Girl Group Chronicles: The Secrets

by Doc Rock

It is an old, familiar story. We've heard it over and over again. The artist longed to be a singer from childhood. He (or she or they) begged his parents for a guitar. He practiced. He played local gigs for years. Tried and tried to get a recording contract. Went from label to label. Finally after years of struggling and toiling, he got a big break wcih led to a hit at last.

With variations, this story fits many artists. Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, Johnny Burnette, the Beatles, Hank Ballard and a host of others, black and white, big and small.

Even many Girl Groups, such as the Pixies Three about whom I wrote about in the October, 1993 issue of DISCoveries, studggled to gain success.  The Pixies had been singing together for seven years before their break, which came when they were "discovered" by Johnny Madara and David White. And even then, Debbie's mom had to practically beat Madara and White over the head to get the Pixies noticed.

But sometimes, an artist gets their big break right at the beginning of their career. Such a artist was the Secrets. They are listed twice in the Doc Rock Dictionary of Music Terminology. Once under "Over-Night Success" and again under "One- Hit wonder."

OK. So I am being facetious. If you look in the Doc Rock Dictionary of Music Terminology, you won't find the Secrets listed like that. Truth be told, there is no such thing as the Doc Rock Dictionary.

At least not yet . . . .

However, if you look in almost any real rock and roll reference book, such as Joel Whitburn's Record Research Billboard Chart series, or Norm N. Nite's "Rock On," you will find the Secrets listed as four girls named Patty, Carol, Josie (or sometimes Jacie), and Kragen.

In reality, their actual names are Patty, Carole (not Carol), Jackie (not Josie or Jacie), and Karen (not Kragen). Why are they always listed incorrectly?

Well, when the Secrets' record, "The Boy Next Door," first started to break out in late 1963, Billboard ran a brief biography on the female quartet. And Billboard got the names wrong. And writers have been drawing on Billboard as a source and repeating that mistake for 33 years!

I felt it was time to set the record straight. After all, with the Pixies Three and the Angels, the Secrets made my personal 1963 experience perfect! So I went to the source, all four original Secrets, to get the facts about this enigmatic 1963 Girl Group. Who's the Secrets?

The girls, now women, are Karen Gray Cipriani, lead (June 16, 1943), Carole Raymont McGoldrick, alto (or bass) (August 1, 1943), Jackie Allen Schwegler, high dum-dee- dums (June 6, 1943), and Patty Miller, soprano (July 1, 1943). As far as musical backgrounds go, Karen says, "My father was in a barbershop quartet back in the 1920s. I think that I got my singing ability from him. I sang lead in the Secrets."

Carole was the first musical note on her family tree. "I started singing when I was very young, also I had tap and ballet lessons, and performed at recitals. The first song I sang in public was "Take Me Out To The Ball Game" at a recital when I was eight. My mom was not pushy -- I'm a natural ham."

Patty always liked singing. "I sang in the church choir and in all the school choirs. My father sang and played the drums for years in a polka band, and my brother still does. They do jazz and polkas and rock and roll and standards and everything."

The Secret who had the least musical upbringing (though not from want of trying by her mom) was Jackie. "When I started with the girls, my mom probably thought I was kinda nuts! That was nothing new. Actually, my mother really did enjoy music and played piano at home. But she was pressing me toward learning to appreciate classical music. I was rebellious, so rock was right up my alley."

The group originally formed in Cleveland's Shaw High School."Carol and I sang with two other girls in a group in Shaw High School in Cleveland," recalls Karen. "Jackie sang with us in this group, too, along with a girl named Sue. When we got out of high school, Sue got married, so we picked up Pat along the way. I can't remember what we called ourselves in high school. We sang for school organizations, and after we graduated, we hooked up with another alumni of Shaw High, Tom King. He started Tom King and the Starfires, and later he was in the Outsiders ["Time Won't Let Me"]."

Carole remembers those high school days, as well. "Four of us in high school used to sing for the girls athletic club, the DAA, the Friendship club. We sang songs like 'The Leaves of Brown Came Tumbling Down that September In the Rain' and 'Side by Side.'"

No one recalls any name that the group might have had in those early, school days. Perhaps they had no name. That sure makes sense, in light of the scoop I got when I asked the musical question, "How'd you get the name the Secrets?"

