Talk about your lucky strikes. Gary Puckett & the Union Gap were playing in a bowling alley in 1966 and by this day in 1968 were releasing their first album, Woman, Woman. It was a good break for Jerry Fuller as well. Fuller had been in a band briefly with Glen Campbell and the future Seals & Crofts, and had written the Ricky Nelson song “Travelin’ Man’ but was looking to make a career as an A&R man and producer with Columbia Records. Puckett was his first “discovery.”
In the time between the bowling alley and the LP, Puckett and his band had become regulars on the West coast tour scene and had adopted their trademark look of Civil War (Union side) costumes, perhaps for those who found Paul Revere and the Raiders Revolutionary War costumes too old-fashioned!
The Union Gap was a quartet behind Puckett, and an unusual one for rock since it featured two on saxophone. Puckett himself played guitar and was the distinctive, serious tenor voice that distinguished them. He also was something of a songwriter, but Fuller, producing the record, kept him to just one song on it (“Believe Me”), while Canadian bassist Kerry Chater wrote two. But Fuller knew the path to success for them would be cover songs, or at least those written by others, and Woman, Woman included songs written by Sono Bono, Neil Diamond (“Kentucky Woman”), Jimmy Webb (“By the Time I Get To Phoenix”) and notably, the title track which was written by Jim Glaser and Jimmy Payne. The song in which Puckett asked his girlfriend “have you got cheating on your mind?” with what allmusic would describe as his characteristic “almost other-wordly…earnestness and melodrama” became the first in a short but significant string of hits for Puckett.
Allmusic rated the album 3-stars, thinking Puckett “a great interpreter” of songs and complimenting Fuller’s “slick production” as well as the record’s “wonderful contrasts”. The album did moderately well for a debut in the heyday of the Beatles and Monkees, reaching #22 in the U.S. But “Woman, Woman”, the single was a clear-cut hit, reaching #4, as well as #6 in Australia and being a #1 hit in Canada. Oddly, it didn’t do well in the UK, but some of his future hits like the follow-up “Young Girl”, did their best there. So popular were they, briefly at least, in Britain that they got to perform for then Prince Charles (the current king.) They also played at the White House.
Soon however, their star was on the wane and they were tiring of following Fuller’s advice, so the band broke up. Puckett went solo, but never quite had the same level of success, while Chater moved to Nashville and became a reasonably successful country music songwriter.
But should you want a bit of musical nostalgia and even older clothing, Puckett, now 80, has reformed a Union Gap band and are playing three upcoming shows in Texas later this month.