Beverly Bremers

Beverly Ann Bremers (born March 10, 1950) is an American singer and actress. After roles on Broadway, Bremers recorded the 1972 Top 20 hit single, "Don't Say You Don't Remember".

Beverly Bremers – her surname is pronounced breemɛrs (rhymes with dreamers) – was born in Chicago, but within three years had relocated with her family to St. Louis. Bremers had sung for fun from an early age and, at age eight, she began studying acting. After relocating with her family to the New York City area when she was aged ten, Bremers began singing in local talent shows. She performed on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour on her thirteenth birthday and made her recording debut at age 14 with a 1965 single release on Pickwick Records' Showcase label – – “We Got Trouble” and a remake of "The Great Pretender" – with two subsequent RCA Records single releases, the first in June 1967 and the second in February 1968; all three of these singles were credited to Beverly Ann. Bremers joined the musical Hair early in its Broadway run, playing Chrissy. She then, in 1970, was an original cast member of the Obie Award-winning off-Broadway musical The Me Nobody Knows, in which she played Catherine. She reprised her role in the Broadway production and then returned to Hair playing the female lead, Sheila, during the final phase of that show's original Broadway run. Bremers was credited during her initial run in Hair and in The Me Nobody Knows as Beverly Ann Bremers.

Through recording the original cast album for The Me Nobody Knows, Bremers met David Lipton, a music publishing house executive she would eventually marry. Lipton solicited "Don't Say You Don't Remember" from staff writers Helen Miller and Estelle Levitt for Bremers to record with the resultant master – deliberately styled to evoke the 1960s girl-group sound – being successfully shopped to Scepter Records and released in May 1971. It rose as high as #10 on the Easy Listening chart in Billboard magazine; it just failed to cross over to the Billboard Hot 100, stalling at #102 (see Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles). The follow-up single, "When Michael Calls", co-written by Bruce Springsteen’s manager, Mike Appel, had been readied when "Don't Say You Don't Remember" belatedly became a local smash in San Jose, with enough subsequent interest in other markets to debut at #98 on the Hot 100 dated December 18, 1971 entering the Top 40 dated January 22, 1972 to rise to a #15 peak on the Hot 100 on February 26, 1972.

As Bremers had returned to the Broadway production of Hair, she was unable to do promotion for her single during its Top 40 run; she did, however, perform "Don't Say You Don't Remember" on the April 22, 1972 broadcast of American Bandstand, also performing the follow-up single: the controversial free love anthem "We're Free", which peaked that month at #40, its mild chart-showing mitigated by an extensive radio-station boycott. Bremers comments on the surprise success of "We're Free":

Bremers' next single "I'll Make You Music" marked her third and final Hot 100 appearance, reaching #63 in the autumn of 1972: all three of Bremers' chart singles were featured on her I'll Make You Music album which the Billboard Album Chart ranked with a #124 peak. A later release, "Heaven Help Us", the first recorded song written by Melissa Manchester with lyricist Carole Bayer Sager, was featured as the closing credits’ song for George A. Romero's 1973 horror film The Crazies.

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.