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AboutCurtis Roy Boettcher (January 7, 1944 – June 14, 1987), sometimes credited as Curt Boetcher or Curt Becher, was an American singer, songwriter, musician, and record producer from Wisconsin. He was a pivotal figure in what is now termed "sunshine pop", working with the Association, the Millennium, Sagittarius, Paul Revere and the Raiders, Tommy Roe, Elton John, Gene Clark, Emitt Rhodes, Tandyn Almer, the Beach Boys, and others.
The New York Times wrote of Boettcher: "If his life had gone just a bit differently, [he] might have been another Brian Wilson. ... As it stands, Boettcher — a pop-music producer whose heyday was the late '60s — now survives in rock history mostly as a liner-note credit. He could have been, but never was. Yet he enjoys a godlike status among a select group of music fans, for whom obscurity is more enticing than fame."
He was born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, to Peggie and Arland Boettcher. His father was a Navy pilot in World War II and later worked at the Pentagon.
Boettcher entered the University of Minnesota in fall 1962, where in 1963 he formed the folk quartet The GoldeBriars with the Holmberg sisters, Dotti and Sheri, and Ron Neilsson. They relocated to Los Angeles after being signed by Epic Records, for whom they recorded and released two albums in 1964, The GoldeBriars and Straight Ahead! (A third was reportedly recorded in 1965 but withheld from release.) Under the guidance of recording producer Bob Morgan, the vocals were mixed upfront and enriched by double-tracking to sound like six voices. Prior to recording their third album, the group added drummer Ron Edgar (later of The Music Machine; Edgar also worked with Boettcher in the bands The Ballroom and The Millennium). According to music historian Joseph Lanza, the GoldeBriars' material tended to follow the standard folk formula of songs such as "Shenandoah", but "acoustically, their style blended the homespun and the sugarspun." Boettcher arranged most of the group's songs, but he also contributed as a songwriter. Morgan, quoted in Lanza's Vanilla Pop, said that Boettcher's childhood as a navy brat influenced songs like "Haiku" on the album Straight Ahead!. Bobb Goldsteinn, an accomplished songwriter (who wrote the 1963 folk-dixie hit "Washington Square" for the Village Stompers), became "Boettcher's manager and confidant", as well as lyricist for some GoldeBriars songs. As manager, Goldsteinn inched the band in a more pop-flavored direction. The GoldeBriars performed live in the 1965 film Once Upon a Coffee House.
Following the demise of The GoldeBriars, Boettcher moved into production and songwriting work for others, including Lee Mallory and The Association. In 1966, through his production partnership Our Productions, Boettcher produced the debut album by The Association, And Then... Along Comes the Association, released on Valiant Records. The album spawned two Top 10 hits, "Along Comes Mary" (which reached #7 in the U.S.) and "Cherish" (which reached #1). In 2012, original Association member Jim Yester said Valiant Records claimed the song sounded "too old and archaic", but the song's success "just showed we can have our archaic and eat it, too." The album included the song "Message of Our Love", co-written by Boettcher and Tandyn Almer (who also wrote "Along Comes Mary").
Boettcher's wife Claudia said that Almer wrote "Along Comes Mary" as a slow song. Boettcher sped up the tempo and recorded a demo on which he sang the vocal. This demo was presented to The Association, who used it as a guide for their arrangement of the tune. It was the band's attempt to replicate and build on Boettcher's demo that became the group's first hit single (produced by Boettcher). Boettcher and Almer had a dispute over writing credits for the song, Boettcher arguing that his extensive contributions to the arrangement, which formed the basis of the hit version of the song, warranted a co-writer credit. However, the song was ultimately credited solely to Almer.
After the album achieved commercial success, according to a November 1966 story in Billboard, the band dropped their manager, Dean Fredericks, who in turn filed a breach of contract suit against the band, claiming they were bound by a seven-year agreement. After filing suit, Fredericks joined Our Productions. "Consequently," Billboard revealed, "the Association will no longer associate with Our Productions, and henceforth will be a&r'd by Jerry Yester, brother of Association member Jim Yester." As a result of this dispute, despite his valuable contributions to the debut album's commercial breakthrough, Boettcher was prevented from continuing as the band's producer. (He produced several tracks for a later incarnation of the band in the early 1980s.)
In a 1974 interview with ZigZag Magazine, Boettcher said that during this period he was under contract to Our Productions and on salary. This arrangement accorded him no royalties, but a tremendous amount of artistic freedom. "I wanted to keep on working, to be there. I think for a while I had more hours of studio experience for any producer my age. I used to practically live in the studio. And I used to work until I fell over. It was like an addiction.
