(This feature/cover story originally appeared in the SF Weekly.)

Open up just about any popular book on ’60s rock music, and the story of how the “San Francisco sound” developed will unfold something like this: In the spring of 1965, the Byrds, a group of Los Angeles folkies merging the sound of the Beatles and the lyricism of Bob Dylan, released an electrified version of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.” With its 12-string jangle, reverb-drenched production, and soaring harmonies, the tune shot straight up the charts and in the process inspired hordes of folkie bohemians throughout the Bay Area (and all across America) to trade in their acoustic guitars for electric axes, including members of an old-timey country-folk outfit by the name of the Charlatans, the musicians credited most often as the visionaries who forged San Francisco folk-rock.

But I have an alternative theory, a kind of forgotten history (especially here in the Bay Area) wherein the aesthetic foundation for the San Francisco sound — the moody, atmospheric, minor-key vibrations created by such Haight-Ashbury heads as the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Moby Grape, and Blackburn & Snow — was actually laid six months earlier, by a band most of you have probably never heard of.

It was the fall of 1964. Looking for new talent to sign to their small label, Autumn Records, two now-legendary S.F. DJs, Tom “Big Daddy” Donahue and Bob “The Mighty Mitch” Mitchell, along with their young producer, Sylvester Stewart (later to become Sly Stone), headed down to a club called the Morocco Room in San Mateo to catch a popular young quintet consisting of three young men from the city — singer Sal Valentino, guitarist and composer Ron Elliott, and drummer John Petersen — as well as Oakland native Ron Meagher on bass and an Irishman by the name of Declan Mulligan on guitar. The band called itself the Beau Brummels, a phrase denoting an excessively well-dressed person, a fop.

Now, the club’s owner, Rich Romanello, was the group’s manager, and he had taken the Brummels down to Hollywood earlier that fall to cut a demo at the famed Gold Star Studios (the home of Phil Spector and the Beach Boys). But despite the group’s Anglophilic moniker and a repertoire sprinkled with several Beatles tunes, the formative Brummels sound heard on this three-song demo feels more rooted in American soil than Liverpudlian, as the tight harmonies and country-rock swing of the Everly Brothers’ hits from the early ’60s (“Cathy’s Clown,” in particular) resonate throughout. According to Al Hazan, who produced the demo, “I never thought of the Brummels in terms of the Beatles” — more on this in a second — “it was Ron Elliott’s talent as a songwriter that caused me to want to produce them.” Indeed, “People Are Cruel,” the gem of the demo and a rather intricate pop number for a 19-year-old to have composed, exudes a somber, almost desperate tone, which is all the more enhanced by Valentino’s quivering, country and western-informed croon.

Thus, Donahue and Mitchell found exactly what they were looking for: a polished, professional-sounding group with great songwriting that, if marketed properly, would allow these DJs to cash in on Beatlemania. And that’s exactly what they proceeded to do, with a speed and efficiency typical of shrewd business types who know that cash cows need to be milked as quickly and thoroughly as possible.

Within a matter of weeks, Donahue and Mitchell signed the Brummels to Autumn (eventually supplanting Romanello as their manager), pulled them from the Morocco Room, relocated them to DJ’s (their club in North Beach), and whisked these young men into Coast Recorders (on Bush Street) with a nascent Sly Stone as their producer. By January 1965, Donahue and Mitchell had dressed the Brummels in matching, faux-Beatles suits and were spreading rumors that the group was indeed from the United Kingdom. Shortly thereafter, the Elliott-penned “Laugh Laugh,” the first American single to really nail the folk-rock aesthetic, climbed to No. 15 on Billboard, and the Brummels — while the Byrds were still in the studio recording their version of “Mr. Tambourine Man” — emerged as bona fide American teen idols, complete with sexually charged little girls screaming and chasing after them; appearances on American Bandstand, Shindig, and Hullabaloo; sold-out concerts at the Cow Palace and the San Jose Civic Auditorium (with the Beach Boys); cameos in such trashy teen flicks as Wild Wild Winter and Village of the Giants; and an animated spot as the “Beau Brummelstones” on The Flintstones.

