Beauregard Ajax – Blue Violins [Oxnard, CA, USA ; Psychedelic Rock / Psychedelic Folk] (1968)

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• ˝Let’s set the scene. OK, it’s the summer of 1967 and there’s this band of teenagers who hail from Oxnard, California, a city 65 miles north of Los Angeles and 35 miles south of Santa Barbara. They’re all from basically the same neighborhood, ages 16 and 17 at the time: David Ferguson (lead guitar/vocals) and John Boutell (rhythm guitar) and a schoolmate of David’s, bassist Dennis Margeson, had formed the beginnings of the band a year earlier, calling themselves The Poets, but they were mostly jamming in garages in these early stages.˝

  ˝By the beginning of 1967, Margeson was out, to be replaced by Clint Williams (bass), and soon they were adding Charlie Hendricks (vocals, pipe recorder), who had previously played in bands with Clint. Ferguson (who is their de-facto leader) and Hendricks soon began writing songs together, but there was a reason they weren’t able to play any shows just yet: they needed a drummer, as most rock bands do, and were soon were introduced to Leo Hartshorn (drums), who had gone to the same high school, Hueneme High, as Ferguson.˝

  ˝Finally, now that finals were over and they’d all graduated from high school, they had to time to focus on getting a few gigs (mostly teen clubs up in the lush coastal communities in Ventura County), and maybe, just maybe, they thought they might be able to get themselves a recording contract. At some point in ’67, the band’s friend, Patrick Landreville, introduced them to concert promoter named Jim Salzer, who was suitably impressed with the band’s sound and appearance and he soon began booking them as an opening act at his concerts as well as at his nightclub, the Starlight Lounge.˝

  ˝By this time Charlie had persuaded the band to change the name of the band from the Poets to the Dumplings. Meanwhile, Mike Cullen, another local musician with a band of his own, had approached Ferguson with the idea of playing shows together on a double bill, and Ferguson was receptive to the idea, so Cullen secured several performances at local venues. It was at one of these shows that Barbara Haskell, the wife of famed music arranger Jimmy Haskell, saw the Dumplings and, liking what she heard, she offered to introduce the band to one of her husband’s associates in the music industry, a man named Bob Keane, who had a record company called Del-fi Records.˝

  ˝Now, Keane was kind of a legendary figure by this point, having released recordings on several record labels he’d owned from the late 50s to the mid-sixties — some of his better known artists included Ritchie Valens and The Bobby Fuller Four (on his Mustang label imprint) and he’d also released albums by a lot of surf bands, including The Lively Ones.˝

  ˝Keane called Landreville, saying he had gotten a glowing recommendation from the Haskells’ concerning the Dumplings and he was indeed interested in hearing the band for himself. A meeting was set up, and so, at the beginning of the summer of ’67, the Dumplings soon found themselves driving down to Los Angeles, to Hollywood, actually, where they met with Keane at his offices in a two-story pink granite building, located at 6277 Selma Ave., just a few blocks from the “Record Row” near the intersection of Hollywood & Vine, and just down the street from the familiar Capitol Records tower.˝

  ˝The first thing the band noticed when they arrived at their destination was a new company name stenciled on the glass door — the gold and black lettering was spelling out “Stereo-Fi Records.” They climbed the stairs, leading up to offices that are actually above a Security Pacific Bank, where they meet Keane for the first time. They liked him immediately — he was an affable, handsome guy in his mid-forties, with Brylcreemed dark hair and a square jaw like a telegenic TV news anchor — and they learn during their first conversation that he’s a former musician himself — a clarinet player — and he’d performed all around Southern California with his own big band.˝

  ˝Keane discovers that these teenage musicians have never set foot inside in a professional recording studio, so he escorts them down the hall to a small room which turns out to be a brand-new state-of-the-art recording studio, with a transistorized mixing board, and transistorized three-and eight-track tape decks. Stereo-Fi’s studio is, in fact, one of the first L.A. studios to use a mixing board utilizing transistors instead of tubes, designed by electronic genius/recording engineer John Stevens, who had helped design the mixing board used up the street at Capitol Records’ Studio B.˝

  ˝It seems appropriate to mention here that Dumplings’ sound is really unlike anything Keane has ever released before, and seems to be on the very crest of a new wave of sounds that he’s been hearing, sounding like a mixture of Southern California electric folk-rock (still a relatively new genre in 1967), along with familiar touches of garage rock, psychedelic rock, with a little Beatles-inspired electric sitar-mysticism thrown in. Ferguson writes all the band’s songs, incidentally, with the exception of two which he co-wrote with singer Charlie Hendricks. He also plays all the lead guitar parts, and he and Hendricks share the vocals, with Ferguson occasionally affecting a phony Euro-mod accent. Neither have a particularly strong vocal talent, but it doesn’t seem to matter as their lilting vocals fit these songs perfectly.˝

  Source/more info on them here: http://therockasteria.blogspot.com/2018/07/beauregard-ajax-deaf-priscilla-1968-us.html

  Even more info on them here: https://www.psychedelicbabymag.com/2011/05/beauregard-ajax-my-interview-with-leo.html

  May 2, 2023 at 5:02 pm

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