Music Reissues Weekly: American Baroque - Chamber Pop and Beyond 1967-1971

The descending refrain opening the song isn’t unusual but attention is instantly attracted as it’s played on a harpsichord. Equally instantly, an elegiac atmosphere is set. The voice, coming in just-short of the 10-second mark, is similarly yearning in tone. The song’s opening lyrics convey dislocation: “You and I travel to the beat of a different drum.”

“Different Drum,” the September 1967 single by an outfit dubbed Stone Poneys Featuring Linda Ronstadt, was immediate, had a country edge and was written by Mike Nesmith – then best known as a member of The Monkees. The band had already issued a couple of folk-pop singles simply credited as Stone Poneys, neither of which had clicked with record buyers. Third time out on 45, and after a middling-selling debut album, Stone Poneys went Top 20 in the US singles chart.

In the booklet coming with the compilation American Baroque - Chamber Pop and Beyond 1967-1971, Ronstadt is quoted saying “I didn’t like the record very much. I still don’t like it very much, but I don’t care – it kept me eating for a long time.” However, lots of people did like the record and doubtless liked its unusual, diverting arrangement. Tune in to oldies radio in the States and it won’t be long before “Different Drum” crops up. Presumably, this is the point Ronstadt reaches for the off switch.

The style to which “Different Drum” cleaves became known as baroque pop. This is the sea in which American Baroque swims. It is compiled by author and Saint Etienne band member Bob Stanley. In his text he says this is “a sound that was soft but insistently sad,” and goes on to assert that “the heyday of baroque pop – or chamber pop, or orchestral pop – ran from 1966 to the turn of the ’70s. It used string quartets, harpsichords and woodwinds to create a summer-into-autumn melancholy that was quite new, and quite far removed from rock ’n’ roll as Eddie Cochran would have known it.”

Over its 24 tracks, American Baroque showcases as radical a reconfiguring of the pop template as those pursued by the era’s psychedelic voyagers, the beards-and-denim back-to-the-roots musical prospectors and the dealers in heavy. This was pop though, so not as cool as any of these. It was also a form of pop related to and often subsumed within yet distinct from harmony pop or soft rock. The Association, heard here, fit the latter billing but they regularly – and equally comfortably – leapt into the baroque bag.

The roots of this tendency, as Stanley notes, were in the music of the UK’s The Zombies and their agenda-setting first single “She’s Not There.” They didn’t, at least initially, accommodate flutes, a harpsichord or strings but The Zombies’ attitude and structural architecture heavily informed what is on American Baroque. Next up in the time line are The Beatles: the harpsichord sound-alike piano of “In my Life,” the strings-and-voice only “Eleanor Rigby.” The Rolling Stones were at it too: see “Lady Jane.” The Kinks as well, with “‘Too Much on my Mind." All this UK pop action taking it from 1964 into 1966.

America was looking to the UK at this time, but early in the period fewer records fit the bill. There’s the February 1963 Everly Brothers B-side “Nancy's Minuet,” a primary signifier. Maybe also some of Roy Orbison’s sonic dramas and the filigreed propensities of The Byrds’ Gene Clark (his earliest solo work too). But focus arrived in summer 1966 with Artie Butler’s important chamber-string arrangements for Tim Hardin’s debut album, released that July. A month earlier, in June 1966, “Walk Away Renée” the first single by The Left Banke had gone on sale.

Of this critical record, Stanley explains “In New York, classically trained keyboard player, Michael Brown, was paying close attention to ‘She’s Not There.’ He formed a band called The Left Banke by hijacking an existing one called The Morticians, and then brought in his father, an arranger called Harry Lookofsky, to oversee their first single. The other players’ skills were rudimentary, so Lookofsky focused on Brown's harpsichord and a string quartet. ‘Walk Away Renée,’ with no noticeable guitars, was the first bona-fide baroque pop hit, peaking at #5 in the Billboard Hot 100 at the end of 1966.”

Counter-intuitively, The Left Banke themselves – “the fountainhead for American baroque pop,” as Stanley puts it – are not present on American Baroque. No matter as there is, though, their songwriter Michael Brown’s post Banke-outfit Montage with the wonderful “I Shall Call Her Mary” (1968) and the equally brilliant “Two by Two (I'm Losing You)," a 1971 single credited to original Left Banke singer Steve Martin. Whatever its billing, this was actually a Left Banke reunion recording featuring, alongside Martin, the band’s Brown (who wrote and produced the single), as well as Left Banke alumni George Cameron and Tom Finn.

Much of what’s on American Baroque is what might be anticipated by already committed fans of the genre. As such, it is an introduction which has been necessary, one teasing-out this strand from what has been long celebrated on the long-running and wider-focussed Fading Yellow series of compilations. The baroque-pop excursions by The Blades Of Grass, Eternity's Children, J.K. & Co, H.P. Lovecraft, The Merry-Go-Round, Tom Northcott and The Pleasure Fair are not a surprise but there is deep digging too. Contributions by Chris & Peter Allen, The Common People, the Harry Nilsson-backed John Randolph Marr and The Monkees (with a contemporaneously shelved version of “Mr Webster”) are unfamiliar. This is more than a primer.

In that spirit, the remarkable, genuinely disturbing, ur-goth “Emily's Illness” by Woody’s daughter, Nora Guthrie. “I’m know I’m not well, but it doesn’t frighten me anymore,” she intones in a detached, glass-like voice. “I think I’ll die soon,” a defeated Nora declares. Add in Nico’s frosty, Jackson Browne co-penned “The Fairest of the Seasons,” from her 1967 debut album Chelsea Girl, and it’s clear this particular reading of what constitutes American baroque encompasses the chilly, the cobwebbed, the creepy. American Baroque - Chamber Pop and Beyond 1967-1971 is mandatory listening.

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