And herein lies the reason their tale is forgotten history. How could any manager-groomed pop group appearing on The Flintstones be taken seriously as a folk-rock pioneer when the mythical narrative of ’60s folk-rock is based upon a central theme — hip folkies turning electric and transforming mindless Top 40 pap for teenagers into groundbreaking modern music for smart, college-educated young adults? The Brummels’ image, regardless of how good the group was musically, didn’t fit that narrative, while the Byrds’ did, despite the fact that only a single Byrd actually played an instrument on “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Combine the image problem with a slew of managerial and promotional blunders, and you’ve got a trailblazing band whose time in the spotlight was markedly short, though it did go on to create some of the most inspired music of the ’60s, recordings on a par with anything made by the Kinks or the Beatles. It’s a tragic yet illuminating situation that calls into question the whole mythology of the ’60s, a decade revered as a time when artistic innovation and popular taste coincided.

***

On the northeastern tip of Sacramento, in a modest prefab condo complex that sits not too far from the Capital City Freeway, a Wonder Bread factory, and McClellan Air Force Base, Sal Valentino shuffles a stack of CD-Rs, searching for a burn of some old 45. When he finds the right disc, Valentino slips it into his Bose Acoustic Wave sound system and starts scanning the first few notes of each track. His left index finger pokes the forward search button in rapid succession while his right hand, tucked inside the pocket of his baggy sweat pants, clutches a Zippo, the lid of which his fingers nervously flip open and shut, open and shut, open and shut.

“Here it is. Van Dyke [Parks] and Lenny [Waronker] produced this single,” he explains before a simple, blues-inflected piano and dreamy orchestral touches sweep through the living room. After several bars, Valentino’s expressive baritone — swathed in reverb — fills out a mildly psychedelic sound collage teetering on the edge of moody supper-club balladry and celestial country-pop. Possessing a dramatic vibrato, Valentino’s croon is one of the most individual instruments to emerge from the ’60s. Faint traces of Dylan, Elvis, Roger Miller, and even Dean Martin can be detected, but it has no concrete precedent. However, as is true of all these singers, Valentino (an authentic North Beach-bred Italian-American, born Salvatore Willard Spaminato) is a master stylist, curling his emotions around each little note and negotiating every turn of phrase with a cultivated flair. “At one point,” Valentino continues, “Lenny wanted to put a band together of me, Lenny, Randy [Newman], [Ron] Elliott, and Van Dyke. Hal Blaine was the drummer. Randy’s suggestion for the name of the band was the White Boys’ Blues Band, which is very funny because I am now surrounded by white-boy blues bands.” Valentino chuckles at an irony only he can fully appreciate.

“Friends and Lovers” — the stunning pop tune wafting out of Valentino’s speakers — went nowhere. Recorded in 1970, not too long after the demise of the Brummels, the Valentino solo single was released by Warner Bros., and what should have been a monster hit (it’s that great) plunged into obscurity. Valentino was all too familiar with such a demoralizing outcome. From 1966 to ’68, after scoring two Top 20 hits in 1965 (the aforementioned “Laugh Laugh” and the Top 10 smash “Just a Little”), the Beau Brummels moved to Warner Bros. and released some seriously beautiful and innovative pop music, but every last one of the group’s records for the label died a swift, quiet death, including Triangle, a pastoral psych-pop epic, and the band’s swan song, Bradley’s Barn, a collection of what feels like rural-flavored Broadway show tunes that’s considered a pioneering exploration into country-rock.

But while mainstream rock ‘n’ roll history has canonized the folk- and acid-rock bands of the Haight-Ashbury scene, it has marginalized the Brummels’ rich discography, regarding the musicians as two-hit wonders who were nothing more than “Beatles knock offs,” “Merseybeat from North Beach,” “the first American rock band influenced by the Beatles,” and, as San Francisco Chronicle pop-music critic Joel Selvin wrote just last Thursday in an article on Valentino, “San Francisco’s answer to the British Invasion.” As Rock Scully, the Grateful Dead’s first manager, put it in his book with David Dalton, Living With the Dead, the Brummels were “Beatles clones.”

“Yeah, I felt alienated, but that’s a strong word,” Valentino says. “I remember going to the Fillmore from time to time. I was envious of it. But we weren’t a part of [that scene], and it wasn’t us at all.”

