Bay City Rollers

Though the Bay City Rollers were initially hyped as the "new Beatles," the Rollers actually were cute young musicians who were vigorously promoted to a market of teenagers. Probably the most successful act ever to emerge from Scotland, the group scored its first English hit in 1971. Through the next few years, under the guidance of mentor/manager Tam Paton (who named the group by arbitrarily sticking a pin in a U.S. map and hitting Bay City, Michigan), the Bay City Rollers slowly expanded their predominantly female audience. Clad in tartan uniforms, they eventually inspired a genuine outbreak of teenage frenzy reminiscent of Beatlemania. Rollermania spread to the U.S. briefly in early 1976 with the group’s first stateside concerts and a late-1975 #1 single, “Saturday Night.” The Rollers’ close-knit, wholesome image was tarnished somewhat in the late ’70s with the disclosures that they had all regularly taken Valium to help them cope with the rigors of superstardom and life on the road and that Faulkner and Mitchell had been treated for overdoses in apparent suicide attempts. (In 1993 Faulkner claimed that his OD was accidental.)

By the early ’80s they were a quartet playing bars in the U.S., still wearing their tartan plaid. In an unforeseen turn of events, demand for the reconstituted band was on the rise, particularly in Japan. Years of partial reunion tours and spinoff acts ensued. Alan Longmuir, Faulkner, Wood, and a drummer named Kass toured the U.S. in 1993. In 2000 Wood, who has released several albums of Celtic mood music, was reportedly working on a new album with McKeown. In March of that year, Derek Longmuir pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography. In addition, Courtney Love, who had purchased the rights to Caroline Sullivan’s Rollers memoir Bye Bye Baby, was planning to direct a film about the group’s fall from grace.

from The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll (Simon & Schuster, 2001)