Be Beau Brummels

Of Sal Valentino, Ron Elliott and the greatest unsung band of the 1960s

Welcome music lovers to a new edition of ‘Listening Sessions’!

The below essay is something I have long wanted to write. The Beau Brummels are a band that came out of the gate on fire with two hit singles, ‘Laugh, Laugh’ and ‘Just a Little,’ and then never came close to recapturing those commercial heights. When the group dissolved at the start of 1969, the Beau Brummels weren't technically a group anymore. Instead, since early 1967, it signified the partnership between singer Sal Valentino, and guitarist and songwriter Ron Elliott during which they released some of the most creative, idiosyncratic and interesting music of the late sixties.

The essay is a little longer than usual but hopefully worth the read. I love the Beau Brummels and wanted to share as much of my enthusiasm for their music as I possibly could. I'm looking forward to your thoughts on it as well as about the music of the Beau Brummels.

I have a few things in the hopper outside of my Substack, including doing some tune tagging with Brad Kyle of Front Row & Backstage on July 30. Be sure, if you haven’t already, to subscribe to Brad’s Substack so you can get it directly in your inbox. I will also include a link to my tune tag with Brad the next time I'm in touch which will be August 7. Until then, may good listening be with you all!

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There’s an apocryphal tale about how the Beau Brummels got their name. It has to do with the alphabet and alphabetization. By taking the name they did, the Beau Brummels would have their records conveniently close to, or even better, right next to the records of the Beatles and as most record shoppers flipped through the stacks to pick up the latest by the Fab Four they may just venture a little further and be intrigued enough to pick up the latest by the Beau Brummels. That’s what it meant to game the algorithm in 1965.

But in actuality, it was threads, as in turn-of-the-19th-century clotheshorse Beau Brummell, that led to the group to claim the name of the Beau Brummels.

That such a myth persisted about the mid-sixties group may partly be due to that when they burst onto the scene at the start of 1965, many just assumed they were British and no one rushed to say otherwise. A more interesting explanation, and one that begins to untangle the importance of a group whose music casts a murky shadow against the backdrop of pop’s rapid maturation in the mid- to late-sixties, is that the Beau Brummels were, in many ways, a band of firsts.

They were the first American band to achieve attention that considered how to integrate the British beat into American rock music. They were the first rock band of note to originate from San Francisco. They were a band who first recorded for a label co-owned by Tom Donahue, a disc jockey who soon helped birth free-form radio at KMPX and who first recorded under the direction of a 21-year-old Sly Stewart who would soon become better known as Sly Stone.

They came out of the gate blazing with ‘Laugh, Laugh’ and ‘Just a Little’ and their debut album, Introducing the Beau Brummels, was a top 40 LP. They appeared in motion pictures and in animated form on the Flintstones. The blaze had extinguished by the end of 1965 and the music the Beau Brummels made between 1966 and 1968 moved far beyond Beatlesesque rock and was firmly in the vanguard of the stylistic innovations of the late sixties.

‘Laugh, Laugh’ and ‘Just a Little’ may be the only songs by the Beau Brummels that retain any currency but they only tease at what continues to make the group’s music fascinating. ‘Laugh, Laugh’’s often intricate lyrics tell a familiar tale: the comeuppance that has befallen the party who has chosen to end a romantic relationship. The tone is caustic but not cruel. Consider the chorus: “laugh, laugh, I thought I’d die / it seemed so funny to me / laugh, laugh, you met a guy / who taught you how it feels to be / lonely / oh, so lonely.” Hear how the chorus’ momentum suddenly brakes at the start of its last two lines. ‘Just a Little’ has a little rhythmic figure on the chorus—a brooding, cinematic flourish—that really stands out.

Both songs came from the pen of Ron Elliott (‘Just a Little’ was written with frequent collaborator Bob Durand), the group’s lead guitarist and principal composer. Both songs were sung by Sal Valentino. He and Elliott had known each other since they were kids. It was because Valentino, a rising Bay Area singer, needed a band that led to the formation of the Beau Brummels in 1964. He recruited Elliott as well as second guitarist Declan Mulligan, bassist Ron Meagher and drummer John Petersen.

