The beauty and delicacy of Seals and Crofts' music transcends time, trend and generation. These songs, when Jimmy and Dash wrote and recorded them in the 1970s, were diamonds in the roughshod world of rock 'n' roll and, later on, disco. That Seals and Crofts adapted and succeeded in an atmosphere that routinely disregarded thoughtfulness and all but ignored sincerity is testament to their creative strength and vision.
They may never pass this way again, but the music they made in those unsettled years remains inviting and vital today.
In dusty West Texas, Jim Seals was a musical prodigy who could play several instruments—he'd won the Texas State Fiddle Championship at age 9—and Dash (nee Darrell) Crofts had given up baseball for drums. They met in a swing band called the Crew Cuts, and left home as teens to replace the drummer and saxophone player in the Champs, at that time coasting on the glories of 1958's "Tequila."
They spent seven years in the Champs, in Los Angeles and on the road. After the band's inevitable dissolution, Seals—who had begun playing guitar and writing songs—hooked up with guitarist Louie Shelton and bassist Joe Bogan to form a cover band called, among other things, the Dawnbreakers. Crofts took the drummer's chair.
In '69, the Dawnbreakers became followers of the Baha'i faith, based around the teachings of the prophet Baha'u'llah, who died in 1892. It was a pivotal moment. "From that point on, I just started ripping books apart," Seals said, adding that the ideas espoused by Baha'u'llah "became the foundation for the writing we did with Seals and Crofts."
"It gave us a lot of food for thought," said Crofts. "Our priorities began to change. When you get into music, your goal is to become as famous and rich as you can become. It's an ego trip. When we came across the Baha'i faith, it talked about things like oneness of god, the oneness of mankind, the oneness of religion, equality of men and women, elimination of prejudices of all kinds. And we thought, 'Wow, this is really lofty stuff.' Probably too lofty for us, but it interested us. And so, we started looking into it."
Alongside their spiritual evolution, Jimmy and Dash were growing musically. "In the Champs and the Dawnbreakers, we were playing a harder kind of music," Crofts said, "and we were kind of sick of that. So for therapy we would go into a room and write these little, pleasant soft songs, like wandering troubadour kind of music. And we didn't play it for anybody. We'd just go play it for ourselves, just a therapy."
Crofts had traded drums for the mandolin, which lent a folky, fresh-air complement to Seals' acoustic guitar. "We worked out counterparts on the mandolin and guitar, and also on the vocals, and then we tried to work it out sometimes where we would sing two parts, and play the other two harmony parts on the instruments," recalled Seals. "Being from a small band, we were trying to make it sound as big as we could."
Seals and Crofts played their first show as a duo at Pasadena's Ice House in 1969. Next, they signed on to perform at the legendary Hoot Night at Los Angeles' Troubadour club. Seals had to borrow the $2 the club required as a guarantee they'd show up.
"We had been drawing 3,500 to 4,000 people a night for like two years without a record," Seals said. "So we felt like, if we ever got a record that would appeal to the masses, we would be able to draw more people and have a career."
After two albums on a tiny independent label, Year Of Sunday—represented here by the sunny When I Meet Them—was released by Warner Brothers in the waning days of 1971. Keeping it all in the family, Shelton produced with Bogan as his engineer. It didn't sell, but Warners had faith in Seals and Crofts and their studio team, and OK'd a second album. "This was all an experiment," Seals said. "We never dreamed we'd be heard on the air."
Summer Breeze, from July of '72, is arguably the definitive Seals and Crofts album. All the elements were in place; the album was melodious and focused, with supple harmony vocals tastefully layered over intricate guitars and mandolins. Shelton filled out the acoustic arrangements with piano, bass, drums and his own electric guitars.
Seals wrote most of the lyrics, and he and Crofts collaborated on the melodies. They delivered exquisite ballads (East of Ginger Trees and Hummingbird, both of which included verbatim quotes from the Baha'i Scriptures) and Summer Breeze itself, a simple celebration of home and hearth.
The single reached #6 in September, and the album went gold, spending 100 weeks on the Billboard chart. "We were ready to be disc jockeys, roadies, sound mixers or whatever, just so we could be in and around music," Seals explained. "Because that was all we had known."
The next album was Diamond Girl, and it too went gold soon after its release in May 1973. The jazz-flavored Diamond Girl single reached #6, followed by We May Never Pass This Way (Again), which climbed to #21.
Seals' tenor sax, which he joyously took into the spotlight for a Champs-like romp at every Seals and Crofts concert, came out of mothballs for an instrumental album track, Wisdom.
Another highlight of the album was Ruby Jean and Billie Lee, which they wrote together as a love letter to their wives. "We kept it a total secret at the time we were doing it," Crofts said. "We wanted to give them a gift that would last for a while. So Jimmy started writing the song about Ruby, and I said, 'You can't write one for her without me!' So we decided you write a verse, I'll write a verse, and we'll put the kids in the middle. We had one kid apiece, Joshua and Lua. The funny part about it was, they'd show up at the studio and we'd start calling it 'R&B Waltz,' instead of 'Ruby Jean and Billy Lee,' so they wouldn't know what it was. That was the code name."
