After more than a decade of commercial silence, Chad & Jeremy came back onto the musical scene with a "bullet".  The "reunion" LP of 1983 marked the beginning of a new period for the group, a new period which lasted almost as long as C&J's first run...

    In the 1970s, Chad & Jeremy had briefly recorded and written together again, but without any commercial results.  That would change in 1982, when an eccentric millionaire named "Rocky" Davis signed the duo to his new label, a Rocshire Records, distributed by MCA. "I think Jeremy was missing the musical part of his life," Chad recalls, "And he wanted to give it another try. Rocky had recruited some really good people from Warner Brothers and we thought the situation looked promising." 

For Jeremy, the reunion was the inevitable result of the reawakening of his muse.  "Chad had been going to demo studios and doing stuff on his own, and I started doing the same thing.  And both of us found exactly the same thing, which was that they both sounded like us! They both had two part harmonies and they just sounded like Chad & Jeremy records!" This new material, demoed around 1982, included several songs that were destined for the LP, such as "Night In Fat City" and "Seascape", as well as numbers which were destined to be untouched during group recordings - such as Chad's "Can't Come Back", and Jeremy's "Prison Without Bars", both of which featured a solid rock sound. Towards the end of 1982, with Jeremy starring in the first run of Tom Stoppard's classic play, The Real Thing, Chad returned to England for the first time in years to begin recording their first LP in 15 years.

But before work on the LP could be started, tragedy struck. Chad was involved in an accident which severely damaged one of his eyes, and which required several surgeries over a couple of years to put right. Reunion plans were held off for a brief time until he could recover enough to carry on, resulting in the album being first recorded both in England in late 1982, and further work being carried out in early 1983 in California. By the summer of 1983, with the LP in the can, Chad & Jeremy were ready to face the public again.

    Their new LP, entitled Chad Stuart & Jeremy Clyde,  featured some of the singing that had made the duo famous, such as that shown on "Zanzibar Sunset", but also had several tracks which were compromises to certain commercial pressures and to the lack of time to record the LP. It was a mixed bag and suffered from the fact that, as usual, Jeremy was trying to be a recording artist and perform in a West End play at the same time. "Bite The Bullet" was chosen as the single, and was, in retrospect, the wrong song for the group.  For a gently rocking duo of the 1960s to come back into the public eye with a 1980s rock song was probably a bad decision. For the first time, a video was produced. The "Bite The Bullet" video got a lot of exposure, mainly because actress/model Lauren Hutton co-starred in it. 
    
    Efforts to promote the LP were made difficult by Rocky's famous and very public anti-payola stance. (A position which subsequently appeared ludicrous and hypocritical when the news hit that he had embezzled all his funds from Hughes Aircraft !) Rocshire Records went into receivership and Rocky went to jail. Disappointed but undefeated, C & J went on to star together in the British version of the Broadway hit Pump Boys and Dinettes. During this period, they made preparations for a second album which, because of the disasters at Rocshire, never saw the light of day.
    
    Next, in 1986, came British Invasion II, an American tour with such '60s luminaries as Gerry and the Pacemakers, Freddie and the Dreamers, and the Searchers.   "It was the tour we always swore we'd never do," Chad recalls, "But it turned out to be a blast. And meeting our old fans again, with husbands and children. It brought the whole thing full circle really."
    
    Ironically, this tour almost didn't happen at all. At the last minute, Jeremy landed a big part in a TV series about the legendary William Tell. This opportunity was in direct conflict with the tour dates. Fortunately for Chad and C & J fans, the producer of the tour threatened a lawsuit and forced Jeremy into cooperating! The tour lasted six weeks, ending with a gig at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles. But for Jeremy, the "real" last night was the evening before in Phoenix, in which "the atmosphere engulfed us, and the six of us played the audience like a trout." The duo then stayed in LA for a series of meetings with record executives, agents, and promoters.

    These meetings resulted in the duo landing a gig from February 24th-March 8th, 1987 at Harrah's in Lake Tahoe. This enabled C&J to play to a relatively small and receptive audience, the kind of venue at which they excelled. Happily, the final show from this gig was recorded and is available at electricpaintbox.com.

     The duo had one more go of it, playing a week at the Reno Hilton, ending September 6th, 1987. But just when it seemed that a new night club career was in the cards for C & J, Jeremy pulled the plug once again and announced a return to acting. Or at least, that's Chad's recollection. Jeremy remembers it quite differently - "I didn't pull the plug...we didn't get any other offers! I was for taking a year off, and making some money", then returning to possibly record another record. Sadly, it wasn't to be. That would seem to be the end of the C&J story, but you never know, do you? The next fifteen years would be quiet ones, but important ones.

I. Prologue (before 1964)

II. Fame, Part One (1964-1966)

III. Fame, Part Two (1966-1968)

IV. Epilogue (1969-82)

VI. The Wilderness Years (1987-2002)

VII. C&J Today (2002-present)

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An Electric Paintbox production. Copyright 2004  Frank Jason Rhoden.

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