Cover Story: Let’s Get Together, revived by Paul Brady, echoes of Chet Powers, Kingston Trio and Youngbloods
February 13, 2025
When Bill Taylor made Paul Brady the Salut! Live Artist of the Week at our Facebook group last August, he recalled him as 'amiable, easy to talk to, rather self-effacing' over post-session pints at our folk club in Bishop Auckland, Co Durham.
That was well over 50 years ago and Brady has filled the intervening half century with wonderful music. Bob Dylan has talked of him as a secret hero, other stars have admiringly covered his songs. Now his remarkable career will be encapsulated in an ambitious four-CD package. Salut! Live has been listening to the opening track and comparing it to the original and other versions recorded back even before that Bishop Auckland folk club date with the Johnstons ...
Colin Randall writes: In a busy, colourful but relatively short life, Chet Powers served in the US Air Force, opened for Jimi Hendrix and played in Greenwich Village folk haunts and in such West Coast bands as Quicksilver Messenger Service. He was hit with a pointlessly vindictive jail sentence for simple drug possession and also wrote an enduring peace-and-love anthem of the 60s, Let’s Get Together.
New life has been breathed into the song by the outstanding Irish singer-songwriter Paul Brady, a past master of styles from folk to rock throughout an absorbing 60-year career. Brady's pulsating version captures the essentially good-natured spirit of its generation as potently as anything recorded during the hippies, flower power and love-in times of San Francisco.
Let’s Get Together is the opener, and preview single, of The Archive, a forthcoming four-album collection of often familiar but previously unrealeased material.
Due out on March 28, it will include demos, rare acoustic tracks, collaborations with other artists and unheard live recordings plus a 70-page book of photos and images of assorted memorabilia. Turning these treasure of music and art into this handsome package was all Brady's work, a fitting companion to this autobiography Crazy Dreams and probably worth every bit of the asking price for pre-order, a penny change out of £60.
Paul Brady at the 2009 Cambridge folk festival. By Bryan Ledgard
I first encountered Paul Brady as. member of the fondly remembered Irish folk band The Johnstons. They played exhilarating sets at two folk clubs I ran; an abiding memory is of Brady yelling "Vive la revolution" from the makeshift stage as he caught sight of my wife-to-be (French with 1968 pedigree, albeit provincial France not Paris) brandishing the wooden stave used for barring the door during performances. Don't tell health and safety.
Decades later, we enjoyed a sumptuous lunch near the BBC in Portland Place, courtesy of a PR company that had set up an interview for one of those "My Culture" columns papers like (I was The Daily Telegraph's folk bloke at the time). His film selection sticks in the memory: Patrice Chereau's La Reine Margot.
But back to Let's Get Together and Chet Powers. He recorded it using one of his five pseudonyms, Dino Valenti (his songwriting was done under another, Jesse Orris Farrow), though his version was not heard until it appeared on a compilation in 1996, two years after his death at 57. He had previously undergone brain surgery but is death was sudden and unexpected.
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Photo of Chet Powers: Epic Records
His song first appeared as an instrumental by a group called the Folkswingers soon after he wrote it. Then the Kingston Trio included it on an album; let us just say it is of its time.
The clip of the Powers/Valenti version shows no compelling musical strength (Brady's is miles better) but does come with a delightful footage of the hippy age.
Far better than the delayed original came on the eponymous debut album of The Youngbloods. The single followed in July 1967 but reached only No 62 in the US charts. Then the National Conference of Christians and Jews used it as a call for brotherhood and it raced back into the Billboard Hot 100 and climbed to No 5. It's an impressive treatment of an impressive feel good song.
But Cover Story is about comparisons and none of the alternative versions I've mentioned gets close to the seriously good slice of pop, with typically classy guitar work, in which Brady makes the song his own.
You, of course, may differ. here is Let’s Get Together - the Let’s is often dropped from the title - by the writer, the trio and the top five band:
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Fascinating how the song has evolved from Chet Powers'/Dino Valenti's beguilingly simple original, which I love. Later versions are hardly recognizable as the same song.
The Youngbloods' version, of course, is the best-known, a good singalong pop tune. The Kingston Trio? I dunno. Maybe a little too self-consciously folksy.
But I also love Paul Brady's version. As you say, he makes it his own. And again, it's very different. Puts me in mind a little bit of Van Morrison. Brady's voice seems to have lost a little of its higher register. None the worse for that, though.
Seeing Dino Valenti mentioned takes me back to 2021, when I wrote about John Phillips' wonderful (and so close to have died at birth) song, "Me and My Uncle." Valenti's version was the first I heard and it was love at first listen:
https://www.salutlive.com/2021/04/bill-taylor-uncle-song-.html
Posted by: Bill Taylor | February 14, 2025 at 03:19 PM