WHEN Gary Puckett and the Union Gap take the stage at the Southern Cross Club on February 15, audiences can expect a night of serious rock ‘n’ roll nostalgia, for unlike a lot of admittedly well-performed tribute shows we see year-round, this is the real deal.

Of course, today’s line-up of Puckett, Woody Lingle, Jamie Hilboldt and Mike Candito is not the one Puckett formed in San Diego in the late ’60s, but it is the one he’s been touring with for a few years and, at age 80, lead singer Puckett is still very much there. 

Apart from a short time in the ’70s when he went solo, he’s been a band performer all of his life, with an unmistakable, ringing voice that gave us hits such as “Young Girl” and “This Girl is a Woman Now”.

The band is also still wearing the signature Yankee soldiers’ uniforms from the American Civil War, in which they became famous. The name “Union Gap” is a real place in Puckett’s native Washington state, a nod to the northern Unionists in the war. 

When I ask him how on earth that went down with southern audiences, he roars with laughter. 

“I wanted us to dress differently from other bands,” he says. 

“I thought maybe the key to success for the group was the visual image of Union soldiers. But it’s true that when we first went to perform in the south, we were a little bit nervous, so we bought a big Confederate flag, rolled it across the keyboard in front of 6000 people, and then we rocked.”

He’s been very lucky. It’s possible to speculate that if his dad hadn’t moved Puckett and his three siblings to San Diego for a job, things might have worked out differently. 

His parents wanted him to go to college and get a higher education, so he started studying psychology, but then, he says: “I inherited music in my genes and certainly in my voice”. Fans will know what he means.

He started playing piano aged six or seven, around the beginning of rock ‘n’ roll, and immersed himself in the music of Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley and the larger-than-life Fats Domino. 

“I suppose you could call them the influences of my youth; I was in the midst of all that and I loved all of them,” he says. 

Most of all, he loved Elvis, and he’s quick to praise Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 biopic of the same name.

“I loved the guy, he was handsome, there was his voice, I loved his songs, it was all fantastic to me,” he says.

But Puckett was no copycat, and didn’t seek to emulate Presley. 

“I didn’t model myself after anybody, I was just being me and, fortunately, the genes gave me a signature voice.”

Success followed fast when he signed a contract with Jerry Fuller, a producer for Columbia Records in Los Angeles, who also wrote the songs, “Young Girl” and “Lady Willpower” for his group Gary and the Remarkables, which was quickly renamed the Union Gap. 

They had six consecutive gold records and sold more records in 1968 than The Beatles, also becoming one of the few artists whose first five releases went gold. 

The group disbanded in 1971, but Puckett was later to reassemble the Union Gap and nowadays keeps up a cracking pace, with more than 150 performances a year. 

And, yes, he says, he’s finding it tiring with a US tour to follow his Australian visit and then on to England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales in October and November. But knowing he needs a bit of downtime, they play the tour in segments with home-time in between. 

“I keep fit. I’m a healthy guy,” he says.

As for what we’ll see here in Canberra, Puckett says it’s a matter of “recapturing sounds”.

“I’ve based the show around the first three Union Gap albums, everything the fans will know like ‘Young Girl’, ‘Woman Woman’, ‘Lady Willpower’, ‘Over You’, ‘Don’t Give Into Him’, ‘This Girl is a Woman Now’.” 

And they’ll do a few things “just for fun”… there’ll be a tribute to veterans of the military and a bit of Elvis.

Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, Canberra Southern Cross Club, Woden, Wednesday, February 15.