Hardly anybody had heard of the Beatles. Steve Lawrence topped the Billboard charts with “Go Away Little Girl” and Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons were defying puberty while advising us to “Walk Like a Man.” John Kennedy was entering the twilight of his presidency and Lawrence of Arabia was scooping up a bunch of Academy Awards.
Nick Fortuna, bass player, the Buckinghams:
We were all sitting around one night. I had taken a liking to these guys. They weren’t the Cryan’ Shames then. They were the Travelers. They played around and I hung out with them, and one day they said, “Why don’t you come onstage and beat a tambourine or something?” At the time, I did play bongos. They said, “Why don’t you come onstage and jump around?” And that’s basically what I did, and it got us noticed.
It was kind of nice, because here was this guy who didn’t have to figure out how to play his guitar. He could just get onstage and enjoy the music. I was trying to figure out how to put all this music together. Everyone was trying to figure out how to play their instruments or trying to look cool, and here was a guy who would get up onstage and enjoy the music, to dance, to sing an occasional harmony, to play the tambourine, and to have a good time.
We decided that everyone who was hot in rock ‘n’ roll at that time was British, so we would bring rock ‘n’ roll back to America. Britain called America the “new colony,” and there were six of us. Hence the moniker the New Colony Six. We dressed up in red coats and white slacks.
We were playing all the latest songs that were happening. All of the people coming out to see us were young, and consequently they wanted to hear what they were hearing on the radio and that was before all of the overexposure you have now. There was no MTV. There wasn’t a band every week. The only time they could hear anything was on the radio or if they were lucky enough and went to the high school on the weekend to see a band. But it was never a big band.
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The next day we called and got an appointment with Gary Loizzo’s father, who was their manager in those days, to come down and meet with us. And Kenny said, “I hate the name Gary and the Nitelites. Let’s call you something else. You guys are all-American looking and you look so great and you’re black and you’re white. Let’s call them the America something. Let’s make them look like America.” So I said, “Sure–we’ll put a fucking flag on the cover.” And one of the other guys said “Breed” and Gary’s dad got all excited about that because he really thought the name was wonderful.
