Bradley’s Barn - The Beau Brummels (1968)

Full disclosure: the only thing I knew about The Beau Brummels was the mention of them in Billy Joel’s “It’s Still Rock n Roll To Me.” I’d never looked into who that might have been. There was recently a reissue that I was reading about that made me put this on my list.

There are a handful of bands that seem to be just as good as the “rock gods of the 60s” narrative, but just didn’t survive in the popular imagination. Everybody knows Creedence Clearwater or Jefferson Airplane, but fewer know Quicksilver Messenger Service or 13th Floor Elevators. The Beau Brummels seems to have suffered this same fate, at least from the perspective that I (who had a pretty major classic rock phase) hadn’t really heard about them.

Part of this, admittedly, is that they play good music but without really innovating much. For some reference, BB were a little odd in that they were a San Francisco-based band that got noticed by aping the British Invasion. Listening to a few of the singles from their early albums, you can hear them move from copying the Merseybeat to copying Dylan and The Dead. This album is the result of a Nashville session with Jerry Reed on guitar, where they attacked the seam between west coast psych rock and country music.

It’s a nice mix between folksy country and more high-concept psych and folk rock. It still sounds surprisingly good.

Tracks I liked:

Deep Water - pseudo-baroque keyboards (harpsichord?) makes it sound like Brian Jones-era Stones

Long Walking Down to Misery - straight country for the most part, a real gem

Love Can Fall A Long Way Down - great song, but I keep hearing something about “Fold your laundry” in the lyric that I know isn’t there.