By now, Seals and Crofts were a major touring act, a top grosser, with a private plane for the duo themselves, another for the band, and another for the crew. Still burning with the fervor of the newly-converted, they devised a way to "tell" their fans about their Baha'i beliefs without, they hoped, coming off like zealots. Following each concert, Seals and Crofts would return to the stage and chat, sans microphones, with anyone in the crowd who cared to stick around.
"We tried to take our art and use it toward something that would further civilization in some way," Crofts said. "Yeah, we were successful and we got hit records and we started making bigger money, but what we did was hire more people and try to make it a better show. But we decided at the same time to put in our contract that every place we have the alternative to talk about the Baha'i faith."
Seals: "It was at a time when it was very important that the faith become known in this country, because there wasn't enough Baha'i at that time, and because they can't take donations from outside, and they can't proselytize, the only way you can do it is through an interview, or if you have 'firesides.' You also can't have people come listen to music and then force religion on them."
Still, he said, "I think you can ruin your career, as we almost did, by taking a concept and trying to put it into a record, where it becomes sucked into the political scheme of things."
Enter Unborn Child, written by Joe Bogan's wife as a response to the Supreme Court's landmark abortion case, Roe vs. Wade.
Both Seals and Crofts insist the song's message was, simply, "don't take life too lightly," to stop and think before going through with an abortion. But critics carped that they'd gone too far, carrying their religious beliefs front and center into the pop arena.
Crofts: "Warner Brothers warned us against it. They said, 'This is a highly controversial subject, we advise that you don't do this.' And we said, 'But you're in the business to make money; we're doing it to save lives. We don't care about the money."
The single never made it higher than #66, and the non-controversial follow-up, King Of Nothing (with Crofts on lead vocal for the first time on a single) fared little better. They toured for much of 1974 with the issue hanging over their heads. Often, their concerts were picketed by pro-choice groups.
"I thought either it would be very much accepted, on the strength of the song itself, or that it would be the biggest bomb that we ever had," Seals said. "But it was incidental by that point, because the music was gone. I was out of gas already. When you get in that position, you really don't know what to do. It happens without a lot of different artists, and I admire those people who have not let that happen to them.
"We started with a classical–oriented instrumentation, mandolin and guitar, and trying to find ways to use that—and to not use it—with two people was very difficult."
In April 1975, a new single and album appeared, both titled I'll Play For You. A pleasant if somewhat innocuous singalong (in stark contrast to "Unborn Child"), I'll Play For Yousqueezed into the Top 20.
Still, Seals could read the writing on the wall. "After Unborn Child and I'll Play For You, the music just started getting more and more watered down, less identity and this, that and the other," he explained. "I sensed the same finality that I had sensed with the Champs, except it was our music. And it really made me kind of sick. But at some point like that, you can't go backwards.
"And also, if you're a hard rock group, you can get softer, you can go to a softer song, or a softer style, and you can find your way to peace in your soul, or whatever you want to express and you can get way with it. But if you're a soft rock group, you cannot do a hard song and get away with it."
Ironically, when they tried a "hard song," it gave them their biggest-selling single ever. 1976's Get Closer, which Seals had written as a Bill Withers-type ballad, was recorded in an uptempo R&B vein, with a trio of lead vocalists—Seals, Crofts and ex-Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans singer Carolyn Willis. It reached #6 in April.
The Get Closer album scraped into the Top 40 and was followed by yet another massive worldwide tour. Baby, I'll Give it To You, from the live Sudan Village album, was cut during this trek.
The reason he took up mandolin, Crofts said, was to be able to travel without "a bunch of stuff to carry around. I ended up with like three 18-wheeler trucks to carry the stuff that goes with the mandolin. It got really insane at one point. We were taking 30 people on the road. It was like an army."
By 1977, they were flying blind. TV writer Charles Fox talked them into singing a collection of songs he and Paul Williams had written for the movie One On One. Fox also produced the film, which was not a major success. The single My Fair Sharewent to #28.
The duo made their final appearance in the Top 20 the following year with You're the Love, a rather forced attempt at disco jolliness that was so far removed from the yearning simplicity of their early work, they took a long look at each other and agreed that there was nothing left to say. They delivered a final album, The Longest Road, to Warners in 1980. The poignant First Love was released as their last single.
"After that, we decided, 'What the hell are we doing here?" Crofts explained. "We're trying to force material, and stay up with the standard we've already established. And why prostitute ourselves? Why don't we just stop?'"
Seals retired to a coffee plantation in Costa Rica, and Crofts shuttled between homes in Australia and Tennessee, but they remained friends, occasionally performing together for Baha'i functions. And the music they made—joyous and sincere, rich in harmonic delights—remains, timeless and beautiful and suspended forever on a fragrant summer breeze.
—Bill DeYoung
"Be lions roaring in the forests of knowledge Whales swimming in the oceans of life Prepare to meet Baha'u'llah In the Garden of Clove."*
*From "East of Ginger Trees," by James Seals and Dash Crofts. Adapted from the Baha'i Scriptures.