It was an auspicious coincidence that half an hour before Peter Noone took the stage Sunday night at B.B. King's, The Carpenters' hit cover of Herman's Hermits' "There's A Kind Of Hush" was played on the sound system at a nearby Hell's Kitchen reataurant.
"See what I mean?" Robert Kenison said to his dinner companion, having just discussed the significance of one of rock 'n' roll history's most underappreciated bands. A guitarist, Kenison, , a.k.a. Troy Sharmel of the legendary 1970s Madison, Wis.-based rock 'n' roll show band Dr. Bop & The Headliners, had said that every post-Herman's Hermits guitar player had learned from the "dit-dit-dit-dit, dit-dit-dit-dit-dit-dit" guitar intro and recurring instrumental riff from the group's 1965 hit "Silhouettes."
"It's a scale!" explained Kenison, who also recalled chauffeuring Herman's Hermits around in Dr. Bop's limo when the British Invasion band performed in Madison. "Back then we all learned how to play scales on a guitar to that record."
In Kenison's British Invasion-inspired pre-Dr. Bop band The Gentlemen, a second guitarist played the "Silhouettes" scale simultaneously, but harmonically.
"Another thing is that the song modulates," continued Kenison. "So you played the scale, and then it modulated up a key--which was really cool. So you also learned how to modulate, giving your music another dimension."
At B.B. King's, Peter Noone performed both "Silhouettes" and "There's A Kind Of Hush," and a dozen or so other big Herman's Hermits hits along with plenty of others by contemporaries including The Beatles ("I Saw Her Standing There"), The Rolling Stones ("Start Me Up"), The Yardbirds ("For Your Love"), The Searchers ("Love Potion Number Nine"), The Hollies ("Bus Stop," which he said Herman's Hermits had rejected), Manfred Mann ("Do Wah Diddy Diddy"), The Dave Clark Five ("Because"), Tommy Rowe ("Everybody"), Frankie Laine ("Jezebel"), Frankie Ford ("Sea Cruise," covered on Herman's Hermits first album), Tom Jones ("It's Not Unusual") and his co-host of the current PBS special '60s Pop, Rock & Soul: My Music, The Monkees' Davy Jones ("Daydream Believer").
"He can still sing!" observed Kenison, just as Noone, as if answering, boasted, "I'm one of the few singers from the '60s who can still sing in the same key without forgetting words."
And it was true, entirely. But Noone could also entertain. He modified Gerry & The Pacemakers' "Ferry Across The Mersey" by substituting "The Hudson," and on the Hermits' hit "Leaning On The Lamp Post" paced the stage while holding a vintage Hermits album cover ("what a CD used to look like," he instructed) over his face--not that he was not recognizable some five decades later.
Then again, he joked that a young woman had joyously exclaimed upon seeing him walk in, "Oh, my God! It's Nick Nolte!," and cautioned a high school girl in the audience that she would be considered weird for wearing the Peter Noone t-shirt he threw at her.
"Who ever thought B.B. King and Herman's Hermits would ever be in the same sentence?" he marveled, and in another artful juxtaposition, artfully followed Johnny Horton's "The Battle Of New Orleans" (from an earlier British Invasion, he joked) with the Hermits hit "Dandy." Guessing that his "Long Island crowd" would rather hear country-and-western music than the "12 new songs" he claimed to have written that morning, he delivered Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire," everything with the same boyish exuberance he invariably exhibited during his commercial peak years.
There were a lot of light sticks and Union Jacks being waved about by the "geezer crowd," as Kenison's son rightly surmised the packed Noone audience would be. He closed his 113th and next-to-last concert this year with the Hermits' hits "Can't You Hear My Heartbeat" (fans up front rose and stretched their arms in singing the "Ahh!" part), "Mrs. Brown You've Got A Lovely Daughter" and "I'm Henry VIII, I Am."
"He sounded as good as ever--as good as you get for this stuff!" Kenison said afterward. "He's updated his repartee, and most important for any rock musician, the chicks were standing up in the front!"
[The Examiner wrote the liner notes for the 2004 CD compilation Herman's Hermits Retrospective.]
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