New York Spotlight: The Left Banke - She May Call You Up Tonight and Barterers and Their Wives

We are back after a couple of days off with more garage rock from the Empire State. Today we take a classical turn with The Left Banke. The Left Banke are one of those bands that lived largely in the studio. The band was Michael Brown on keyboards, Tom Finn on bass, Steve Martin on vocals, George Cameron on guitar and Warren David-Schierhorst on drums. Michael Brown's father was an established symphony violinist and he was instrumental in producing and managing his son's band. So it was, the Left Banke went straight from rehearsals to the studio.

Considering the father who was mentoring the band, it is not surprising that the band's first song was a string laden number with violin at the fore. That number, Walk Away Renee, turned into something of a hit for the music collective in the Summer of 1966. The number was co-written by the band's bard, Michael Brown, who also composed the band's wonderful follow-up hit that same year, the symphonically arranged, Pretty Ballerina. Then the management got cocky. Did they really need the band? The third single, released in the Winter of 1967 only featured Michael Brown who co-wrote both numbers with professional songwriters. Steve Martin's delicate, stuffy-nose styled vocal lead would be replaced with a falsetto vocal by Bert Sommer. Occasional On The Flip-Side visitor and comment-maker, Michael McKean (Best In Show, Spinal Tap, Laverne and Shirley) would serve as the guitarist for both tracks. The "Left Banke" sounded nothing like the previous two singles and deservedly flopped. The other four members of The Left Banke went into revolt filing suit against Smash Records, Michael Brown and his father.

Smash Records got jittery and withdrew that ill-fated single and instead released a single taken from the band's album. That fourth single, released in June of 1967, is what we feature today. She May Call You Up Tonight/Barterers And Their Wives. The A-Side was composed by Michael Brown and singer, Steve Martin (left and second from left in the photo below). It follows the time-tested Left Banke theme of a love triangle (Renee, the ballerina was a real person and was dating another member of the band). But the number doesn't have the strings of the previous hits. It was supposed to have them, but time was tight and the number was finished without them.  The Flip-Side, the quizzical, Barters And Their Wives, is composed by Brown and a professional songwriter. It's a beautiful number that plays up the band's baroque style nicely.

We're lifting a cool photo from the cool folk at Nitro-Retro Blog.

Until next time, we'll see you On The Flip-Side!

Song of the Week: Sir Douglas Quintet - I Don't Want

I don't know a whole lot about the Sir Douglas Quintet. They were always a bit of an enigma to me. Particularly when viewed through my garage and punk glasses that filtered much of my view of life many years ago. They were always in the same record bins with groups like the Left Banke, Jefferson Airplane and The Byrds, but they never seemed to have that stuck-in-time sound those other bands had. In other words, in my self defeating myopic way I couldn't easily peg their song as being from 1966 (cool) or 1969 (not cool). Maybe with one or two exceptions. The organ heavy She's About a Mover was obviously a cool gem that appropriately reeked of it's recording date. Despite their unpredictability, I would occasionally pull out the Mendocino album and put it on. Oddly it has the aforementioned She's About A Mover re-recorded 4 years after it first charted. It has the quasi-hit Mendocino with Augie Meyer's up-front organ pounding away and a number of other odd tunes with horns, fiddle, steel guitar and accordion that don't fit obviously together to form "a sound".

It should be clear to you by now that I am not being critical of the album or the band, but rather my way of trying to fit them into a category. The Sir Douglas Quintet were led by San Antonio, Texas child music prodigy Doug Sahm who began his recording career at the age of 9. He called upon country and western, swing, cajun, rock-n-roll, blues and Mexican norteño to form what would become the corner-stone of the flowering Tex-Mex scene. A style of music that pulls together a mosaic of sounds to form a wholly new one.

Despite repeated listenings, the album never quite grabbed me. Then one day a San Diego drummer named Dave Klowden suggested to his bandmates, The Tell-Tale Hearts, while sitting in a Winchells Donut shop at 1am that they cover I Don't Want from the Mendocino album. I couldn't even think of the song. I went back to listen to it and realized it was a brilliantly understated song. Sahm's powerful vocals are matched by Meyer's smooth coating of organ and Sahm's own gentle doubled guitar work that is as melodic as anything you'll hear. And at the 3:28 mark, the song takes a decidedly different avenue to wrap the number up. The guitar pushed to the fore, the drums mixing up the beat. Way cool. As were other songs on that album like, If You Really Want Me To I'll Go, At The Crossroads and the pushing the VU into the red song, Texas Me. And the European version has other cool songs such as the New Orleans soul inflected gem, A Nice Song.

Give I Don't Want a listen and let us know, by way of comment (below), how you like it. We love hearing your thoughts. Below is a video of the San Antonio quintet performing their 1965 hit She's About A Mover. I do believe that this is one of Jack Hayden's favorite songs ever.

Have a great week. We'll see you on the flip-side.