late 1980s. Behind an ambiguous lyric reminiscent of Eight Miles High, The Art Collection and Columbus rave away in fine psych-punk style over a simple but killer fuzz riff. Columbus: “The song’s about fear of flying, whether you’re tripping or travelling or…” It was one of his first solo compositions and an experiment influenced by the burgeoning San Francisco sound and scene and it garnered good airplay and sales in the Bay area. From the same session came Snap, Crackle and Pop, a bubblegum ditty Columbus had written to pitch to Kelloggs. Two more different songs would be difficult to find, but they amply demonstrated the two sides of the American-era Ray Columbus. In July, Kick Me was followed by Columbus’ I Want A Beat backed with his New Zealand solo hit, I Need You. Columbus: “I’ve never really liked I Want A Beat. I liked the rift, but I never liked the record. My favourite solo record was I’ve Been There, Baby. I got that saying from the Big 0, Roy Orbison.” The band continued to play around the Bay Area with such fly-by-nighters as The Mourning Reign, The E Types and The People as well as the more well-known Steve Miller Band, The Turtles and Eric Burdon and The New Animals. The Eric Burdon and The New Animals show at the San Francisco Civic Auditorium was the Art Collection’s biggest yet but rock star temperaments spoiled it for the band. Columbus: “We hadn’t met Eric or the band. They arrived halfway through our set and the audience were really enjoying what we were doing - it was a combination of my solo stuff, old Invaders things, and a couple of Art Collection songs - all decidedly British. “We were into our second encore, and out comes Al to the front of the stage and hands me this note, which I read during the guitar break. It said ‘Eric Burdon’s manager just told me if you don’t leave the stage immediately, Eric will leave and the band won’t play.’ “Apparently we were doing too well with the audience, so I stopped the song mid-stream, read the note to the crowd, and told them; “Sorry, we don’t want you to lose your money,” and said goodbye. They booed when The Animals came on and it took Eric twenty minutes to get them back onside.” Ever the professional, Columbus still found time for a photo-opportunity and a short chat with Burdon afterward. In October 1967, Ray Columbus and The Art Collection were an attraction at the Topstar organised San Francisco International Pop Festival, an early imitation of Monterey, held at the Santa Clara Fairgrounds. The festival made little impact, but it prompted a lavishly packaged compilation album on Colstar - Columbus and Topstar’s record label - which featured several Columbus tracks including East Pinkerton Street and Polka Dot Resistance - and several tracks written or produced by Columbus. One in particular shone - I’m Good For You - written and produced by Ray for black Oakland R & B outfit, Fire. The song later be a 1969 New Zealand chart hit for The Troubled Minds. With the Art Collection getting more and more frustrated, grumbling about their contract with Topstar, the fruitful collaboration came to an end at the close of 1967. Rich Martin: “We didn’t get along with Zehner; our contract was exclusive, so it was messy when we hopped off in the middle of everything. I don’t know what happened to Ray after he split with us. Al Zehner owned a drive-in movie theatre down in San Jose and I heard he was working there in the booth for a while.” Columbus still had work and a number of offers to host television shows: one in San Francisco, several in San Jose and one from New Zealand for a six-month series. He chose the latter, returning to the Shaky Isles in early 1968, staying in television for the next fourteen years, his Californian sojourn a steadily fading memory. In all Columbus released a dozen singles in America together with isolated album tracks. He wrote some of his best solo compositions there, played with some of the shakers of the day, and succeeded in setting up and running (with his Topstar managers as partners) his own publishing company, Cotop, and record label, Colstar. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.