With their brilliant synthesis of folk and country, baroque and roll, San Francisco’s Beau Brummels made a major and lasting contribution to the lexicon of American popular music in the mid-1960s. ‘Turn Around: The Complete Recordings 1964-1970’ is the exhaustive overview of their legacy has so long deserved; presenting the band’s classic Autumn and Warner Brothers recordings in definitive fashion.
Boasting the stellar songcraft of Ron Elliott and the unique voice of Sal Valentino, the Brummels were amongst the first American units to respond to the British Invasion with innovation rather than imitation. The group remained popular and influential in the US long after their 1965 chart successes with ‘Laugh, Laugh’ and ‘Just A Little’, and once the act had devolved to the duo of Valentino and Elliott in 1967, the Beau Brummels moved to the forefront of Warner Brothers’ late 1960s pop renaissance with the albums ‘Triangle’ and ‘Bradley’s Barn’, the latter a visionary country-rock masterpiece.
Assembled, annotated and mastered by longtime Brummels’ aficionado Alec Palao, this major refurbishment of The Beau Brummels’ catalogue leaves no stone unturned. The original stereo album masters are accompanied by a comprehensive assortment of out- takes, alternate mixes and 45 RPM versions, and are further enhanced by rarities and unreleased demos drawn from the band’s own archives.
All the members of the Brummels also contribute to the instructive and heavily-illustrated history of the recordings, housed in a deluxe, handsomely appointed booklet art directed and designed by Steve Stanley.
“I do like this record. Despite their tremendously loser name, this group from America is pretty good. They have a sound of their own added to by Byrd-like guitar playing and Everly Brothers voices. In a funny way, it’s rather sexy.”
Although Penny Valentine’s verdict on The Beau Brummels’s “Don’t Talk to Strangers” edges towards damning the single with faint praise, it was positive and homed in on an important aspect of the San Francisco band – their Everly Brothers’s resonance. Readers of her Disc Weekly reviews column that mid-November in 1965 will have been well-aware of America’s decisive response to the wave of British bands clogging up their charts. It was an influential reaction: The Byrds impacted on The Beatles.
With their brilliant synthesis of folk and country, baroque and roll, San Francisco’s Beau Brummels made a major and lasting contribution to the lexicon of American popular music in the mid-1960s.
The Fat Angel Sings 