In 1966 he formed the group The Ballroom with Sandy Salisbury, Michele O'Malley, and Jim Bell. The quartet recorded an album's worth of material, but other than two songs on a 1967 Warner Bros. 45 rpm single, the sessions remained unreleased until 2001.
In 1966, he produced two hit singles for Tommy Roe, "Sweet Pea" and "Hooray for Hazel". Production on both was credited to Boettcher's Our Productions partner, Steve Clark, but Boettcher subsequently claimed that he himself produced these recordings. The following year, Boettcher produced Roe's album It's Now Winter's Day (ABC Records).
In the early 1970s, Boettcher had little commercial success and few rewarding recording projects. In 1971, at the insistence of Elektra Records founder-president Jac Holzman, who was a huge fan of Begin, Boettcher signed a deal with Elektra. He warned Holzman that the album would take a long time to produce, and started working on a solo album. The project got a boost when Boettcher met a young multi-instrumentalist named Web Burrell; taking a cue from the early one-man albums by Emitt Rhodes, Boettcher decided to record the album in a similar fashion, using few musicians other than Burrell. (Boettcher and Burrell collaborated on at least three published songs.) After almost two years of work, There's An Innocent Face was released in 1973 under the name Curt Boetcher. It was a continuation of the direction that the Millennium had taken with their unreleased post-Begin recordings, being a collection of songs with country, sunshine pop, arena rock, and folk stylings. The album was a commercial failure. He attempted to record a follow-up album, tentatively titled Chicken Little Was Right, but it was never completed.
In 1973, Boettcher served as mixdown engineer on the Emitt Rhodes album Farewell to Paradise. In the mid-1970s, he sang backing vocals on a number of Elton John recordings, including "Don't Go Breaking My Heart", a duet John recorded with Kiki Dee. He also contributed backing vocals to recordings by Tanya Tucker, Helen Reddy, Eric Carmen and Dennis Wilson.
Thereafter, his output as a musician and producer was limited and sporadic. Beginning in 1975, he worked for several years as a disco DJ throughout southern California. His best-known work in the late 1970s was a 10-minute disco version of "Here Comes the Night" by The Beach Boys, which was a moderate hit in 1979 and was included on L.A. (Light Album); it was a remake of the original recording from their 1967 album Wild Honey. As Curt Becher he produced a disco version of Shortnin' Bread for The Beach Boys that emerged on some bootleg collections. He also produced Mike Love's solo album Looking Back With Love. Other productions were largely overlooked, such as the Geno Washington album That's Why Hollywood Loves Me and The Diamonds' Live And Well album. In 1980 he produced new recordings by a later incarnation of The Association, but these tracks were not released. He also produced their 1983 version of "Walk Away Renee," which was included on a Radio Shack promotional album by Mike Love and Dean Torrence entitled Rock & Roll City.
Boettcher died in 1987 at Los Angeles County Hospital while being treated for a lung infection. Shortly before his death, he set up the Valley Center Studios with musician Mark Antaky and engineer Dave Jenkins.
Little is known about Boettcher's personal life. He was married to Claudia Ford in the late 1960s. A 2013 New York Times Magazine article asserted that he was homosexual.
The Brady Bunch recorded Boettcher's composition "I Just Want To Be Your Friend" on their 1972 album, Meet the Brady Bunch (Paramount Records).[27] Their 1973 follow-up album, The Brady Bunch Phonographic Album, included the Boettcher co-composition "There Is Nothing More To Say."[28]
The Sunshine Company, a Los Angeles rock band, recorded two Boettcher compositions, "I Just Want To Be Your Friend" (on the 1967 album Happy Is the Sunshine Company, Imperial Records 12359), and "If You Only Knew" (on the 1968 album The Sunshine Company, Imperial Records 12368).
The Hep Stars, a 1960s Swedish rock group whose line-up included Benny Andersson before he went on to greater fame in Abba, recorded four Boettcher compositions, "Another Time", "Musty Dusty" (co-written with Tandyn Almer), "Would You Like To Go" (co-written with Jules "Gary" Alexander of the Association), and "Spinning Spinning Spinning" (co-written with Ruthann Friedman).
In April 2013, Beth Sorrentino (formerly of the American rock band Suddenly, Tammy!) released Would You Like To Go: A Curt Boettcher Songbook, produced by Sean Slade and issued in Europe on the Basta label. (It was released in North America on June 10, 2014.) The album includes covers of well-known and obscure Boettcher songs and co-writes, as well as an idiosyncratic recording of "Along Comes Mary" because of the song's strong association with Boettcher. Sorrentino's recording of "You Know I've Found a Way" (co-written by Boettcher and Lee Mallory) was used as the soundtrack for the trailer of Rik Cordero's film Starla.
