All for one, one for all

Another ferocious flinging for Freddie. Followed by swift justice. The Dreamers looked tasty back in the day. Freddie Garrity built a fighting unit that could go toe to toe with even the most loveable lads. At least two of them look like genuine hard nuts. Freddie and the Dreamers 1963 posters & prints by Bela Zola


27 comments on “All for one, one for all

  1. I love this “All for one, one for all” philosophy of both bands. But now the Beatles will be eaten alive by the crowd of angry fans. They’re totally doom. Shelley will have to work a miracle to save them.

  2. Gotta say, the state of The Dreamers has been a massive revelation for me. I had no idea.

  3. Nothing perturbs Ringo, does it?

  4. Love the girl with the upturned face, lower left corner, watching Freddie passing over her head.

    1. Could that be Shelly?

      1. Or maybe Shelley (sorry Shelley.)

        1. No specs.

    2. SchadenfreudePersonified

      Superb perspective!

      And amazing neck musculature.

  5. The reference photo makes panel 4 all the more amusing, and vice versa too.

    I’ll be adopting the phrase “genuine hard nuts” as my all-purpose declaration in situations of shock, pity, and irony for the week ahead.

  6. Wait. Isn’t the one on the left of the photo, with the dark glasses, Stephen Merchant? More time travel shenanigans!

  7. Yeeeaah, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to get cornered by those guys in a blind alley.

  8. Yeah, the Dreamers were seriously working class. So were the Beatles, but they were never anything but musicians. Freddie was a milkman, and although he stuck with music and acting, some of the others went on to be a taxi driver, running a bar on Tenerife and in what Wikipedia describes as the “distribution business”, which could be either completely legit or seriously shady from the sound of it. They definitely look like they’re ready for a rumble, while the Fab Four were a bit weedy.

  9. Watching them jounce about the stage doing “You were made for me” you would never guess The Dreamers would be such a bunch of well handy blokes.

  10. Getting Freddie out of the way early at least evened the odds. Herman’s Hermits and the Dave Clark Five (duh) were, like the Dreamers, 5-man groups. Gerry and the Pacemakers were only 4, but as we have seen, Gerry is sidelined with a wicked Indian burn so the Beatles would have had an edge in that proto-Celebrity Deathmatch event.

  11. This solves the controversy around Freddie’s height- he only seemed small in comparison with his bandmates!

  12. There’s a great Lester Bangs quote on their WIkipedia page:

    “Freddie and the Dreamers [had] no masterpiece but a plentitude of talentless idiocy and enough persistence to get four albums and one film soundtrack released … the Dreamers looked as thuggish as Freddie looked dippy … Freddie and the Dreamers represented a triumph of rock as cretinous swill, and as such should be not only respected, but given their place in history.”

    The triumph of rock as cretinous swill.

    1. SWILL! …music is a BUSINESS man. Critics… can’t get good ones, can’t throw them all out a five-story window

      1. The five-storeyed defenestration plan would suffer from the mountain of critics quickly growing taller than the building.

        Ah, and for that criticism, I think I’ll spare you and toss myself out the window.

    2. That’s Lester giving them the highest compliments he was capable of, I reckon.

    3. This storyline has made me think of Bangs quite a bit, actually. I’ve been wondering what the Dreamers’ “Carburetor Dung” would have been, and their “Snowflakes Falling on the International Date Line”.

    4. SchadenfreudePersonified

      “The triumph of rock as cretinous swill.”

      You could say the same about the Beatles. They were b*ll*x. Grossly over-rated.

  13. From that up close, the Dreamers seem… even bigger than Jesus!

    * bada-dish*

  14. Intentional or unintentional “Starship” ref: vote!

  15. Hard to believe this is the same John Lennon who (in our timeline) 10 years later staged a “Bed-in for Peace.” I suppose people do change.

    1. IIRC, in his early days John Lennon had a bit of a reputation for being… pugnacious.

  16. The lyrics of this song remind me of the greeting that Lauren gave Jack Finch in Bad Machinery:

    “Hey Jacky-Jacky Jack Jack Jack!”

  17. Love that George and Ringo seem to know this is going to end horribly but they both accept that there’s nothing else to be done.

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