Hype or Hope?

Scotland's Bay City Rollers? Who?

If you don't know, Sid Bernstein will tell you. Bernstein is a promoter, the man who staged the Beatles' momentous Shea Stadium concert in New York a decade ago. "Just like ten years ago all over again," he says. "I am not saying the Rollers are the new Beatles. I am saying that they are the biggest phenomenon since the Beatles."

This week the Rollers will make their U.S. television debut on the kick-off of ABC's new music-variety series Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell. The five-man band will appear from London via satellite doing three typical songs: Bye Bye Baby, its first big hit; Give a Little Love, its current British chart buster; Summer Love Sensation, a new item. Everybody is sure the Rollers will be sensational enough to be demanded back. The group will tour 15 cities in the U.S. between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Bernstein is already negotiating a Shea Stadium date for next summer. And the group's first LP has just been released on the Arista label.

Soft Rockers. "Is it a hype? Is it a hope? Or is it a Bicentennial gift from the old country?" goes Cosell's introduction for the Rollers. Cosell's musical taste being on a par with his knack for objective sports reporting, it is likely that even he does not have the answers to those questions. What is known for sure about the Rollers is that they drive little girls wild. In the year and a half since they supplanted the Osmonds as the favorites of youthful Britain, weeping, squealing and screaming have been big things at their concerts. So has fainting. At a concert in London last May, 250 or so young things were treated on the scene and another 28 hauled off to a hospital.

Rollers is the British word for soft rockers. That accounts for one part of the group's name. Its collective eye on the American market, the Rollers stuck a pin in a map of the U.S. and hit Bay City, Mich.

Onstage, the boys--Alan and Derek (Longmuir), Les (McKeown), Eric (Faulkner) and Woody (Stuart Wood) --are the ultimate squeaky cleans. They claim not to drink. Only one admits to smoking, and then only cigarettes. At their press conferences, a pitcher of milk is always conspicuous on a table front and center. Their personal promotion describes them as just working-class lads from Edinburgh. That turns out to be true.

It all began seven years ago when the Longmuir brothers, Bass Guitarist Alan, then 19, and Drummer Derek, then 16, started a rock group called the Saxons. They rehearsed in their parents' tenement apartment. "They had the most patched-up bunch of electronic junk I'd ever seen," says Tam Paton, their manager. They also had, he recalls, "a freshness and an eagerness to please that were very appealing." A perhaps marketable, boy-next-door look, in other words.

For three years they worked this joint and that in Edinburgh for at most $55 a night. Then one day in 1970 a record-company executive missed his flight back to London and dropped in at the Caves Club. The Rollers were playing. Almost immediately, the Rollers had a contract, and began turning out such British top-ten hits as Remember, Shang-a-Lang and All of Me Loves You.

Like the Beatles, the Rollers have devised a look all their own. Their denim trousers are cut halfway to the knee and trimmed with tartan. Below are striped football stockings and sneakers.

Above are either T shirts or denim jackets, decorated with more tartan. Out in the audience, in Britain at least, are invariably several thousand girls dressed the same way. Says Manager Paton: "It's cheap, it's original, and any fan can dress like a Roller simply by sewing some strips of tartan on a shirt and cutting off the trouser leg at mid-calf." Right, Mom?

A Little Love. Neither the Rollers nor their backers make any great claims for their music, and that is probably just as well. Their songs are essentially pale imitations of the 1960s, in which one can hear echoes of the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Beach Boys mingled with the Rollers' own routine four-chord harmonies and chug-a-chug rhythms. The lyrics are never ambitious enough to confuse a ten-year-old. Sample:

You have to give a little love,

take a little love,

Be prepared to foresake a little love.

And when the sun comes shining through,

We 'll know what to do.

The Rollers' real expertise seems to lie in their ability to titillate the hearts and minds of their young audiences. One of their most adroit teases is to encourage one or two girls to come up to the stage for a kiss, usually from Les, the lead singer.

The blunt truth is that the Beatles were inventive harmonically and had two major rock poets (John Lennon and Paul McCartney) in their number; no lyric like She's Leaving Home or With a Little Help from My Friends or Eleanor Rigby is within the Rollers' capacity, range or competence. In their favor is the fact that the young have been waiting for new rock heroes for years. Maybe--just maybe--the Rollers are next.

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