Peter Asher, who with Gordon Waller recorded such British Invasion hits as “A World Without Love,” “Woman” and “I Go to Pieces” in the mid-1960s, has had a series of career reinventions that have kept him a vital presence in the world of popular music.
In the 1970s and ’80s, he became one of Rock’s top producers and artist managers, guiding James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt to their superstar success. More recently, he has toured with a show mixing his performance (with accompanists) of Peter & Gordon songs coupled with reminiscences of his life. It’s called A Musical Memoir of the 1960s and Beyond and he brings it to Cincinnati’s 20th Century Theater on Jan. 10. (Waller, his partner in the Peter & Gordon vocal duo, died in 2009.)
Of the many artists to have smash American hits during the British Invasion era, Asher is an especially good choice to provide a colorful, anecdotal and intimate history of the time. He was especially close with The Beatles — Paul McCartney provided him with many of Peter & Gordon’s hits, including the No. 1 1964 record “A World Without Love” and also “Woman,” “Nobody I Know” and “I Don’t Want to See You Again.” And after Peter & Gordon split in 1968, Asher became head of Artist & Repertoire at The Beatles’ new label, Apple Records. He moved to the U.S. in 1970 to guide Taylor’s developing career.
Asher — who recently released the book The Beatles from A to Zed: An Alphabetical Mystery Tour — got to know McCartney because the latter was dating his younger sister, the actress Jane Asher, and spending much time at the family’s London house, beginning in 1963.
“Eventually our parents offered him the guest room,” Asher recalls in a phone interview. “He accepted and moved in, and he and I shared the top floor of the house for about two years.”
Asher heard McCartney’s “A World Without Love,” a song written earlier, and liked it. “Paul explained it was a reject because John didn’t like it and The Beatles weren’t going to do it,” he says.
Around the same time, Peter & Gordon were heard playing in a club by a talent scout for EMI Records and offered a contract. Asher needed material.
“I went back to Paul, and (asked) if there was any chance we could try that song and he said yes,” he says of “A World Without Love.” “It turned out to change my life forever. We recorded five or six songs on our first day and that was one of them. At the end of the session, there was no doubt among anyone that it was going to be our first single.”
Among the anecdotes Asher may tell at his 20th Century show is how he played a key role in introducing Lennon to Yoko Ono. In 1966, as Asher’s music career was going swimmingly, he joined with John Dunbar and Barry Miles to open a London bookshop and gallery. Dunbar, in charge of the Indica Gallery, decided to ask Ono — an avant-garde artist with a developing international reputation — to have a show.
“Deals were made and dates were set,” Asher says. “As is customary, we closed the gallery for a few days while it was all set up. Prior to the actual press opening, we invited friends over for an informal pre-opening viewing. We did invite The Beatles, who by that time numbered among our friends. John was the one who came, and that’s when he and Yoko met.”
As an executive at Apple Records, Asher had to take part in one of The Beatles’ more utopian promises to the public — listening to unsolicited demos from fans with dreams of being signed as Apple artists.
“We were expecting to find some hidden treasures, and we didn’t,” he says. “Some were not very good, some were somebody sending in 50 pages of closely written lyrics they were absolutely certain John Lennon would want to set to music when they didn’t rhyme or make any sense. A lot of seriously strange stuff came in.”
But Asher did find his own hidden treasure while at Apple. Danny Kortchmar, an American guitar player who had accompanied Peter & Gordon on tours and then stayed in touch, had subsequently been in a New York band called The Flying Machine with James Taylor. When it broke up with little success and Taylor went to London to visit a girlfriend, Kortchmar gave him Asher’s number to call.
“James called me and I invited him over,” Asher says. “He’d made a demo tape and played it, and I thought it was some of best music I ever heard in my life. That was the beginning of our relationship. I signed him to Apple and within not that long a period ended up leaving Apple, becoming his manager and moving to America.”
The subsequent self-titled 1968 Apple album, produced by Asher with some lovely orchestrations from Richard Hewson, contained such now-famous Taylor songs as “Carolina in My Mind,” “Knockin’ ‘Round the Zoo” and “Something in the Way She Moves.” It created some buzz, but not enough to break Taylor to a wide audience. So Asher quit Apple and moved to Los Angeles to help Taylor’s career. He got him a recording contract with Warner Bros. and produced 1970’s Sweet Baby James, which remains a landmark of introspective, Folk-oriented singer/songwriter Rock music.
Asher is currently happy about the popularity of the 2019 documentary about another great American singer he worked with, Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice. While Ronstadt had some success before Asher started producing her albums, it was their collaboration on 1974’s Heart Like a Wheel — that made her a top-selling artist.
Because she was primarily a vocal interpreter with wide, eclectic tastes, rather than a singer/songwriter working exclusively in a Rock, her reputation has somewhat faded in recent decades — especially as an illness has left her unable to sing. But Asher is glad to see the movie sparking renewed interest in her and the art of interpretative singing.
“People are realizing how important she is, how important her music is and above all what a great singer she is,” he says. “She’s really good at choosing songs, has a great ear for cool writers and she inhabits the song, makes it sound as if she wrote it. She gets the sensation that ‘I have to sing that song.’ I do believe she has been underrated. I can’t tell you how delighted I am she’s getting the respect she deserves.”
Peter Asher performs Friday, Jan. 10 at Oakley’s 20th Century Theater. Tickets/more info: the20thcenturytheatre.com. Find tickets at ticketweb.com.
This article appears in Dec 25, 2019 – Jan 7, 2020.