Relaxing in a brown leather chair, feet draped over a matching brown ottoman and arms folded behind a head of salt-and-pepper hair, Valentino would just as soon not discuss his former band. These days he maintains the Brummels’ official Web site and plays the occasional oldies festival as a solo act. But Valentino also believes that he’s spent enough time over the years dwelling on the Brummels’ commercial failures. He prefers discussing his next band, Stoneground, whose hippie-fried rock revue was embraced by the heads of ’70s San Francisco far more than the well-crafted pop of the Brummels. He also raps about his upcoming gig at this year’s South by Southwest music festival and two newly released discs: Dreamin’ Man (a collaboration with former Stoneground guitarist John Blakeley) and Come Out Tonight. Each title is a polished assortment of classic-sounding pop-rock, slow-burn meditations on love, and sturdy roots-rock. It’s not groundbreaking music, but both discs are solid evidence that Valentino is a serious talent who still wants to write and perform new music.

“What Elliott taught me in the Brummels was to always do something new, always keep moving,” Valentino says to me, referring to Ron Elliott, the Brummels’ central artistic force and “genius” composer. “Over the years, I would deliver flowers. I would deliver phone books and stuff like that. But I’m not trained to do anything. There is nothing I can do — just music.”

Regardless of the hard times, Valentino’s “always keep moving” outlook is palpable. But there are brief moments when the vocalist’s charming smile disappears and his face takes on a dejected, questioning look. When this happens, he’s recalling the disappointment he felt in 1966 when the Brummels’ “greatest” single, “Two Days ‘Til Tomorrow,” failed to chart. He’s wondering why Warner Bros. didn’t properly promote the group in 1967 and ’68. He’s wishing the Brummels had sold “a few more records.” He’s defiantly stating that the Brummels should be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Behind this line of thinking is a single question that has lingered in the back of Valentino’s mind since the Brummels drifted apart in 1969: Why isn’t my band recognized for all the great music it made in the ’60s?

***

“We tricked the whole audience into thinking they were a British band,” Carl Scott, the Brummels’ tour manager, is quoted as saying in the liner notes to Magic Hollow, Rhino Records’ immaculately packaged quadruple-CD box set released last spring. And indeed they did. Throughout 1965, Big Daddy and the Mighty Mitch’s showbiz chicanery helped sell the Brummels to a frenzied nation of wigged-out teeny-boppers craving the next big thing after the Mop Tops. In late ’65, with the Brummels’ hit records and incessant touring bringing money into Autumn, Donahue and Mitchell expanded their local roster, adding three new groups from the budding Haight-Ashbury scene that all played a fusion of rock and folk not too dissimilar from — if far more rudimentary and archaic than — the Brummels’ own.

The first was none other than the so-called originator of the San Francisco sound, the Charlatans, a kind of electrified jug band. The second outfit was the Great Society (featuring a young vocalist named Grace Slick, a former debutante); this act was the only one of the three to release a single for the label. And the third was the Emergency Crew, whose name within a matter of months would morph into the Warlocks, and then, finally, the Grateful Dead. In November 1965, the proto-Dead recorded a six-song demo consisting of snappy garage-folk at Golden State Recorders on Harrison Street, where the Brummels were busy tracking demos and working on a third full-length. With such pieces as the soul-searching confessional “I Grow Old,” the atmospheric lament “Find a Place,” and “Darkness,” which featured stream-of-consciousness wordplay woven into a majestic tapestry of delicate acoustic guitar work, the Brummels’ music was clearly developing at an accelerated clip.

But a third record for Autumn never materialized, because the label, despite the Brummels’ success, fell apart due to poor management. According to Elliott, Donahue’s attention span was short; he was always searching for the next big thing. And in one of the shittiest music-industry deals of the decade, Donahue (who died of a heart attack in 1975) sold the Brummels’ contract to Warner Bros. in the spring of 1966, but neglected to tell the label’s apparently ignorant executives that the deal did not include the group’s publishing rights or master recordings, which were, according to the Magic Hollow liner notes, “being held by Golden State [Recorders] until a lien against Mitchell and Donahue was satisfied. By the time the tapes were auctioned off, the band had moved on.” Thus, Warner Bros. acquired a group with an incredible record in the can — but it didn’t get the can. In fact, the label obtained not a single tune from the Brummels’ extensive catalog, which consisted of approximately 100 demos and outtakes, as well as two excellent full-lengths, Introducing the Beau Brummels and Volume 2. The latter contains the sullen ballad “You Tell Me Why,” a tune so prescient of the lush, melancholic vibe of early Jefferson Airplane that Marty Balin must have been digging it. (His people never responded to my inquiries.)

