Their hits were few, their heyday brief, and their catalog regrettably thin - a mere five studio albums (including one ill-advised, contractually mandated collection of covers) - but in the 40 years since San Francisco's Beau Brummels, led by songwriter Ron Elliott, and the dewy-eyed tenor voice of Sal Valentino, hit the charts with their twin peaks - "Laugh, Laugh" and "Just a Little" - they have become one of the most celebrated American pop bands of the Sixties, right up there with the Lovin' Spoonful and the Mamas and the Papas. (Magic Hollow, a pricey 4-CD Rhino Handmade box set of the band's later recordings for Warner Bros., sold out its limited edition in a matter of weeks.)

As notable for its unusually strong set of Ron Elliott originals and the band's deft reconciliation of the then predominant Merseybeat sound with distinctly American elements of surf guitar and California folk-pop and an ear for Brill Building craftsmanship, as for being one of Sylvester "Sly Stone" Stewart's earliest production credits, Introducing... the Beau Brummels, originally released by the tiny (and short-lived) August Records in 1965, and reissued with a couple of bonus tracks and meticulously remastered sound by the always reliable Sundazed Records in 1995, is an appealingly unpolished nugget of smart, jaunty, heartthrob pop - a Fountains of Wayne for the Johnson Administration - brimming with clever musical allusions, deeply layered, elaborately detailed production (especially for what are mostly essentially two minute rock n roll ditties) and deceptively boy-band-ish lyrics that reveal themselves in three dimensions on closer inspection.

The album's two hit singles were the first and last most people ever heard of the band (though they charted about a half dozen singles onto Billboard's Hot 100 between '65 and '67, and their otherwise hitless albums Triangle and Bradley's Barn are still very highly regarded by many critics). "Laugh, Laugh", a terrifically catchy bit of told-you-so schadenfreude, opens with the whinnying of a harmonica and Valentino's smoothly sympathetic-but-not-really tenor - don't mind my preachin' to you - before bursting into bold, just-shy-of-triumphant harmonies on the memorable chorus:

Laugh, laugh, I thought I'd die, it seems so funny to me
Laugh, laugh, you met a guy who taught you how it feels to be...
Lonely
Oh, so lonely

Those lonelys at the end - and again with that Debbie Downer harmonica! - sung in dripping folk harmonies, verily ooze the condescension of the jilted lover testifying to the poetic justice of seeing his own jilter jilted. But the album's real masterpiece is "Just a Little", the band's only top 10 hit - a break-up song in which nobody's being dumped. Instead, unspecified outside forces - our worlds can never meet - are driving a wedge between the couple in question. What elevates the song to greatness - aside from the atmospheric, spaghetti-western harmonies and romantic Spanish-flavored guitar picking in the introduction and verses, aside from Valentino's weepily regretful vocals, aside from that brief, but furiously emotional chorus - so, I'll cry just a little 'cause I love you so, and I'll die just a little 'cause I have to go... away - is the instrumental break that follows that chorus, a cinematic play on Link Wray's classic "Rumble", which quite effectively appropriates that song's almost cartoonishly amplified macho and echoey emotional desolation.

In fact, as much as Ron Elliot's two-minute movie-shorts-in-song, it's what the band steals from pop's (then) recent past that distinguishes the Beau Brummels from both the British Invasion (an association they attempted to exploit on several not-always-musical levels - the band name itself having an inherently British ring, and the word Beau following felicitously closely behind the word Beatles in the racks of a record store), and from their nascent California scene. If the moody jangle of "Not Too Long Ago" bears a vague resemblance to the Searchers' "Needles and Pins" and "I Would Be Happy" sounds like a long lost Dave Clark Five ballad along the lines of their beautiful "Because"; then the rebel-rousing, bottom-E-string-loving guitar licks of "Just Wait and See" are pure, pure Duane Eddy. The band's take on Don Gibson's "Oh Lonesome Me" is a south Texas hoedown worthy of Buddy Holly's Crickets, full of pig-roastin' whoops and hollers, hand-clapped beats, and a steaming ladleful of clip-cloppin', wood blockin' rock n' roll. (If apostrophes were dollars, I'd be broke after that.)

The chugging blues of "Ain't That Loving You Baby" falls somewhere between Please Please Me and Between the Buttons, and the word Dylanesque might rightly have been coined as an adjective for the bitter, nasal lamentations of "They'll Make You Cry". On "I Want More Loving", they throw in a guitar solo straight off the earliest 45s of the Beach Boys - the kind of twangy California dream of Chuck Berry that the Beach Boys themselves couldn't pull off anymore. And yet, despite all of these borrowings, or maybe as a result of their sheer diversity, and especially due to Sly Stone's ability to make them all sound as specific and intentional and, y'know, snappy as a present-day hip-hop sample, the Beau Brummels always sound like the Beau Brummels - a sound very specific to this particular quintet, which at that particular time sounded simultaneously like nothing else and at home with everything else on the radio.

While clearly their most successful, this isn't necessarily the Beau Brummels best work. But at a time when the chart was dominated by so many British accents, the Beau Brummels were one of the earliest groups to effectively reintroduce pre-Beatles Americana to American audiences, paving the way for a number of bands that would ultimately prove more popular. As introductions go, you could do far worse than Introducing... The Sundazed reissue features brilliantly remastered sound by Bill Inglot, a brief history of the band up to the recording of this album (based on interviews with Ron Elliott), and two bonus tracks - a demo version of "Just a Little" and the band's rollicking cover of the Lovin' Spoonful's "Good Time Music", a contemporaneous non-LP single.

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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:

"Introducing... The Beau Brummels" by The Beau Brummels
Originally released by August Records, 1965
Sundazed Records
Reissued 1995

Produced by Sylvester Stewart
38 min.

SONGS: Laugh, Laugh - Still in Love With You Baby - Just a Little - Just Wait and See - Oh Lonesome Me - Ain't That Loving You Baby - Stick Like Glue - They'll Make You Cry - That's If You Want Me To - I Want More Loving - I Would Be Happy - Not Too Long Ago /BONUS: Just a Little (demo) - Good Time Music



Recommended: Yes