Beverly (Bev) Ann Bivens, (born April 28, 1946 in Santa Ana, California)[1] is the American former lead singer of the West Coast folk rock group We Five from 1965 to 1967.

After her marriage to jazz musician Fred Marshall and the break-up of We Five, she sang for a while with the experimental Light Sound Dimension, but by the late 1960s Bivens had largely left the music scene.

Beverly Bivens attended Santa Ana High School, where she was a direct contemporary of actress Diane Keaton,[2] and Orange Coast Junior College.

Around 1963–4, she began performing with Mike Stewart (1945–2002) and William Jerome (Jerry) Burgan (1945-2021), who had formed a folk duo at high school and branched out into electronic music with guitarist Bob Jones (1947-2013), whom they met at the University of San Francisco.

[4] Contrary to popular belief, she did not perform backup vocals with Glen Campbell, who also played banjo, on "Desert Pete", a recording by The Kingston Trio, of which Stewart's brother John (1939–2008) was a member.

[20] Bivens' performances on the album You Were On My Mind and in concert largely foreshadowed a female vocal style that by 1967 was associated with, among others, Elaine "Spanky" McFarlane, Grace Slick of the Great Society and Jefferson Airplane,[21] and Cass Elliot and Michelle Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas.

[19] As regards fashion, photographs show her wearing dresses whose hemlines were well above the knee in 1965, at a time when the mini-skirt, which in England became a defining symbol of "Swinging" London, had yet to make a wide impact in America.

[33] Bivens' relatively brief career covered a period in which she was one of a fairly small number of female rock musicians: her classic style, at least until 1966, was in contrast to the more Bohemian look favored by contemporaries like Grace Slick or Janis Joplin.

[29] On another occasion, Bivens defended Peter Noone, the young lead singer of Herman's Hermits, whose apparent lack of self-control was criticized by other members of We Five, pointing out that he was only seventeen and was not in her view being managed properly.

[29] In October 1965 KYA, a leading San Francisco radio station, used a large photographic portrait of Bivens to draw attention to its inaugural International Pop Music Awards (with the caption, "Wee One of the We Five").

[36] We Five sometimes used Werber's home at Mill Valley to rehearse; one photograph taken there shows Bivens barefoot in a bikini top and jeans, while the group used among other things a broom in place of a microphone.

[37] Bivens appeared barefoot also on the cover of You Were On My Mind, walking along a beach in a reddish-orange tunic, accompanied by her male colleagues, all fully shod and wearing matching turtlenecks.

Bivens enjoyed sunbathing: she was once admitted to hospital on tour with second degree burns after Burgan, who had been called to her room, found her in considerable pain, wearing only the lower half of a bikini.

Burgan's wife, Debbie, née Graf, who sang with a group called the Legendaires and had sometimes worked with the Ridgerunners (as they then were), took over from Bivens as lead vocalist.

In his notes for We Five's second album, Make Someone Happy (1967), released after they had split (an episode that later give rise to unfounded rumours that Bivens had been killed in a road accident), satirist George Yanok observed that "We 5 was the first "electric band" to come out of San Francisco.

It predated the entire present "happening" in the Haight-Ashbury [a district of San Francisco that became the centre of "flower power"] with all its attendant trippery and hang-overs …".

Jerry Burgan recalled that, among a number of complicating factors, some of band members, notably Mike Stewart, were "frankly in love" with her and has referred to, in his words, "an instinctive caution innate either to Beverly or to young women generally [in the mid 1960s] whose ties to social tradition were all about to unravel".

There were other mild hints of condescension: the same sleeve notes recognised that Bivens' "unusual brilliance and vocal range is the basis of our sound" and that she was "the spark of the group", but referred also to her "genuine involvement in singing and desire to learn", while, many years later, the We Five website referred to Stewart and Burgan's having added "the sound of a female voice that was eventually to be made famous by Beverly Bivens".

(This is perhaps consistent with another sleeve reference to Bivens' instrument as her throat, although it may allude also to the Ridgerunners' original female singer, Sue Ellen Davies, a coloratura whom the other members had met at Claremont High.

[citation needed][52] Jerry Burgan spoke more kindly of the band's management in 2007, recalling that Werber "had an ability to encourage creativity and the musical process without having to direct it.

[57][58] Marshall had worked with a number of West Coast rock bands and been a member of the Vince Guaraldi Trio which famously recorded the incidental music for television specials based on the Peanuts cartoons of Charles Schulz.

[59] Guaraldi had been an habitué of the hungry i club and Marshall's own band, the Ensemble, played at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco on the same bill as Jefferson Airplane on the night in October 1966 that Grace Slick first sang as their lead vocalist.

[60] Together with Jerry Granelli, who, in addition to playing on We Five's first album, had also worked with Guaraldi[61] and been a close associate of the songwriter and producer Sly Stone,[62] they formed the Light Sound Dimension (which, as with the Beatles' 1967 song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, many were quick to notice bore the initials LSD), an "audio visual multi media group" combining lighting technology and experimental music.

[63] The LSD, which continued into the 1990s, established itself at various West Coast venues, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Fillmore Auditorium (which, with its "omnipresent pot smoke" noted by songwriter Carole King,[64] became known for its psychedelic posters), and appeared with, among others, Big Brother and the Holding Company and the Grateful Dead.

is an intensely dedicated, highly gifted group of light artists and musicians who carry abstract light-sound art to perhaps its ultimate in purity and concentration.

[69] An earlier publicity biography of Joshi stated that, while still at Berkeley High School in the latter half of the 1980s, he would "play in and host sessions with his mother ... and many notable jazz musicians which included saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and pianist, Benny Green.

"[70] Bivens' career after leaving We Five is not well documented and, until Jerry Burgan published a memoir of the early folk-rock scene in 2014,[29] sketchy information was derived mainly from recollections posted on the internet.

After Fred Marshall died in Oakland in 2001, an obituary published in his home state of Arkansas referred to Bivens' still living in Berkeley and to his having had another partner of long standing.

[68] The sleeve notes for Big Beat's retrospective CD of We Five's recordings, released in 2009, contained several reminiscences by Bivens[73] and, on September 24 of that year, she sang "High Flying Bird" at the opening of an exhibition, mounted by the Performing Arts Library & Museum in San Francisco, of the rock scene in the Bay area in the mid-1960s to early 1970s.

[75] A memoir by Burgan, touching on Bivens' years in the Ridgerunners/We Five, her impact on the early folk-rock scene and subsequent 40-year seclusion, was published in April 2014 by Rowman & Littlefield.