Their debut album suggested the band would be democratically run and that there would not be a lead singer. But, save for the two early hits as well as the driving group vocal of ‘Still in Love With You Baby,’ Introducing the Beau Brummels strains under the reality of the quick scramble to put an LP together and get it into stores. Sure, there are intriguing ideas. For one example, the Mulligan lead on ‘I Would Be Happy’ is an interesting stab at mirroring how Paul McCartney could front an elegant ballad in the mop top-era of the Beatles but the end result is underdone with Mulligan floundering in trying to match McCartney’s earnestness.

The moment that emphatically argued for the promise of the Beau Brummels was the song that would conclude their brief time as hitmakers, just a year after Valentino put out the call to form a band around him.

‘Don’t Talk to Strangers’ could only be considered a hit insofar that it made it to the Billboard top 60 at the start of the autumn of 1965 (the group would only slip onto the single charts twice more and barely at that both times). There may be a reflex to focus on the fairly explicit tip of the hat that the song pays to the Byrds. That group's jangle chimes are ever-present with a variation of the twelve-string riff from their version of the ‘The Bells of Rhymney’ that would also serve as the launching point for George Harrison to write ‘If I Needed Someone.’ There's also the rush of Petersen’s unison beat on the ride cymbal and snare drum. Far more interesting, however, is how Elliott and Durand use this foundation to build something that ventures far beyond homage to Roger McGuinn and company.

Is the song’s instruction to “don’t you go talking to strangers”—a message given from one romantic partner to another who is about to go away on what is not entirely clear—an admonishment or a desperate plea? It’s hard to say. At the very least, the song’s protagonist is giving license to its subject to live and how it is expressed is unique. “Follow your own beaten path.” “Ramble where the wind don’t blow.” “Take leave of what’s behind you.” There’s a suggestion of making oneself scarce, for sure, but it is expressed in a beatific, literate way. The switch from the staccato metre of the verse to the rhythmic desperation of the chorus is another layer to how ‘Don’t Talk to Strangers’ can get under one’s skin. But, lyrics and rhythm aside, the song’s knock-out punch is delivered by Valentino.

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There’s no use tiptoeing around things here so I’ll just say it: Sal Valentino is one of sixties rock’s sui generis voices. That it took almost a year for Valentino to become the undisputed lead singer of the Beau Brummels is puzzling in retrospect. While Elliott’s baritone had a darkness combined with an idiosyncratic tone, Mulligan (by the middle of 1965, he was out of the group), Meagher and Petersen’s voices were more serviceable than sonorous. Valentino’s was special.

To hear Valentino sing for the first time is like Howard Carter’s first glimpse of the treasures contained within the tomb of King Tutankhamun. There is an onrush of his voice’s many “wonderful things”: a timbre that balances on a knife’s edge and slashes through the music, and a tone that often curls into a sneer. His phrasing reflects the heart of a pop singer, the choices he makes being guided by the lyrics and the drama or action they imply or illustrate. His mastery of the tools of the singer’s trade are the mechanics of singing. The art comes in the performance and it is the rare Valentino performance that does not leave the listener moved.

On ‘Don’t Talk to Strangers,’ it’s in the slight hesitancy as he declares the verses, the dark trepidation he adds to the chorus and the frenzied cry of the bridge. Emotive singing in the mid sixties was not out of the ordinary but Valentino’s sound was. Its auditory footprint is deeply and personally pressed into the music. It is the first part of the argument of why the Beau Brummels matter. The second part lies in the songs of Ron Elliott.

If Valentino is still known, it’s purely through the group’s two hits. Elliott, on the other hand, remains invisible. He, like Valentino, was thoroughly individual. Far more inclined to popular and country music than rock and roll, Elliott wrote songs, both on his own and with Durand and eventually with Valentino as well, that were lyrically intricate and structurally bold. The best Beau Brummels recordings are like gifts to be carefully unwrapped and savoured.

The group’s second album, called functionally The Beau Brummels, Volume 2, was released at the end of the summer of 1965. It testified to the group’s growing assertiveness—just compare its cover of all four members of the group posing without smiling, looking effortlessly cool, with their debut where the group is caught in mid-pose as if trying to figure skate on sand (Mulligan’s grimace sums up the cover’s misbegotten concept).

A spaciousness began to open in the Beau Brummels’ music. Songs like ‘I Want You’ and ‘Sad Little Girl’ unfold slowly, both building to a dramatic moment, opening up space for Valentino’s voice to stretch out supported by Elliott’s harmonizing.

