With Paul Revere & the Raiders, co-founder Mark Lindsay sang some of the ’60s most memorable songs, such as "Indian Reservation" and “Kicks.” Though he left the group in the 1970s, their memory lives on with the Happy Together Tour, which arrives at the Granada on Wednesday, July 13, at 7:30 p.m. and features the Turtles featuring Flo & Eddie, Chuck Negron (formerly of Three Dog Night), Gary Puckett & The Union Gap, The Cowsills, The Spencer Davis Group, and Paul Revere & the Raiders’ Lindsay. I talked to Lindsay on the phone about how the tour is like a circus, the ’60s, and the endurance of rock ’n’ roll.
How is the Happy Together Tour going so far? So far, so good. It’s like a circus, a traveling circus, with a lot of moving parts. It’s great, we pull up to a venue, the trucks unload the equipment, though there are no animals to unload, of course. When I say it’s like a circus, there’s a series of acts, and everything has to run smoothly. When the elephants go out, the clowns have to come in, so to speak. So the way the tour works, there are five acts, and one incredible band on stage, and these guys are great musicians and great signers. They have learned all the songs of the artists on the tour, just like the record. That’s their job to sound like the record. If you have the lead signers that were on the original, you’ve got a band. Each act goes on, and there’s exactly a minute between, you don’t even have time to go get popcorn. There’s one band doing five bands, and that makes the transition so much quicker. For two and a half hours, wham bam and ’60’s rock, and that’s what they do.
How long have you been doing the Happy Together Tour? Usually you do a couple years and take a year off, and I’ve been doing this for probably 10 or 15 years. The original Happy Together went out in ’84, and I was on that, so I’ve been doing it off and on with Mark [Volman] and Howard [Kaylan] since they’ve ben doing it. I look forward to it every year. Every year we go out and do 60-80 dates across everywhere.