You could almost taste the wit: TOAST – The Best of BREAD is the name of a tribute band that’s performing Aug. 12 at Smart Araneta Coliseum and Aug. 15 at Waterfront Cebu City Hotel and Casino, courtesy of Ovation Productions.
Growing up in 1970s Manila, there was no escaping Bread, whose songs would usually play on the radio during slow, sleepy afternoons.
The songs were ballads that caught one’s ear because the lyrics were easy to relate to. They were not exactly folk music like the early stuff of James Taylor, but closer to the slower tunes of the Eagles – still mellow but with soft rock beats and electric guitars.
At age 9 in ’72, I first heard ‘Everything I Own,’ whose vocals by David Gates fluttered smoothly from falsetto to tenor, singing about someone who ‘sheltered me from harm, kept me warm…’ and doing everything ‘just to have you back again.’
Year after year, radio kept playing more Bread songs which, to an adolescent, sounded like love letters and personal confessions:
‘Make It with You’ (‘And if you’re wondering where this song is leading to…’);
‘If’ (‘If a picture paints a thousand words/Then why can’t I paint you?’);
‘Baby, I’m-a Want You’ (‘Used to be my life was just emotions passing by/Then you came along and made me laugh and made me cry…’);
‘Diary’ (‘I found her diary underneath a tree/And started reading about me…’);
‘Aubrey’ (But how I miss the girl/And I’d go a million times around the world just to say/She had been mine for a day…’);
‘Lost Without Your Love’ (‘Lost and all alone/
I always thought that I could make it on my own…’).
But just when it seemed Bread was all about mushy stuff, there was ‘Guitar Man’ and its trippy wah-wah pedal guitar adlibs.
The band broke up in ’73, reunited twice – in ’76-’78 and ’96-’97. In between those years, each member did solo work, with Gates recording ‘Goodbye Girl’ from the movie soundtrack.
The Griffin/Royer tandem wrote the lyrics to the song ‘For All We Know,’ which The Carpenters famously covered.
Tracing the history of Bread revealed interesting and intriguing details.
Gates had known Royer, having worked as producer and arranger in the latter’s previous band, the Pleasure Fair. When Royer introduced his songwriting partner, Griffin, to Gates, they formed Bread as a trio, adding a session drummer, Jim Gordon (who had played with Eric Clapton in Derek and the Dominos). Mike Botts would later replace Gordon.
Bread’s members were a talented bunch. On its self-titled debut album in 1969, Gates sang lead vocals and played guitars, bass, organ, piano, RMI electric piano, Moog synthesizer, violin, viola, and percussion.
Griffin also sang lead vocals as well as played guitars and percussion.
Royer sang backing vocals, played guitar, bass, RMI electric piano, piano, flute, recorder, and percussion.
In all its albums, Bread had two sets of composers: Gates, who wrote most of the ballads, and Griffin/Royer, who contributed the upbeat tracks.
Larry Knechtel performed the exciting wah-wah solos in ‘Guitar Man.’ He had previously been a member of the famous Los Angeles session musicians, the Wrecking Crew and played piano and harpsichord on the Beach Boys ‘ ‘Pet Sounds’ album and on Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ single.
Between 1969 and ’73, Bread had 11 singles that landed on the charts, including, in order of release: ‘It Don’t Matter to Me’ from the debut album which went to no. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 and no. 7 on the Cash Box Top 100; ‘Make It with You’ from 1970’s ‘On the Waters,’ no. 1 on Billboard and no. 5 in the UK; ‘If’ from 1971’s ‘Manna,’ no. 4 in the US and no. 6 in Canada; ‘Everything I Own’ from 1972’s ‘Baby I’m-a Want You,’ no. 5 in the US and Canada, and no. 12 in Australia; and also from 1972’s ‘Guitar Man,’ the title track was no. 11, ‘Sweet Surrender’ and ‘Aubrey’ both no. 15, in the US.
All those hits were by Gates, which was the reason for the intriguing part. Griffin resented that Elektra – Bread’s record label at the time – released the singles with Gates’ songs on the A-sides. Obviously, Griffin didn’t like that Gates became the voice of Bread – which strained their relationship.
Professional jealousy aside, it was simply apparent that Bread achieved fame through Gates’ contributions.
Griffin and Botts died in 2005, followed by Knechtel in 2009, leaving Gates and Royer as the only surviving members. But Bread lives on in its classic albums, continuous airplay, and through tribute performances by the likes of TOAST, which is said to be the next best thing to the original.