In our examination of rock bands whose careers ended too soon, we have worked our way all the back to the 1960s. If it didn’t birth rock & roll, the 1960s were the decade in which it rose to prominence as the dominant musical form in the west – a position it would hold until being supplanted by hip-hop toward the end of the century.
As such, the ‘60s holds a special poignance for rock & roll fans. Even if you did not live through it, you know most of the bands. It may have been the music of your parents or older siblings, but you grew up listening to it. British invasion, California surf, Motown – it formed the foundation of all that came next. In such a fertile decade, the early demise of a creative band always hurts, because we are left wondering what other seeds they might have sown had they remained intact.
The most famous rock band ever – the Beatles – may have been the final casualty of the turbulent decade. At least by the time the Fab Four released their final studio album – Let It Be – in 1970, they had already created a dozen albums and altered the course of music forever. It had been obvious for several years that they needed to split. The Beatles did not break up too early. But here are five bands who did...
These 1960s bands gave up way too soon
WAYNE FONTANA AND THE MINDBENDERS – 1965-1967 (6 albums)
1965 was the fulcrum. Country rock legend Steve Earle does a great podcast in which he suggests that was the year Bob Dylan decided he wanted to be the Beatles and John Lennon decided he wanted to be Bob Dylan. Bringing it All Back Home and Rubber Soul were the results. The training wheels were off and everything was fair game for musical exploration. Record labels began gobbling up any young band with long hair and two guitars. They threw a lot of spaghetti at the wall to see what was ready for public consumption.
Wayne Fontana emerged from Manchester when he was not yet 20 with Eric Stewart, Bob Lang, and Rick Rothwell. His quivering tenor hovered over the vaguely Motown-sounding “Um Um Um Um Um” and scored a modest hit. But it was the following year that he found major success by diving into the emerging Merseybeat rock & roll of “The Game of Love.”
That early triumph inspired Fontana to leave his backing band – The Mindbenders – for a solo career. The Mindbenders then recruited a new lead singer – Eric Stewart – and put out the Beach Boys-inspired song written by Carole Bayer Sager, “A Groovy Kind of Love” to massive sales.
Neither Fontana nor The Mindbenders could sustain success on their own. Fontana never really hit on the right mix, recording a lot of soft-sounding pop that never found an audience. Only the blue-eyed soul of “Come On Home,” with its gospel chorus really works. The Mindbenders actually were more artistically ambitious on their own and put out a couple of good albums over the next few years which sadly never caught on.
They got into some trouble with their single “Schoolgirl” because of its subject (teen pregnancy) – but its weirdly hypnotic Gothic Irish folk vibe pointed out an interesting direction – as did much of their final album. In hindsight, it seems as if the band needed Fontana’s star power while the singer needed his band’s music.
THE BEAU BRUMMELS – 1965-1968 (5 albums)
The common take on the Beau Brummels is that they wedded the California folk of the Byrds with the Beatles. That’s true to an extent, but it sells the Bay Area rockers short. They had two elite weapons that made them far more than derivative imitators. Guitarist Ron Elliott was a highly gifted songwriter, and frontman Sal Valentino had one of the very best voices in ‘60s pop.
You hear both immediately on their very first album track, “Laugh Laugh.” Then, two songs later, they top it with the haunting “Just a Little.” They even do a spry little version of the country classic “Oh Lonesome Me.” They followed up the debut with a second strong album, basically sticking to the same formula. They got so big so fast that they were booked at the Bedrock-a-Gogo on The Flintstones to sing “Laugh Laugh.” They were cleverly renamed The Beau Brummelstones.
But success ended up hurting them. After the second album, they left their small hometown label, Autumn, for Warner Brothers and the big time. They rushed out an album of covers which was met mostly with disdain. Combined with Elliott’s failing health, which kept him from full participation, the Brummels were never able to build on their early success.
The failure of Beau Brummels ’66 caused a bit of a shake-up in the band, and the resulting albums, Triangle and Bradley’s Barn indicated that there was more interesting music to come. Triangle is a decent art rock project that predicts some of Jethro Tull’s more pastoral work in the ‘70s.
But Bradley’s Barn is a fabulous album – full of swampy, blues rock like “Turn Around” and “Deep Water” that would feel right at home on any modern country rockers setlist. Elliott and Valentino were both expanding their voices – sharing songwriting and singing – and coming up with some excellent material. But it wasn’t the early stuff, which is what Warners thought they were getting. The original Brummels reunited for one final hurrah in 1975. That final album was not bad at all, but their time had come and gone.
THE PLEASURE SEEKERS – 1965-1971 (0 ALBUMS)
The Pleasure Seekers never released an album during their brief run. They released singles and appeared on compilation albums. They toured and played on local television. But mainstream success eluded them. So history has largely forgotten that ten years before the Runaways and the Raincoats, even before Fanny or the Slits, Suzi Quattro and her sisters were rocking as hard as any boys could in the 1960s.
