Were The Beau Brummels America's Unluckiest Band?

EVERYTHING BEGAN so well. Almost a year after the all-consuming British Invasion began, the Beau Brummels were one of the first new homegrown bands to make a dent on the charts, with back-to-back singles, 'Laugh, Laugh' and 'Just A Little', that combined chiming pop melodies (with a touch of modern Merseybeat) and an underlying moodiness. They sounded a bit like the Searchers and the Zombies – their records had that type of hazy shimmer – but as much as some people wanted to brand them English imitators riding on red-coattails (the band name smacked of Anglo-appropriation), they had a distinctive American bent, folk-rock before that genre had a name, before the Byrds brought Dylan into the jet age.