Closing The Beau Brummels, Volume 2 was ‘In Good Time,’ which illustrated the breadth of the group’s harmony. Elliott’s baritone added a width to it that other groups whose harmony took a more central seat to their sound didn’t have; the effect may be properly called barbershop bohemian.

By the beginning of 1966, Autumn Records was on life support and was soon bought out by Warner Bros. Records, bringing the Beau Brummels into the label’s fold, the home then of the Everly Brothers, Petula Clark and Peter, Paul & Mary. While the group moved to a new label, their publishing stayed with Donohue, one of the reasons that lead to quizzical moves that killed any momentum the group could have harnessed out of the gate on Warner Bros.

Their first single for the label was a folk-rock cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘One Too Many Mornings.’ Hearing Valentino singing Dylan is worth it. The generic arrangement not so much. It defines what it actually meant to ape the Byrds and nothing else.

Their first album for Warner Bros., Beau Brummels ’66, released in June 1966, made it seem almost inevitable that the group would remain on the periphery. Bad decisions by record companies are as old as time and indeed, dictating an album of covers to a group that was bursting at the seams with original music ranks as an all-time clunker of a choice. Notwithstanding, the resulting album is interesting in that it helps solidify the case for Valentino as a great song interpreter, making it not inconvincible to place him on the lineage of Italian singers of pop music whose reign was on the wane by the time that Beau Brummels ’66 hit the shelves for a public that had about as little appetite for it as the band had for recording it.

Hearing the album engenders its own fascination. There is at least an effort to find something original to say about most of the songs that are covered. The group dusts off their long-standing arrangement of ‘Louie, Louie’ with Petersen singing lead and it’s definitely a fun listen.

Unsurprisingly, the album works best when Valentino takes the lead. He croons the Beatles’ ‘Yesterday’ with sensitivity and plumbs the isolation of their ‘You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away.’ On Dylan’s ‘Mr. Tambourine Man,’ the tempo is more deliberate than the Byrds’ famous version and Valentino sings more of the song’s lyrics. Little on the album is objectively bad with the tossed-off version of Herman’s Hermits’ ‘Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter’ being the only true stinker.

‘She Reigns,’ the sole piece of original material included on the Beau Brummels’ first Warner Bros. recordings, was the only that suggested where the group was heading. By early 1966, Elliott had ceased performing live due to health issues related to being diabetic and Don Irving had joined to fill his shoes, making the Beau Brummels a five-man group once again. The Elliott and Durand composition, issued as the b-side to ‘One Too Many Mornings,’ moves away from rock to a kind of elevated pop—the song’s sentiment makes it the kind of love song where romance feels life-altering even as its bright brittleness is slightly marred by the wavering tunefulness of the group’s harmonies.

A follow-up single of ‘Here We Are Again,’ from the pen of Valentino and ‘Fine With Me,’ an Elliott-Durand number, confirmed an allegiance with California pop, especially in the high-pitched and bopping vocal backgrounds on the latter just as San Francisco was to explode as the musical centre of the counterculture.

By late 1966, the group underwent more changes. Both Meagher and Irving were drafted. Elliott moved to Los Angeles. Valentino and Petersen considered recruiting new bandmates to continue the Beau Brummels without the other three. Instead, Petersen joined Harpers Bizarre, a new group spearheaded by Ted Templeton and Dick Scoppettone, and Valentino continued to make music with Elliott. The Beau Brummels began their second chapter.

Feelin’ Groovy, Harpers Bizarre debut for Warner Bros. and released in April 1967, signified the deep hive of creative musicianship being borne at the label. Randy Newman and Van Dyke Parks, two songwriters and performers who were extraordinarily well-versed in the craft of pop, contributed songs and arrangements to the recording. Lenny Waronker, then an A&R rep at the label, produced. Leon Russell, part of the group of session musicians in California to be christened as the Wrecking Crew, wrote and arranged for Feelin’ Groovy too. Elliott and Durand did as well with an adaption of the main thematic material of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, tailoring it for the extremely sugary sound of the group (no sunshine-pop group strained the tolerance of good taste as Harpers Bizarre did).

Nick DeCaro was soon to also become part of the roster of musical minds contributing to Warner Bros.—by 1970, his name would be ubiquitous as an arranger for Newman, Gordon Lightfoot, Maria Muldaur and many others. In 1967. he was working primarily for A&M Records but was brought on by Waronker to arrange an absolutely dynamite new song by Elliott and Durand.