Jackie, Karen, and Patty were not sure where the name came from. "Maybe Madara and White thought it up?" they suggested. So I called up Johnny Madara. Madara and White have had involvement in many musical milestones, including the Danny and the Juniors records like "At the Hop," the Sherry's "Pop Pop Pop-Eye," Len Barry's "One Two Three," the Pixies Three "442 Glenwood Avenue," and Lesley Gore's "You Don't Own Me," among many others. As writer, producer, arranger, and discoverer of the

Secrets, Johnny Madara seemed just the person to know the truth! So I asked Johnny if he and Dave White knew the Secret of the Secrets' name.

"We did come up with names in our career for groups. For example, we named the Sherrys. Some groups would have a name that was almost there, and we'd change it, like Sherrys to Sherreens [a fictious example]. But I don't recall where The Secrets name came from."

Finally, I asked Carole where the name came from. Carole, the low voice of the group, the one who sang the immortal line "Stay away if you value your life!" dropped into an even lower, Secretive tone. "You wanna know something? We always say, 'It's a secret.' But that is just because none of us can remember how we got that name! In 1963. we werebrainstorming names, and the first time we went out to perform live, we didn't even have a name or a recording contract or anything. The pianist at the show looked down at the piano and said, 'How about the Sonnets?' which was the brand name of the piano. So the very first time we appeared in pubic, we were known as the Sonnets! But I don't know if Johnny Madara and David White helped pick the name the Secrets, or what! I just can't remember! None of us can! But because we can't remember, we always say, 'It's a Secret!'"

It's not a Secret any more!

Going to school with Tom King turned out to be a fateful coincidence. The girls were asked by Tom to do a series of five Twist Shows, hops really, with Tom backing them up. One show was at the Continental in Cleveland, another at the American Legion or Veterans Hall on Cleveland's west side. Karen: "Things happened surprisingly quickly after that. It was really a fairy tale story. We never expected anything like that to happen. We were really doing this just for fun."

Pat: "One of the acts in these shows was Bocky Boo and the Visions, a group which was managed by a woman named Redda Robins. She came with them, heard us, liked us and signed us up.

"We were performing at the Chateau, which no longer exists, on the west side of Cleveland. Rhedda got Johnny Madara and David White to come and see us performing. They came from Philadelphia to see us. They liked us and immediately signed us to a recording contract. We went to Philadelphia to learn the songs and then we drove with them from Philadelphia in two cars to cut the songs. It was that fast."

Johnny Madara did like the Secrets from the outset. "I don't recall if we heard a tape on the Secrets before we saw them perform. But Redda Robins had two acts, Bocky and the Visions and the Secrets, so we went in to see two acts at the same time. And we actually did record with the Visions for Mercury. But when we went in to see the Secrets, I really liked them. They looked good, and they had a nice character-look to them also. The girls all worked well together and it was a good grouping. I remember how much I liked them."

Even thought the group was not terribly experienced, Johnny found they rather polished already. "I think they were pretty much ready to go. What we worked on was the kind of harmonies that we wanted for that particular record. Dave White is fantastic with harmonies, so we worked with the Secrets on that for our songs. We did not work on choreography that I remember."

Of course, the girls did not know who Madara and White were when they first met, and Carole, for one, was skeptical that something that happened so fast was truly on the up and up. "We did five shows. And at the fifth show, two guys came up to us and said that they were with Mercury Records and they wanted to record us. We said, 'Yeah, sure, uh huh. Right.' We didn't believe them. But in a matter of weeks, we were in Philadelphia in their offices, Madara and White, and they treated us like gold. They were wonderful, wonderful guys. Total gentlemen. And they treated us like we were big, big stars, not green girls. We made a demo which was sent up there to the Mercury representatives. They liked us and signed us up."

Jackie also has nothing but fond memories of the getting a record deal. "We headed to New York just laughing all the way, thinking that it was hysterical that these four girls from Cleveland were going to see the inside of a recording studio. And we thought that that would be the end of it. But not very long after, it became a hit. We were all taken by surprise!"

Their contract was with Phillips Records, under the parent company Mercury Records, with Madara and White as their A&R men, writers, and producers. "We were out of school, 20 years old when we cut the first record," Pat relates. "Our parents had to sign the record contract, and they were so excited about it. We always had chaperons, we were very square and never got to do anything. Not to say that it wasn't fun. How many people get to do what we did?"

Their first record was a song called "Learnin' To Forget" backed with a Madara and White composition, "The Boy Next Door."

"The A side was supposed to be 'Learning to Forget,'" according to Karen.