Compensating for this obvious blunder and wanting to put something on the market as swiftly as possible, Warner Bros. forced the Brummels to record an LP of popular cover tunes titled Brummels ’66. Containing versions of “Hang on Sloopy,” Paul Simon’s “Homeward Bound,” and Sonny Bono’s “Bang Bang,” it was a dreadful artistic and commercial misstep in a year that saw pop music radically redefined with the release of the Beatles’ Revolver, Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds.

As for Donahue, that savvy, sharp-dressed Top 40 DJ and entrepreneur who packaged the Brummels as a British import and then sold them off, by 1967 he would be “turning on, tuning in, and dropping out,” sporting gaudy tie-dye fashions, transforming San Francisco’s KMPX and then KSAN into two of America’s earliest underground FM stations, and declaring in the pages of Rolling Stone that “AM radio is dead and its rotting corpse is stinking up the airwaves.” He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996.

***

A dazzling sun warms the breezy ocean air outside the Elliott family home, a distinctly Californian stucco structure situated on a small street parallel to Junipero Serra Boulevard, just down the road from San Francisco State University, where Elliott majored in music before dropping out to pursue the Brummels full time.

But little of that golden sunshine penetrates the tightly drawn shades of the Elliotts’ basement-cum-recreation room, the place where “the Beaus began,” and where the family hasn’t updated the hep décor since the early ’60s. A vintage faux-tiki wet bar covered in dust stands in the corner. Rectangular lanterns constructed from plywood and translucent marigold-tinted plastic hang from the ceiling. The parquet floor is straight out of an Arthur Murray dance studio. On one wall hang framed portraits, one for each of the five original Brummels, and on another wall hangs a music industry certificate for the single “Just a Little” — a decorative anomaly considering Elliott firmly believes “the record business is run by tone-deaf shoe salesmen.”

He even writes off the Brummels’ Autumn-released material as a “bit thin” and “fun and simple, almost too simple” — critical views shaped by the revelatory fact that Elliott has never really dug rock ‘n’ roll. “I never listened to pop or rock ‘n’ roll other than if I was riding in a car with somebody listening to the radio,” he says from behind his large computer and home recording setup, which sits just across from that surreal wet bar.

What Elliott really dreamed of becoming — since age 11, around the time diabetes almost took his life — was a “theatrical writer” in the tradition of Tin Pan Alley, “doing musicals and film scores” like his hero, the early-20th-century composer Jerome Kern (Show Boat, Roberta, Ziegfeld Follies, et al.). But by the early ’60s Tin Pan Alley’s heyday had long since passed; rock ‘n’ roll, Motown, jazz, Kingston Trio-styled folk music, rhythm and blues, a little country and western, and a whole lot of Brill Building pop were the sounds dominating the Bay Area radio waves. So Elliott, a young man set on becoming a professional composer, modernized his tastes, applying his prodigious songwriting skills to crafting folksy, often countryish pop-rock. “I started writing more modern things because there was no access to big bands or orchestras,” he says.

“The Brummels were like a cast for Elliott,” Valentino had said a day earlier. And as poet Bob Durand, Elliott’s old college buddy and part-time lyricist, recently explained, “It was easy, if vexatious, for Ron to ‘dumb down’ his real musical desires and crank out pop songs. But even in those early songs you can hear hints of Elliott’s real musical skills. His melodies are beautiful, unique. His arrangements are imaginative and masterful. I’m guessing Ron thought he could use the money he was making off rock ‘n’ roll to buy himself time and opportunity to write the music he really wanted to be composing,” which is probably why Elliott, whose contempt for the music business is profound, grudgingly admits (as did Valentino) that Donahue played a vital role in the group’s early development.

