Hey, let’s go now! That’s the opening shout on “Always, Always,” a song recorded by a Long Island, N.Y., band called the Abstracts in the early 1960s. Dressed in tight white pants and matching knee-high boots, the group of high school students had a loyal local following at about the time the Beatles were making it big in America.

“We were quite a phenomenon on Long Island,” says Don Sucher of Peterborough, who played lead guitar in the five-man band. “The girls would see me riding in a car, they’d start beating on the glass.”

Now Don and his wife, Jan Sucher, who’s also a musician, are reliving those days, because their hit “Always, Always,” its flip-side track titled “Baton Girl” and other never-before released 1960s-era songs are available for the first time on a record also called “Always, Always.” The album also includes a batch of demo songs the group made for Columbia Records, which were never released, and a couple of live tracks, where the sound of screaming female fans evokes memories of watching old Ed Sullivan show tapes of the Beatles or the Rolling Stones.

It all came about after Don, who had abandoned music years ago after his interest in visual arts led him to a career as a biomedical imaging developer, posted on YouTube a video he’d made of the Abstracts performing “Always, Always.” He discovered there were other video versions posted by fans and after he let slip during an Internet chat session that he had been the group’s guitarist, he was contacted by Mike Dugo, a well-respected historian of 1960s classic rock and garage rock music.

“I did an interview with Mike,” Don recalls. “I had a copy of the Columbia sessions on an MP3, and he heard it and said, ‘This is very special.’ This should go on a record.”
Dugo contacted several record companies and eventually a deal was struck with a German company, Break-A-Way Records, which in November released a limited edition album.
It’s already becoming a collector’s item, according to Don.

“Only 500 copies were made,” he says. “It’s been out less than a month and scalpers are selling them for three or four times the price. This all came out of the blue. It’s been so much fun. It’s craziness.”

Part of the fun for the Suchers has been reconnecting with friends from their past. Don had completely lost touch with the other members of the Abstracts and didn’t have much except his memory to go on.

“It’s been a challenge to put the facts together,” he said. “Al Karp had been my absolute best buddy since fifth grade. I think we started playing in bands about 1961 or ‘62. We’d play rock and roll, but also polkas and that sort of stuff. This was pre-Beatles.”
During that time, the two teens met a young songwriter and keyboard player named Andy Bomine.

“He played a song for Al, and Al was just mesmerized,” Don says. “He was like Jerry Lee Lewis, just a little less raw.”

Bomine joined the group, and soon after two other Long Island kids, Roger Ponzi on bass and Mike Machat on drums, came aboard. The group started out playing at dances and Don says they quickly became the rage of Long Island.

“Our parents had to drive us to shows. We were just kids,” he says.

But within a couple of months, they were in a studio on Long Island recording a single. They also landed a summer gig in 1964 at one of the resorts in the Catskills, an experience that leads Don to say that the movie “Dirty Dancing” is “absolutely accurate.”

“That summer, we became a rage,” he says. “Fan clubs were forming. The Beatles were just starting to climb, and we added some Beatles songs.”

He says they also developed a two-act show on the history of rock and roll and started using projectors to highlight certain songs.

“Later on, it would be called a light show,” he says.

The group just missed out on making it big, Don says. Columbia Records producer Clive Davis was trying to promote interest in rock music at the relatively conservative record label, and Don says Davis was given approval to sign one band. The Abstracts were called in to New York City and spent a day laying down several tracks.

“We thought it was our golden opportunity,” Don says. “But months went by. I finally got a call and I was told they’d chosen some group from California with an oddly spelled name — The Byrds.”

The band slowly dissolved as its members graduated from high school and went off to college. Don went to the School of Visual Arts in New York City, became interested in film study and continued playing in bands during the Vietnam War era. He attended New York University for a while, but when he lost his student deferment, he registered as a conscientious objector and took on an alternative duty assignment in 1969 doing hospital work in Boston. That’s where he met Jan, who was singing in a group called “IV Kings and a Queen.”

“She was the queen,” Don says.

“I was in a band, we were looking for a place to practice,” Jan recalls. “We had been playing R&B but we were switching to acid rock. The neighbors were not happy. I went down to this place in Brighton; the neighbors called it the Hippie House.”

Don recalls answering the door and meeting “this lovely, lovely woman” and five months later they were married.

“We had a band for a while,” Don says. “But the music world was changing. We decided ‘Maybe this isn’t what we want to do.’”

“It was the culture that was a problem,” Jan says. “It just wasn’t going to be the best environment to raise a child.”

So they traded the rock instruments for acoustic ones, making music just for their own pleasure. Their son Aaron was born in 1970 and they settled down to live in Brighton, Mass., where Don did imaging work for the Harvard University group of hospitals in Boston and Jan was a stay-at-home mom. In 1997, they bought a house on Middle Hancock Road in Peterborough, from which Don still commutes into Boston five days a week. Jan now works full-time in the financial services industry.

They love the quiet life, but now they’re feeling the pull of music again, at least a little bit. It took quite a bit of research, but Don’s gotten in touch with the surviving Abstracts — Roger Ponzi died in 1994 — and the Suchers are hoping a reunion may be in the works.

“We have not sat face to face in 45 years,” Don says. “We’re definitely planning to do that. I’ve told the guys to just come up here to our place. We’ll have a blast.”