Carole agrees. "We worked on the song 'Learnin' to Forget' all the time. The flip side was 'The Boy Next Door,' and we really didn't work on that song much. It was put it together very fast in the studio.   But 'Learning to Forget' was cut with violins and a whole production, even professional hand clappers! On later sessions, we had to do our own hand claps!"

Karen remembers that "a DJ in Buffalo accidentally turned it over to the other side, and started playing 'The Boy Next Door.' And it took off. It was all live in the studio, we sang with the session musicians. And we had one of the most fantastic guitar players, Al Caiola, on 'The Boy Next Door.'"

On the other hand, Patty is pretty sure that "The Boy Next Door" was always the intended hit side. Looking at the 45, the matrix number for "Boy" is 27552, the matrix number for "Learnin'" is 27554. Usually, the A side of a record has the lower matrix number. Okay, Johnny, do you remember which was the A side?

""I think that 'The Boy Next Door' was supposed to be the A-side. It was the commercial side. We were trying to make a dance record of that era, with the kind of sound that was current then. There were a lot of girl groups happening. We were basically trying to do that kind of recording. In fact, there were a couple of things we had done before [in 1962] in the Sherrys' song 'Pop Pop Pop-Eye' that we also did on 'The Boy Next Door.' We pulled production concepts that we had from those Jamie-Guyden label records for the Secrets. such as the drum elements and the saxophone solo. These were both things from 'Pop Pop Pop-Eye.' Yes,all the production ideas were directed toward 'The Boy Next Door' as being the hit song. I don't remember strings on the session. It was a horn-rhythm thing."

The Secrets first session was a split session. The Secrets had just 30 minutes to record their two numbers. "And Paul Anka was in the next studio," Carole notes. Patty noticed Paul, too, and asked to go meet him.

Patty, who was from Willowick, Ohio, and did not attend Shaw high, vividly recalls when the record became a hit. "The first time we heard the record on the radio we were driving in Karen's convertible and it came on the air. We looked at each other and broke out in happy tears."

The local station, WKYC, created a "Secret Student" feature in honour of the local girls who made good. Recently, after three decades, they actually met one of the former Secret Students.

Once the record hit, things changed for the Secrets. Karen: "Our lives got exciting after the record hit. We started doing little hops here and there. We traveled mostly up and down the east coast to Florida. The record company would set us up with a limo and a PR guy and you would go from hop to hop, driving around in these limos, maybe three or four hops in one evening. We didn't have a band to back us up. It was all lip sync shows at that time, with Dionne Warwick, Lou Christie, Lesley Gore, Vic Dana. Lesley was just a teenager, about five years younger than we were, and very nice. We played the Palace Theater in downtown Cleveland with Connie Francis, and we thought she was pretty special and a very nice woman. We really liked her.

"We were doing a TV show where we watched Lenny Welch on stage. We loved his song, it was the first time we'd heard it, 'Since I Don't Have You.' We started talking with him, and he told us that this was his 8th record, and finally he had a hit. Shortly after that, we heard that he had gotten drafted. And he was not heard of again. It was a shame. And we had the fairy tale story of our first record we put out there and it went so high in the charts, number 18 on Billboard! It was really exciting."

Well, Lenny did have a half-dozen more chart records, but none as big as "Since." Jackie remembers several times when other long-struggling artists met the overnight success, the Secrets, who got a hit on the first record. "I'm not sure that we were very well appreciated when we met people who had recorded a lot of flops before scoring their first hit."

The Secret Sound was an interesting approach to the Girl Group style. Having four members, with one low voice, set the Secrets apart from other more typical groups, who had just three members, or four members but no low voice. Besides a low end to the harmony, giving the records a fuller sound than most, most of their records featured at least one spotlight low line by Carole.

A highlight of all Secrets records is the most exciting drum work on any Girl Groups records (apologies to Hal Blaine!). Their songs were written for them specifically, according to Johnny. "We always wrote songs for specific acts. Very rarely did we ever write a song without the person in mind to record it. We didn't make demos. We would play piano and just teach the girls the songs. We would work with them, teaching them the harmonies that we wanted. Then we'd let them rehearse it themselves. They'd go home and work on what we had taught them."

"The Boy Next Door." The big Secret song was a powerful Madara-White record, which came on with a booming sound which was a cross between a wall of sound and a "Locomotion" feel. It opens with drums and a sax, much like "Locomotion," but also features hand claps and the Secret trademark "Dum-dee-dum-dee-dum" refrain. Really, a hybrid of the Angels' "My Boyfriend's Back" and Little Eva's "Locomotion," but with a nod to the Pixies Three "Birthday," also a Madara and White opus.