“Well, Donahue did make the Brummels happen,” Elliott reveals. Although Elliott’s taken on the look of an eccentric hermit — sporting a hand-knit ski cap in 60-degree weather, a thick fleece pullover, an intricately designed sterling-silver bracelet, and leather sandals with white tube socks — his eyes still possess that deep, grave stare captured on those old, ring-worn LP sleeves. “But what Donahue did after making us happen was abandon us. He sold only the band to Warner Bros., and by the time Warner Bros. figured out what they didn’t get, we were basically a tax write-off. We never had any promotion, any publicity. The first thing they told us was, ‘Do Brummels ’66.’ So I attribute all of this to Donahue. But there is no doubt that without him we would have never made it at all.”

According to avant-garde pop composer and Warner Bros. recording artist Van Dyke Parks, Elliott’s criticism of the label’s publicity department is spot-on. “Warner Bros. employed a lot of promotional people who were interested in the successes of the past,” Parks tells me, “who were ill-prepared to be a part of the counterculture. In terms of promotion and so forth, a lot of artists got short shrift, and I’m sure the Beau Brummels did.”

However, unlike at Autumn, where Elliott’s more adventurous compositions were left off the group’s first two records (in the late ’90s, the specialty imprint Sundazed released a triple-CD box set of mind-blowing demos that had been gathering dust in Autumn’s vaults), Warner Bros. supported Elliott’s artistic growth, allowing him to begin working with theatrical-style music as well as larger ensembles. After relocating to Los Angeles in late 1966, the Brummels joined a small, progressive roster of songwriters and musicians that included Parks, Newman, the Everly Brothers, Ry Cooder, and rookie producer Lenny Waronker — all deeply dedicated to the very ’60s concept of expanding consciousness via sonic experimentation. But instead of attacking pop song structures through an acid-fueled, jam-oriented, high-volume fusion of rock, blues, folk, and free jazz — by 1967, the dominant mode of experimentation for counterculture bands — these refined, if rather “out there,” musicians worked together to enrich pop song structure, to give it emotional depth as well as compositional complexity. They did so through a well-crafted synthesis of American classical music, film score-inspired arrangements, Broadway show tunes, rock ‘n’ roll, folk, and country and western. The result was what Paul Williams, founder of Crawdaddy! (the first serious rock magazine of the ’60s), described to me as a “new wave of psychedelic Tin Pan Alley” — a tag that captures the essence of Valentino’s swirling, extravagant vocal delivery and the colorfully reverberating orchestral splendor of the 3-1/2-minute opus “Two Days ‘Til Tomorrow,” the Brummels’ third single for their new label and the first full blossoming of this new style.

“I think in terms of a play,” explains Elliott about his approach to songwriting. “You have light moments. You have happy moments. You have sad moments. You have all of it.” Then, for the first time during our interview, one of San Francisco’s great composers grows animated, excited. “Music is about our melodic ability to love — spiritual love.”

***

By the summer of 1967, the Brummels’ original lineup had been whittled down to just Elliott and Valentino. Mulligan and the group had long since parted ways, Petersen had split for a more successful pop outfit by the name of Harper’s Bizarre, and Meagher had been drafted into the Army shortly after the group began work on its 1967 concept album Triangle, a “mythological cartoon about love written from some weird spaces,” according to Elliott. With lyricist Durand, producer Waronker, and a small orchestra’s worth of instrumentation (strings, brass, woodwinds, harpsichord, and a slew of unique percussion), Elliott and Valentino, who were composing as a team for the first time since the Brummels’ inception, radically reworked traditional pop song structures from the ground up, crafting a mystical pop opera about a man’s journey through a “magic forest” consisting of 11 meticulously arranged vignettes exploding with impressionistic imagery.

According to Valentino — who answered my question “Was the group experimenting with psychedelics?” with “All of that, sort of…” — Triangle was partially inspired by several day trips he took to the Legion of Honor, where he spent time admiring the dark yet incandescent hues emanating from the museum’s collection of Flemish portraits and landscape paintings from the 17th century. Indeed, smoking a joint and roaming the halls of that 80-year-old replica of a neoclassical French palace and the gorgeous natural landscape framing it (which I gladly did as “background research”) elicits the same dramatic blend of fantasy, antiquity, and nature that courses through this record.