‘Two Days ’Til Tomorrow’ took the loftiness of ‘She Reigns’ and raised it to the heavens with lines like “the princess who will mesmerize / with lights of diamonds in her eyes / she’s coming.” DeCaro’s arrangement adds uncommon touches that match the song's ecstatic wonder of the coming promise of love. Accordion lines played by DeCaro himself during the first part of each verse herald the imminent meeting of boy and girl as an event of spiritual renewal. Low, unison strings on the second part of each verse builds the tension that will be released on the chorus. The end of each chorus emphasizes the group’s harmony with Elliott’s baritone subtly pushing through to add a chorale effect. There’s a baroque touch in a key transition point, one of “waiting and watching for her to appear / she’s near / do I dream?” before another climax.

The song is also a triumph for Valentino’s uniquely expressive gifts: his stress on enunciation, the way his voice opens up on key phrases to a cry that balances smoothness with unbridled ecstasy, fully acting out—embodying really—the mini-play that Elliott and Durand wrote.

If anything could have revived the Beau Brummels’ commercial fortunes, it should have been ‘Two Days ’Til Tomorrow.’ It didn’t. There are few obvious reasons why. The song hangs on the refrain “she’s coming.” It’s a phrase that’s easily mistaken for a double entendre even as no sexual connotation was implied. The version of the song released as a single in March 1967 was two-and-a-half minutes which packed in a lot of musical invention in an almost overwhelming amount of time. The full-length version, which totals three minutes and 50 seconds, should have been released instead given as it more properly positions the song as one of many engrossing and complex works of the time such as the Beach Boys’ ‘Good Vibrations’ and the Beatles’ ‘Strawberry Fields Forever.’ Instead, ‘Two Days ’Til Tomorrow’ served as a kind of elegy for the Beau Brummels, the last true attempt to capture the market. Today, the song stands as one of the great lost singles of the sixties. But, there was more music to come and what came continued to be bold and forward-thinking.

Triangle hit stores four months after ‘Two Days ’Til Tomorrow.’ While Meagher is credited and illustrated on the very 1967-like cover, he only contributed to the first part of the album’s sessions before answering the call from Uncle Sam. The album is primarily a product of Valentino and Elliott working with the Wrecking Crew and Waronker producing.

The album’s a feast of multitudes. A good portion of it is dedicated to fantastical characters, a reflection of Elliott’s interest in fantasy (one of the group’s many unreleased songs was his ode to Galabriel from the Lord of the Rings). There’s ‘the Painter of Women,’ ‘the Wolf of Velvet Fortune’ and ‘the Keeper of Time.’

The passage of time is another preoccupation. Valentino begins the album by asking, “how do you feel? / how do you feel? / running to summer / with winter at your feels / how do you feel?” on ‘Are You Happy?,’ one of Triangle’s four collaborations between Elliott and Durand. On ‘It Won’t Get Better,’ one of the album’s five collaborations between Elliott and Valentino, the halcyon days of one’s youth are celebrated; the feeling of starry-eyed nostalgia thickened with a wistful brass arrangement by Elliott.

Triangle also tells of a surreal encounter with a gypsy woman on ‘Only Dreaming Now.’ Valentino conjures the tale like a storyteller unwilling to confirm whether the tale he is spinning is fact or fiction. Hear how he shades lines like “the days of sunshine in the air” and “so happy dancing on our way.” Dervish-like strings and a part for accordion add to the song’s hypnotic spell. ‘Magic Hollow’ unfolds like a fairy tale promising of “magic delight” and features a memorable harpsichord part played by Parks.

The title track is the song’s most philosophical, positing that life consists of “the triangle of love and sun and rain” and that one’s job is “to share the sun and rain and move them / where the seed will flower.” Heady stuff and certainly Valentino is a passionate messenger of ‘Triangle’’s maxims, digging deep into the wordy lyrics. An arrangement that builds up tension and releases it in a rush assures that Elliott and Valentino’s vision is ultimately life affirming, concluding in a triumphant, elongated repeat of the word “triangle.”