The New York Times wrote of Boettcher: "If his life had gone just a bit differently, [he] might have been another Brian Wilson. ... As it stands, Boettcher — a pop-music producer whose heyday was the late '60s — now survives in rock history mostly as a liner-note credit. He could have been, but never was. Yet he enjoys a godlike status among a select group of music fans, for whom obscurity is more enticing than fame."
He was born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, to Peggie and Arland Boettcher. His father was a Navy pilot in World War II and later worked at the Pentagon.
Boettcher entered the University of Minnesota in fall 1962, where in 1963 he formed the folk quartet The GoldeBriars with the Holmberg sisters, Dotti and Sheri, and Ron Neilsson. They relocated to Los Angeles after being signed by Epic Records, for whom they recorded and released two albums in 1964, The GoldeBriars and Straight Ahead! (A third was reportedly recorded in 1965 but withheld from release.) Under the guidance of recording producer Bob Morgan, the vocals were mixed upfront and enriched by double-tracking to sound like six voices. Prior to recording their third album, the group added drummer Ron Edgar (later of The Music Machine; Edgar also worked with Boettcher in the bands The Ballroom and The Millennium). According to music historian Joseph Lanza, the GoldeBriars' material tended to follow the standard folk formula of songs such as "Shenandoah", but "acoustically, their style blended the homespun and the sugarspun." Boettcher arranged most of the group's songs, but he also contributed as a songwriter. Morgan, quoted in Lanza's Vanilla Pop, said that Boettcher's childhood as a navy brat influenced songs like "Haiku" on the album Straight Ahead!. Bobb Goldsteinn, an accomplished songwriter (who wrote the 1963 folk-dixie hit "Washington Square" for the Village Stompers), became "Boettcher's manager and confidant", as well as lyricist for some GoldeBriars songs. As manager, Goldsteinn inched the band in a more pop-flavored direction. The GoldeBriars performed live in the 1965 film Once Upon a Coffee House.
Following the demise of The GoldeBriars, Boettcher moved into production and songwriting work for others, including Lee Mallory and The Association. In 1966, through his production partnership Our Productions, Boettcher produced the debut album by The Association, And Then... Along Comes the Association, released on Valiant Records. The album spawned two Top 10 hits, "Along Comes Mary" (which reached #7 in the U.S.) and "Cherish" (which reached #1). In 2012, original Association member Jim Yester said Valiant Records claimed the song sounded "too old and archaic", but the song's success "just showed we can have our archaic and eat it, too." The album included the song "Message of Our Love", co-written by Boettcher and Tandyn Almer (who also wrote "Along Comes Mary").
Boettcher's wife Claudia said that Almer wrote "Along Comes Mary" as a slow song. Boettcher sped up the tempo and recorded a demo on which he sang the vocal. This demo was presented to The Association, who used it as a guide for their arrangement of the tune. It was the band's attempt to replicate and build on Boettcher's demo that became the group's first hit single (produced by Boettcher). Boettcher and Almer had a dispute over writing credits for the song, Boettcher arguing that his extensive contributions to the arrangement, which formed the basis of the hit version of the song, warranted a co-writer credit. However, the song was ultimately credited solely to Almer.
After the album achieved commercial success, according to a November 1966 story in Billboard, the band dropped their manager, Dean Fredericks, who in turn filed a breach of contract suit against the band, claiming they were bound by a seven-year agreement. After filing suit, Fredericks joined Our Productions. "Consequently," Billboard revealed, "the Association will no longer associate with Our Productions, and henceforth will be a&r'd by Jerry Yester, brother of Association member Jim Yester." As a result of this dispute, despite his valuable contributions to the debut album's commercial breakthrough, Boettcher was prevented from continuing as the band's producer. (He produced several tracks for a later incarnation of the band in the early 1980s.)
In a 1974 interview with ZigZag Magazine, Boettcher said that during this period he was under contract to Our Productions and on salary. This arrangement accorded him no royalties, but a tremendous amount of artistic freedom. "I wanted to keep on working, to be there. I think for a while I had more hours of studio experience for any producer my age. I used to practically live in the studio. And I used to work until I fell over. It was like an addiction.
In 1966 he formed the group The Ballroom with Sandy Salisbury, Michele O'Malley, and Jim Bell. The quartet recorded an album's worth of material, but other than two songs on a 1967 Warner Bros. 45 rpm single, the sessions remained unreleased until 2001.
