The Bay City Rollers Papers

“You’re gonna interview the Rollers? They’ve been together six years. Ask ’em what they’ve been doing all that time.”

Anonymous English journalist

It is too easy, of course, to come right out and declare everything that is true of the Bay City Rollers — that they are probably the most mindless collection of individuals ever to play what approximates music. That their status as England’s biggest all-time music sensation is as insulting as it is baffling. That they are a synthesis of every crassly commercial success formula since Pat Boone. And that there is little redeeming value in any of it.

All of these facts, at first exposure to the Bay City Rollers, are much too obvious to bother evangelizing about. After awhile, it all boils down to one basic question. “Are America’s boppers sucker enough to follow suit?” Tam Paton and Barry Perkins — the band’s managers — sure think so.