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Like many bands, the Beau Brummels started out playing the hits they were hearing on the radio. Eventually, they came to the attention of local disc jockeys Tom Donahue and Bob Mitchell, who signed them to their Autumn Records label in 1964.
At Autumn, the Brummels’ first album was produced by Sylvester Stewart, aka Sly Stone, then a disc jockey at Oakland radio station KSO.

"Sly was great to work with. He was younger than I was, but he could play a lot of different things. He was one of the first guys we met that played drums, bass, guitar and he sang," Valentino said. "When we first went in the studio, we were probably pretty nervous about it. We were mild mannered guys trying to do this as perfectly as we could. He loosened things up a bit and took the initiative to make it more like a party thing rather than like a classroom. Sly was fascinated with my voice and had me sing on some other things he was working on."

Valentino noted that even with Ron Elliott’s obvious talent for composition and performing, the working relationship with Stewart was never less than positive.

"Elliott was pretty reclusive even then, because of his diabetes, which he’s had since he was 11,” Valentino said. “Everything he was exposed to musically came through me or Declan, or the radio. But he was always studying composing. Technically, Ron was real sound. Sly might have had some suggestions on arranging, but we pretty much came to the studio with the arrangements intact."

The Elliott-penned "Laugh, Laugh" was a breakthrough hit for the Beau Brummels, reaching the top 20 nationally at a very competitive time. Years later, “Laugh, Laugh” was selected by the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame as one of the genre’s 500 most influential songs and was included on Rhino’s Nuggets box set of artifacts of the first psychedelic garage-rock era (1965-68).

Appearances on “American Bandstand,” “Shindig,” “Hullabaloo” and other variety shows soon followed, interwoven within a whirlwind schedule. The San Francisco quintet gained eternal fame when they made a guest appearance on an episode of ABC's prime-time cartoon hit, “The Flintstones,” that served as a cross-plug for another ABC show, “Shindig.”

For the appearance, they were called The Beau Brummelstones.

"Hanna-Barbera wanted to do that. I was thrilled and I was real happy with it,” Valentino said. “Of all the things we did, I'm most happy that we got to do that. I think they were going to do a series of bands, I don't know if they were all going to do the ‘Shindig/Shinrock’ thing, but it was neat. I still like seeing it."

The Zombies and folk-influenced "Just A Little" was the Beau Brummels’ biggest hit, reaching No. 8 in Billboard.

"Just A Little took a long time to get. 'Laugh, Laugh' just seemed to be there," he said. "'Just A Little,' to Tom and Bob, seemed a lot more important. We needed that follow-up. We tried it with Declan and I singing lead, and some other different ways."

Mulligan, a native of Ireland, brought an interesting element to the otherwise laid back Beau Brummels. One thing that struck Valentino, and the rest of the Brummels, was Mulligan's intensity.

"Declan told stories about being in bands in Ireland where they would go out and have a fight, then go back on stage and play together. We couldn't imagine that at all,” Valentino said. “We found that was true for the English bands we played with that I'm sure had fist fights before they went on stage - the Kinks, the Yardbirds, Them, the Animals - they were fiery. They drank more than us. I don't think any of the Brummels drank when we had hit records. It was a different world than we ever imagined."

The Zombies and folk-influenced "Just A Little" was the Beau Brummels’ biggest hit, reaching No. 8 in Billboard, followed by a short string of minor, regional-type hits.

What should have been a plum career move turned into a disaster. When Autumn Records began experiencing financial problems, it sold the Beau Brummels’ contract to Warner Brothers in 1966. Unfortunately, Donahue and Mitchell sold the back catalog to another party, and the publishing went somewhere else --and those were the two elements of the purchase that WB wanted more than the band itself.

Their first album for Warners was Beau Brummels ’66, an album of cover songs by a band that was, by now, used to writing its own material.

“We had started a third album after Volume 2, but they thought they could work with that better at their level,” Valentino said. "I was thrilled to do those songs, but Elliott wasn't. It was the one time Elliott and Don Irving played together on record and they really played well together.

"Elliott was bummed out and I don't blame him in a way. What he wrote was what he was about."

As the band began to unravel, the next two recording projects would provide Elliott and Valentino with their most noteworthy efforts for Warner Brothers – Triangle and Bradley’s Barn. The producer was a young staffer named Lenny Waronker, son of Liberty Records president Sy Waronker.

“Lenny was real serious, not that Sly wasn’t. But Lenny was much more intense,” Valentino remembered. “He was real loyal and dedicated to us. He really liked working with us.”

Triangle was one of the first true progressive concept albums. Bradley’s Barn, named after the Nashville studio owned by Owen Bradley, is considered a pioneering effort in country rock that predates similar efforts by the Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers.

“We never got a hit record out of all the work we did with Lenny, but we did get Triangle and Bradley’s Barn, which are considered pretty exceptional for the time,” Valentino said. “I don’t remember that we were the first to go to Nashville and come out with something different, but I was really glad we came away without the steel guitar sounds and other stuff everybody else did.”

A residual effect of being on Warner Brothers was getting to work with legends like the Everly Brothers. Elliott arranged the Everlys’ Roots album and wrote “Empty Boxes” and “Ventura Boulevard” for them.

“They were a big influence on me,” Valentino said. “Phil Everly actually produced a demo for me with three of his songs. When I met him, I went to his house, I was sitting in front of a roll-top desk and he was playing one of those black Gibson Everly Brothers guitars and singing me these songs and asking me if I like them. He’s singing like a goddam bird and I’m thinking, ‘What am I doing here? This guy’s killing me!’ I did no singing for about a week. I went home and got my stuff together.”

Valentino later worked a succession of jobs ranging from warehouse work to being a parimutuel clerk at a Ventura racetrack, where, in 1993, a freak back injury forced him to go on disability with a herniated disc in his lower spine. Gradually, he became interested in singing again, and hooked up with an oldies tour coordinated by Donnie Brooks, best known for his one hit from 1960, “Mission Bell.”

It was on a trip to Reno in 1994 to perform in one of those concerts that Valentino found himself detoured into staying in Sacramento, where he met and married his wife, Catherine. He enthusiastically looks forward to what lies ahead, whether it’s a Beau Brummels gig or his latest dates with the Sal Valentino Band.

"I'm still glad to be in a band as a singer, whatever band it is," he said.

Next weekend in his home town, that band is the Beau Brummels. For other equally interesting endeavors, watch your local listings.