Triangle is the kind of album that could have easily collapsed upon its seriousness, succumbing to the lure of pretentiousness. The album never does knowing that drama is best mediated with brief flashes of comedy or, at the very least, a moment’s lightness that is given a chance to breathe. The first side of Triangle concludes with a polite yet rollicking cover of Merle Travis’ ‘Nine Pound Hammer’ and the second side ends with the dark humour of Newman’s ‘Old Kentucky Home.’ suggesting that the album’s most adventurous, hallucinogenic moments are a kind of fever dream with Valentino coming to as a deeply disagreeable southerner.

It is also a jarring way to close the album. It seems a bit too out of place maybe, a result of Valentino and Elliott almost trying too hard to anticipate and answer the criticism of how far they went to create a work that took a huge leap forward for the Beau Brummels. ‘Lower Level,’ recording during the Triangle sessions and released as a single with ‘Magic Hollow’ on the b-side, is similarly ambitious as well as somewhat martial in beat and determinately uncommercial. The intricacies of Elliott’s composition, impervious to the limited attention span of AM radio, are revealed only through repeated, focused listening.

Valentino and Elliott then headed to Mount Joliet, Tennessee to famed producer Owen Bradley’s recording barn at the beginning of 1968, on Waronker’s suggestion, to put a new album on tape that used the countrified elements of Triangle as a starting point. Playing with Elliott and Valentino were a core band of guitarist Jerry Reed, keyboardist David Briggs, bassist Norbert Putman and drummer Kenneth Buttrey. What they created was another bold album-length statement.

To call Bradley’s Barn country-rock misses things entirely. It sounds wholly different from other early statements of the fusing of the two genres. There are no steel guitars, fiddles and little two-stepping (Valentino’s ‘An Added Attraction (Come and See Me)’ is the closest the album gets to pure country). Instead, there is the collision of the cutting-edge of Music City with the two equally cutting-edge members of what remained of the Beau Brummels.

‘Cherokee Girl’ begins almost like a baroque country piece. Valentino’s lines soar against Reed’s dobro. Yet another winning Elliott-Durand composition, the song was an attempt to create a backstory for the woman featured on the front cover of Dylan’s John Wesley Harding. It’s a fertile tale they create, centered on the cry of a coyote amidst isolation. Each verse resolves into a straight beat before a further shift into a urbane hoedown. Songs like ‘Little Bird’ and ‘Love Can Feel a Long Way Down’ further illustrate how the Nashville musicians employed for the album created a rock-solid and river-deep beat.

Everyone nestles into the pocket for ‘Deep Water,’ especially Valentino and his jittery, syncopated lead. It's a highlight of Bradley’s Barn. The album is primarily a document of the potency of the partnership between Elliott and Valentino. There is a daringness to how the heartbreak formula is subverted on ‘Jessica’—a country weeper, if ever there was one—by turning it into a pensive pop song that only relents to what is expected at the end but with the added twist of a chiming organ part straight out of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds.

It's hardly surprising that Bradley’s Barn did nothing to solve the Beau Brummels’ inability to return to their early commercial success. Neither did a single, ‘Lift Me,’ with Darlene Love’s the Blossoms backing Valentino, released in June 1968, four months before Bradley’s Barn came out. A final single with ‘Cherokee Girl’ backed by ‘Deep Water’ was released in January 1969.

By then, Elliott was deep into contributing to albums like Parks’ Song Cycle, Newman’s debut and the Everly Brothers’ Roots—on the latter, he contributed two songs: ‘Turn Around’ which lead off Bradley’s Barn and ‘Ventura Boulevard,’ one of the great songs of the deep melancholy of the end of summer. He released a solo album in 1970, The Candlestickmaker, which remains a hidden gem and a serene example of California chill. Valentino released several solo singles before becoming the focal point of Stoneground, a sprawling group that was kind of a musical commune.

Head over to any streaming service today and you’ll discover how shakily the Beau Brummels’ legacy has been tended. The picture of the band is from one of the many times in which they reformed, sometimes with Elliott and Valentino and sometimes without. All the music they recorded is there but you need to be more savvy that you should be in order to find it. As always, physical media comes to the rescue. Cherry Red Records’ eight-CD set, Turn Around: The Complete Recordings 1964-1970, is the close-to-definitive document of the group (the absence of the full-length version of ‘Two Days ’Til Tomorrow’ here is inexplicable, however). It is the best way, save for a reissue of the group’s five albums on vinyl hopefully someday, to celebrate the greatest unsung band of the 1960s.