Dave Adams

Biography

In terms of historic British rockers, Dave Adams is the real deal. Pictures of one of the earliest bands he was in, the Blue Jeans, underscore what a radical transition in personal appearance combos such as the Beatles would be involved in. Adams and band, which like many of his early musical projects included his sister Joy Adams, positively look like some kind of church social performers, not rocker hooligans. The Blue Jeans played rock & roll when there literally weren't any rock songs to play, so most of the group's repertoire was actually country & western and cowboy songs. Adams spent a good part of his career in close collaboration with the brilliant, eccentric record producer Joe Meek, including a series of recordings done under made-up names. In addition to his musical relationship with his sister, Adams later cultivated a performing duo with his talented daughter Dee Dee Adams called the Generation Gap.

Brother and sister Adams and their friends were greatly influenced by the film The Blackboard Jungle, the rebellious ambience as well as the music that included "Rock Around the Clock," for a time to become the only actual rock & roll song in the set list of the Blue Jeans. The family already had a rich tradition of music, the children brought up enjoying Saturday night gatherings around the piano in the front room. Their father would play mandolin, cousins dropped by to strum guitars and manhandle accordions, and there was an uncle who played banjo, sometimes when he was asleep. Dave Adams began on piano, while his sister played guitar. Well before Adams met Meek, the former man was already a veteran of countless experiments with a Grundig one-track tape recorder. Indeed, Meek and Adams seemed to feed off each other in terms of weird recording ideas, Meek suggesting they get a child to sing a certain number, Adams showing Meek how to get a distinctive sound out of a piano by cramming newspapers under the strings.

The Blue Jeans developed out of a family band. Brother Brian Adams learned drums and gave himself the appropriate stage name of Chick Lewis. Joy Adams added the saxophone to her talents, and several neighbors got involved, such as Brynmor Phillips on guitar and Dan Marshall on bass. The band's first gig ever was a social at the Rockwell Glass Factory, secured for the bandmembers by their father. In 1956, the group entered the national talent show run by Tony Crombie, made it all the way to the finals, and wound up placing second. Shortly thereafter, Adams lost part of his finger in a carpentry accident, but would later ask "Who needs ten fingers to play rock & roll anyway?" in his autobiographical writings. The relationship with Meek began in 1957 with a recording entitled "The Old Red Lion." Typically of Meek, this was not just a simple matter of recording a song, since the whole idea was to create an impression of a group singing in a noisy bar, but to do it in a studio. Adams recalls hating the song itself, but being vastly impressed with how well Meek pulled off the idea with basically zero resources.

Adams and his sister recorded frequently for Meek as Joy & Dave, but the two men also began to develop a coterie of fictitious recording personalities, including Burr Bailey and Silas Dooley. Bailey was an outlet for country & western experiments, while Dooley would emerge from a closet somewhere whenever a song was a trifle risqué. Joy Adams left music after marrying an American soldier in the '60s. Dave Adams eventually relocated to the United States, and began performing with Dee Dee Adams in the early '90s. His daughter also fronts her own group, the Road Trippers. Several collections of Meek's busy studio experiments have been released under Adams' name and feature a great deal of their creative activity in various contexts. ~ Eugene Chadbourne, All Music Guide