Uploaded November 2010 | Updated September 2026, 4 days ago
The Hangmen became incredibly popular in the Washington, D.C. area and even performed for the Kennedys. How did the band land that very high profile gig?
Tom Guernsey: We got some high-powered management after the record took off. A Washington lawyer, a television producer and a prominent businessman formed a corporation to manage us. They were all very well connected in Washington, D.C. and got us a number of high visibility gigs playing at embassies in town. There was a lot of press about us in The Washington Post and eventually Ethel Kennedy asked us to play at a charity event at the Kennedy home in McLean, Virginia. I remember sitting around in the kitchen with Ethel Kennedy and the rest of the band casually drinking beer and talking before the show...and then I helped myself to a bottle of their scotch and the band got smashed. Our managers were not very happy about that!
60sgaragebands.com (60s): You formed The Hangmen when members of your previous band, The Reekers, were attending college. Where did you locate the members who would eventually become The Hangmen?
Tom Guernsey (TG): I met George Daly at Montgomery Jr. College in 1965. The other Reekers were away at other colleges, so George and I decided to put a band together really just as away to help pay for our expenses at school
We recorded our album Bittersweet in Nashville for Monument after doing our second single 'Faces' there. In the 'Faces' sessions, we also re-recorded 'What A Girl Can't Do' with our first singer, Dave Ottley. I recall that it was not very inspiring and Monument never saw fit to release it even on the album when it came out. When we came back to Nashville six months later to do the album, we had replaced Ottley with Tony Taylor. In retrospect, this was probably a big mistake. Dave's voice, while in some ways inferior to Tony's, was much more interesting to me (as was Dave himself). In any case, Monument hooked us up with producer Buzz Cason, who was part of Buddy Holly's band The Crickets way back when, and I believe is still producing in Nashville.
Buzz was very methodical and hands on. He had us demo up all the possible songs for the album in a smaller studio in Nashville with him and we experimented with various things—chords, bridges, harmonies, different instruments, etc. Then we took the best songs in to Monuments mains studios and recorded them. It still amazes me that we did the album on a three-track machine! At any rate, we cranked the tunes out in a couple of weeks and that was it. Now I think there is some really nice stuff on the album, but it was so poorly mastered, the levels so low, that it did not have any punch, and really did not sound that good. I had produced the single 'What A Girl Can't Do,' and was just 19 at the time and naively thought that I should be producing the album. Also, we all thought of Nashville as a foreign land of country music where people didn't have a clue what we were trying to do. We didn't realize until much later that we should have taken the whole project more seriously. I think we spent more time in Nashville bars than the studio. Oh well, it was fun.
The Hangmen became incredibly popular in the Washington, D.C. area and even performed for the Kennedys. How did the band land that very high profile gig?
Tom Guernsey: We got some high-powered management after the record took off. A Washington lawyer, a television producer and a prominent businessman formed a corporation to manage us. They were all very well connected in Washington, D.C. and got us a number of high visibility gigs playing at embassies in town. There was a lot of press about us in The Washington Post and eventually Ethel Kennedy asked us to play at a charity event at the Kennedy home in McLean, Virginia. I remember sitting around in the kitchen with Ethel Kennedy and the rest of the band casually drinking beer and talking before the show...and then I helped myself to a bottle of their scotch and the band got smashed. Our managers were not very happy about that!
60sgaragebands.com (60s): You formed The Hangmen when members of your previous band, The Reekers, were attending college. Where did you locate the members who would eventually become The Hangmen?
Tom Guernsey (TG): I met George Daly at Montgomery Jr. College in 1965. The other Reekers were away at other colleges, so George and I decided to put a band together really just as away to help pay for our expenses at school
We recorded our album Bittersweet in Nashville for Monument after doing our second single 'Faces' there. In the 'Faces' sessions, we also re-recorded 'What A Girl Can't Do' with our first singer, Dave Ottley. I recall that it was not very inspiring and Monument never saw fit to release it even on the album when it came out. When we came back to Nashville six months later to do the album, we had replaced Ottley with Tony Taylor. In retrospect, this was probably a big mistake. Dave's voice, while in some ways inferior to Tony's, was much more interesting to me (as was Dave himself). In any case, Monument hooked us up with producer Buzz Cason, who was part of Buddy Holly's band The Crickets way back when, and I believe is still producing in Nashville.
Buzz was very methodical and hands on. He had us demo up all the possible songs for the album in a smaller studio in Nashville with him and we experimented with various things—chords, bridges, harmonies, different instruments, etc. Then we took the best songs in to Monuments mains studios and recorded them. It still amazes me that we did the album on a three-track machine! At any rate, we cranked the tunes out in a couple of weeks and that was it. Now I think there is some really nice stuff on the album, but it was so poorly mastered, the levels so low, that it did not have any punch, and really did not sound that good. I had produced the single 'What A Girl Can't Do,' and was just 19 at the time and naively thought that I should be producing the album. Also, we all thought of Nashville as a foreign land of country music where people didn't have a clue what we were trying to do. We didn't realize until much later that we should have taken the whole project more seriously. I think we spent more time in Nashville bars than the studio. Oh well, it was fun.
