SAN DIEGO — Scoring in academia or on the Top 40? Striving for pop stardom or learning psychoanalytic therapy? The Union Gap or the synaptic gap?

When Gary Puckett moved to San Diego in 1960 — seven years before he and his band scored their first hit single with “Woman Woman” — it was to enroll at City College, not to pursue music. Fate had other things in store for him.

“I was into psychology and thought about maybe getting a medical degree,” recalled Puckett, who spent two years at City College but couldn’t afford the tuition to attend SDSU or UC San Diego. “I was tired of school and truly more interested in music, so I started playing in small bands.”

And not so small bands.

The Ravens, his first San Diego group of note, was an 11-piece ensemble with a brass section and backing singers. In 1964 Puckett became the lead singer in the Outcasts, a four-man band that performed frequently at the Quad Room in Clairemont. They released two singles, “Runaway” and “I Can’t Get Through To You,” which gained local radio airplay.

His next band, Gary and the Remarkables, soon morphed into Gary Puckett & The Union Gap. With his soaring — at times almost operatic vocals — at the fore, the vintage military uniform-clad group scored a slew of hit singles between 1967 and 1969, including “Woman, Woman,” “Young Girl,” “Lady Willpower,” “Over You” and “This Girl Is A Woman Now.”

“In 1968, we sold more singles — not albums — than the Beatles. We sold more singles than anyone, so that’s a little badge of honor,” said Puckett, now 82, speaking from his Florida home in the coastal city of Clearwater.

Those hit singles will be featured when Puckett performs as part of the 2025 Happy Together Tour. The lineup also features Little Anthony and the current iterations of the Turtles, the Cowsills, Jay and the Americans, and the Vogues. While his appearance is billed as Gary Puckett & The Union Gap, he acknowledged that he will be accompanied by the same four-man house band that backs all the Happy Together Tour acts.

A Minnesota native, Puckett shares the same hometown as Bob Dylan, whose song, “The Mighty Quinn,” was covered with brassy verve on The Union Gap’s second album. The title of another Dylan song, “Changing of the Guards,” best conveys what happened to Puckett and the members of the Union Gap, which disbanded in 1971, two years after the singer signed a solo recording deal with Columbia Records.

‘Some slim times’

His 1971 release, “The Gary Puckett Album,” fared so poorly it didn’t even make it onto the bottom of the national Billboard Top 200. After selling millions of records, touring the nation and appearing multiple times on some of the most-watched TV shows of the time with The Union Gap, Puckett’s career in music evaporated almost overnight.

“People were moving on and people in my generation were having families,” Puckett said. “The new generation was paying attention to David Bowie and T. Rex. Radio wouldn’t play our music. I found myself going through some slim times.

“I studied acting and made a film in the Philippines, ‘Dynamite,’ that didn’t succeed. You will never find it. It was about a band that was successful because of the death of one of its members ….”

After he completed filming, Puckett returned for a few years to Los Angeles where he had moved in the late 1960s. He came back to San Diego in 1978 and began playing in a duo with guitarist Paul Martin at the Anchorage Fish Company in La Jolla. Their repertoire consisted of Union Gap favorites, classics by the Beatles and Buddy Holly, and then-current hits by such acts as Little River Band and Exile.

In 1980, Puckett began working with SRO, a San Diego lounge band, and asked Kicks magazine publisher Tom Arnold to manage him despite the fact Arnold had never managed any music acts. In early 1981, Puckett launched a new band with the goal of fueling a comeback and obtaining a recording contract.

After doing some warm-up gigs in Las Vegas, the group did a homecoming show at the Bacchanal in Kearny Mesa. The performance received such a tepid review in the San Diego Union that, after reading it, Puckett fired the band, fired his fledgling manager and shelved his comeback attempt.

“We did play at the Bacchanal, which I think was a mistake,” Puckett said. “All these years later, Tom and I are still friends.”

Puckett maintained a low profile until 1984, when the Turtles launched their first Happy Together Tour and invited Puckett and a reconstituted Union Gap to be one of the acts in the multi-band lineup. His star rose significantly higher in 1986 when he and The Union Gap joined the Grass Roots and Herman’s Hermits on the Monkees’ 20th anniversary reunion concert trek.

That tour included a show at San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium, making Puckett the only artist in memory to go from playing at the Anchorage Fish House to the home of the San Diego Padres baseball team.

“It was a spectacular tour, the biggest of the year,” he said. “And it was our good luck that radio stations began playing the music of our generation again. The Monkees certainly put us back on the map.”

In a Union-Tribune interview previewing the San Diego tour stop of the 2012 Happy Together Tour, the then-69-year-old Puckett referred to himself as “an old man.” Had anyone told him then that he’d still be touring 13 years later, how would he have reacted?

“I would not have believed it!” Puckett replied. “I would have said: ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ This year I’m doing 59 or 60 Happy Together Tour shows and about 40 more on my own.

“There are times when I honestly want to say: ‘OK, I am done touring. I want to spend time with my family and swim with my grandkids.’ There are other times when I am so inspired being on stage and inspired by the enthusiasm of the audience shaking my hand and thanking me. So, I have no idea how long I’ll keep doing this. I’ll let go of the reins when the time comes.”

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