In 1966, he produced two hit singles for Tommy Roe, "Sweet Pea" and "Hooray for Hazel". Production on both was credited to Boettcher's Our Productions partner, Steve Clark, but Boettcher subsequently claimed that he himself produced these recordings. The following year, Boettcher produced Roe's album It's Now Winter's Day (ABC Records).
In the early 1970s, Boettcher had little commercial success and few rewarding recording projects. In 1971, at the insistence of Elektra Records founder-president Jac Holzman, who was a huge fan of Begin, Boettcher signed a deal with Elektra. He warned Holzman that the album would take a long time to produce, and started working on a solo album. The project got a boost when Boettcher met a young multi-instrumentalist named Web Burrell; taking a cue from the early one-man albums by Emitt Rhodes, Boettcher decided to record the album in a similar fashion, using few musicians other than Burrell. (Boettcher and Burrell collaborated on at least three published songs.) After almost two years of work, There's An Innocent Face was released in 1973 under the name Curt Boetcher. It was a continuation of the direction that the Millennium had taken with their unreleased post-Begin recordings, being a collection of songs with country, sunshine pop, arena rock, and folk stylings. The album was a commercial failure. He attempted to record a follow-up album, tentatively titled Chicken Little Was Right, but it was never completed.
In 1973, Boettcher served as mixdown engineer on the Emitt Rhodes album Farewell to Paradise. In the mid-1970s, he sang backing vocals on a number of Elton John recordings, including "Don't Go Breaking My Heart", a duet John recorded with Kiki Dee. He also contributed backing vocals to recordings by Tanya Tucker, Helen Reddy, Eric Carmen and Dennis Wilson.
Thereafter, his output as a musician and producer was limited and sporadic. Beginning in 1975, he worked for several years as a disco DJ throughout southern California. His best-known work in the late 1970s was a 10-minute disco version of "Here Comes the Night" by The Beach Boys, which was a moderate hit in 1979 and was included on L.A. (Light Album); it was a remake of the original recording from their 1967 album Wild Honey. As Curt Becher he produced a disco version of Shortnin' Bread for The Beach Boys that emerged on some bootleg collections. He also produced Mike Love's solo album Looking Back With Love. Other productions were largely overlooked, such as the Geno Washington album That's Why Hollywood Loves Me and The Diamonds' Live And Well album. In 1980 he produced new recordings by a later incarnation of The Association, but these tracks were not released. He also produced their 1983 version of "Walk Away Renee," which was included on a Radio Shack promotional album by Mike Love and Dean Torrence entitled Rock & Roll City.
Boettcher died in 1987 at Los Angeles County Hospital while being treated for a lung infection. Shortly before his death, he set up the Valley Center Studios with musician Mark Antaky and engineer Dave Jenkins.
Little is known about Boettcher's personal life. He was married to Claudia Ford in the late 1960s. A 2013 New York Times Magazine article asserted that he was homosexual.
The Brady Bunch recorded Boettcher's composition "I Just Want To Be Your Friend" on their 1972 album, Meet the Brady Bunch (Paramount Records).[27] Their 1973 follow-up album, The Brady Bunch Phonographic Album, included the Boettcher co-composition "There Is Nothing More To Say."[28]
The Sunshine Company, a Los Angeles rock band, recorded two Boettcher compositions, "I Just Want To Be Your Friend" (on the 1967 album Happy Is the Sunshine Company, Imperial Records 12359), and "If You Only Knew" (on the 1968 album The Sunshine Company, Imperial Records 12368).
The Hep Stars, a 1960s Swedish rock group whose line-up included Benny Andersson before he went on to greater fame in Abba, recorded four Boettcher compositions, "Another Time", "Musty Dusty" (co-written with Tandyn Almer), "Would You Like To Go" (co-written with Jules "Gary" Alexander of the Association), and "Spinning Spinning Spinning" (co-written with Ruthann Friedman).
In April 2013, Beth Sorrentino (formerly of the American rock band Suddenly, Tammy!) released Would You Like To Go: A Curt Boettcher Songbook, produced by Sean Slade and issued in Europe on the Basta label. (It was released in North America on June 10, 2014.) The album includes covers of well-known and obscure Boettcher songs and co-writes, as well as an idiosyncratic recording of "Along Comes Mary" because of the song's strong association with Boettcher. Sorrentino's recording of "You Know I've Found a Way" (co-written by Boettcher and Lee Mallory) was used as the soundtrack for the trailer of Rik Cordero's film Starla.
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