Check out “What a Way to Die.” It is more punk than anything you will hear from 1965. Or “Never Thought You’d Leave Me,” which is better than most garage rock from the decade. With “Where Have You Gone,” Suzi and sister Patti (later joined by another sister, Arlene) are dabbling in proto-metal.
Though they released successful singles and became a popular live act, it seems the world had no idea what to do with female rockers. And the Quattro sisters weren’t giving in. They just got harder and heavier into the late 60s, now rechristened as Cradle, and with yet another sister, Nancy, taking over when Arlene moved the management side of the business.
Suzi, who was just 15 when the band formed in the mid-1960s, went solo in 1971 and Cradle essentially ended.
Patti hooked up with Fanny – another seminal all-female rock group – briefly, while Suzi, for better or worse, went onto her biggest fame as Leather Tuscadero, a recurring character in Happy Days. That gig made her known to a wider audience, but it also diminished her street cred, so a lot of music fans considered Suzi Quattro a caricature on a sitcom, and not the stone-cold killer rock and roller that she was.
THE 13TH FLOOR ELEVATORS – 1966-1969 (4 albums)
There was another band from Texas who could have been included in my 1970s early break-up list called The Flatlanders. They reformed years after their early break-up and released their iconic album entitled More a Legend Than a Band. That would have been an appropriate name for the 13th Floor Elevators too. Hailing from Austin in the mid-1960s, they played a brand of music that hadn’t really been heard before. A writer on these very pages has already gushed about their second album, Easter Everywhere, as being a foundational piece of psychedelia. (All right – it was me.) You can read about that later if you’d care to.
For now, though, I want to point out that one of the things that made the Elevators so important was that they went well beyond psychedelia. Other crucial Texas rockers as diverse as ZZ Top, the Butthole Surfers, and Ray Wylie Hubbard were heavily influenced by Roky Erikson’s iconic voice and guitar, and Tommy Hall’s insanely hypnotic electric jug.
“You’re Gonna Miss Me” kicked off their first album with classic garage energy. But there was also this throbbing, fluttering sound that no one could really figure out. That was the jug. When Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers strobed his vocals through their far-left take on Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man,” I suspect he had Tommy Hall’s jug in his head.
That first album could get ponderous and pretentious at times, but the Elevators were getting better by getting weirder on Easter Everywhere. And on the fourth and final album, the third member of their singing/songwriting team, Stacy Sutherland, took over from Erikson and Hall and launched them in another new direction, flirting with Grateful Dead-style jams. Before that, though, in truly bizarre Elevators fashion, they released Elevators Live!, which was not a live album, but did have a crowd edited into the tracks.
The Elevators had fallen apart by the end of the decade. They were beloved by their fans but didn’t sell very well. Erikson had myriad issues and Hall was questioning whether music was the career for him. But they stretched rock & roll in a lot of directions, and are still revered in Texas and by fans of psychedelia. Had the original lineup been able to stay together, who knows where they might have gone next?
THE VELVET UNDERGROUND – 1967-1970 (4 albums)
As much as I would like to, I cannot make the claim that the Velvet Underground was the greatest rock & roll band of all time. They just weren’t around long enough. But the famous Brian Eno quote about their impact remains as important today as ever. “The first Velvet Underground album only sold 30,000 copies, but everyone who bought one ended up forming their own band.”
The VU had an oversized impact on many facets of rock & roll. Their front man, Lou Reed, expanded the lyrical universe of what a rock song could cover by leaps and bounds. Heroin addiction and sadomasochistic sex were just two of the subjects he covered on their sensational debut, The Velvet Underground and Nico. Reed observed the darker side of his environment and wrote pop songs about it.
Meanwhile, John Cale was pushing the bounds of musicianship at the same time, knifing his electric violin through the songs and experimenting with what kinds of sounds an electric guitar could create. Their drummer broke down barriers by merely existing. All-boy rock bands didn’t have girl drummers until Maureen Tucker showed that they, in fact, could. With Andy Warhol initially managing them (he created the iconic Banana cover on the first album), they were expanding the very nature of performance in their live shows.
The Velvets played noise rock and art rock, psychedelia, and basic pop rock with equal elan. Reed could write heartbreakingly beautiful ballads as well. Unfortunately, he didn’t play with others very well. He fired Warhol first. Then he booted Cale. Cale was replaced by Doug Yule, who played an important role in the two final albums.
The last one produced two of their biggest hits – “Rock and Roll” and “Sweet Jane.” They are both impossibly catchy rock songs. But Reed needed to move on. There was one more album released by the Velvet Underground a few years later, but it was really just a Doug Yule solo project. It paled in comparison. Reed and Cale would team up a couple of decades later to produce a tribute album after Warhol’s death. Songs for Drella suggests that there was a lot more ground the Velvets might have covered had they remained together.