Johnny Rivers – "Secret Agent Man" (1965)

They’ve given you a number

And taken away your name

Look what I found while I was going through my hundreds of CDs, LPs, and 45s and creating a list to send to dealers who might be interested in buying them:

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John Henry Ramistella was born in New York City in 1942, but his family moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, when he was just a young boy.

John’s father and uncle taught him to play guitar, and he released his first record when he was only 14.

He met legendary rock ’n’ roll disc jockey Alan Freed in New York City a couple of years later.  Freed suggested that he change his name to “Johnny Rivers” – the Mississippi River flows through Baton Rouge – and helped him get a recording contract.  But the first three singles he released after meeting Freed didn’t sell.

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After a stint in Nashville, where he concentrated on songwriting instead of performing, Rivers moved to Los Angeles.  A brief fill-in gig at a Hollywood nightclub went so well that the owner of the brand-new Whiskey à Go Go on the Sunset Strip gave Rivers a one-year contract to play there.

Rivers recorded a live album at the Whiskey in February 1964, and it sold very well.  He later released the first track from that album – a cover of Chuck Berry’s “Memphis” – as a single, and it became a million-selling hit.

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Prior to the success of “Memphis,” legendary record producers and songwriters P. F. Sloan and Steve Barri had asked Rivers to record the theme song they had written for the American version of a British spy series.

Patrick McGoohan in “Secret Agent”

The series – which starred Patrick McGoohan – was called Secret Agent in the U.S., and Rivers’s theme song was so popular that he recorded a longer version and released it as “Secret Agent Man” in 1966.  It made it all the way to #3 on the Billboard “Hot 100.”

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When I was a junior-high schooler, I lwas a huge fan of TV spy series.  The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and its short-lived spinoff, The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., were my favorites, but I loved Secret Agent – which was a much more realistic show – as well.

The men from U.N.C.L.E.

After leaving Secret Agent, McGoohan developed The Prisoner, a surreal and ultimately baffling 17-episode series that aired in the U.S. in 1968. 

McGoohan later denied that John Drake, the fictional spy he played in Secret Agent, is the same man as Number Six, his character in The Prisoner.  But a lot of fans of the two series believe otherwise.

A final note: Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond novels, was involved in the development of both Secret Agent and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

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Click here to listen to “Secret Agent Man.”

And click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: