Kerry Chater Dies: Gary Puckett & The Union Gap Co-Founder & Country Songwriter Was 77
12.02.2022 - 03:35
/ deadline.com
Kerry Chater, the bassist and co-founder of ’60s hitmakers Gary Puckett & the Union Gap who went on to score multiple country hits as a songwriter, has died. He was 77.
Local Nashville paper The Williamson Source said he died February 4 in the Tennessee capital. No cause of death was given.
Chater was born on August 7, 1945, in Vancouver and began playing in local bands by the mid-’60s. When one of his bandmates left to form Iron Butterfly, Chater joined a band fronted by Gary Puckett that would become the Union Gap. Singed to Columbia, the newly christened Gary Puckett & the Union Gap — sporting matching American Civil War uniforms — found near-immediate success, and their first four singles all went gold hit the Top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100: “Woman, Woman” (No. 4), “Young Girl” and “Lady Willpower (both No. 2) and “Over You” (No. 7).”
The group’s fifth single “Don’t Give in to Him” peaked at No. 15, but its follow-up “This Girl Is a Woman Now” hit No. 9. All told, the group amassed five top 10 singles in less than two years from 1967-69. Chater wrote several of the band’s songs but none of its singles.
The band found little success overseas, but a rerelease of “Young Girl” hits the UK Top 10 in 1974.
The Union Gap’s albums were only moderately successful, but its 1970 greatest-hits disc went platinum. Chater left the Union Gap that year, and the group splintered.
In 1972, he relocated to Los Angeles and began writing plays as part of a collective led by Lehman Engel. He would barely crack the Hot 100 in 1977 with a solo song, “Part Time Love.”
After that, Chater began writing country songs again. He found his greatest success in 1983, when he co-penned a pair of Billboard No. 1 country hits: George Strait’s “You Look So