Having said that, the compositions that make up Triangle — and, to an even greater extent, the songs of the Brummels’ next and final record, the more rustic Bradley’s Barn — are radically modern. As a fellow record nerd recently pointed out with astonishment when I played him “Lower Level,” the obscure Brummels B-side recorded shortly after the release of Triangle, “This is like house music or something.” Now, that sounds like a far-out comment because this isn’t proto-electronic dance music or anything of the sort; the Brummels used very little electric instrumentation, much less the trippy studio wizardry that was de rigueur during the age of acid rock. And outside of Waronker’s subtle use of reverb on Valentino’s vocals, Triangle and Bradley’s Barn exude an organic and acoustic feel, the latter even featuring a “guitar orchestra” of five seasoned Nashville session musicians (the same ones Dylan employed for John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline). So what my buddy was focusing on were the distinctive song structures that Elliott and Valentino constructed. As with film scores built from sequences of finely honed suites and movements, Elliott’s work dispensed with the verse-chorus-verse template common to most pop music. But Elliott also blended melody, harmony, and rhythm while adding a touch of syncopation, which is rock ‘n’ roll’s primary influence upon his songwriting: “Rhythm, syncopation, they’re the same in my book. They are both a part of the composition.” Emerging from these bold design moves are cinematic pop songs built from multiple, finely arranged layers of percussive melodies and countermelodies, which playfully dance around one another in a faint yet palpable geometric fashion (kind of like the music in a player piano or a music box), which is similar to how modern digital dance-oriented pop music unfolds. Every instrument contributes melody and rhythm simultaneously.

Elliott and Waronker (with assistance from Parks and Newman) applied these concepts to the Everly Brothers’ 1968 country-rock concept album Roots, a collection of wistful Americana that Elliott arranged into a dreamy sound collage. And Elliott was also a key studio musician playing guitar on Parks’ mind-bending debut for Warner Bros., Song Cycle (a record highly revered by numerous modern electronic composers), as well as on Newman’s LPs from the late ’60s and early ’70s, idiosyncratic marriages of Fats Domino’s smooth piano-led rock ‘n’ roll and Broadway show tunes.

But despite numerous critical accolades, this “new wave of psychedelic Tin Pan Alley” was an unqualified commercial bust, for which Warner Bros. is to blame only to a certain extent. You see, the Brummels were in a precarious position in 1967 and ’68 (similar to but on a much smaller scale than the Beach Boys’ situation after the release of Pet Sounds). Their music was advanced, complex pop that had become way too weird for the mainstream AM-pop audience that originally made “Laugh Laugh” and “Just a Little” national hits. As one L.A. fan from back in the day recently said to me, “With Triangle and Bradley’s Barn, the Beau Brummels got total artistic control, and they kind of went off the deep end,” which means the only listeners open enough to really get what the Brummels were up to were the freaky hippies of Haight-Ashbury and beyond. But those guys were not nearly as freethinking and free from superficial labels as history has led us to believe: Remember, the Brummels were considered Top 40 “Beatles clones.” And to be an American act branded Top 40 during what old Joel Selvin zealously describes in the book It Happened in Monterey as “a transformation in music as the 45 rpm format was broken and pop music became a rock revolution… when Top 40 died and underground (FM) radio was born” was to be consigned to the losing side of a larger cultural battle. As that quintessential hippie chick Michelle Phillips once stated, summing up the attitude that pervaded the underground, “If you didn’t get invited to the Festival, there was something wrong.”

***

When I was a teenager falling in love with Pet Sounds, my mother told me this funny story. In 1967, she was a tall, gorgeous model, actress, and authentic “Copa Girl” living in New York. She had good taste in music and couldn’t get enough of the Beach Boys’ new single, “Good Vibrations.” So she headed over to some hip West Village record store and bought a copy. When the ultrahip record store clerk manning the cash register eyeballed that photograph of the Beach Boys on the picture sleeve, he decided to have a little fun. With outstretched arms like teetering airplane wings, he feigned imbalance like a surfer riding a massive wave as he said to my mom in a faux-surfer dude accent, “Whooooaaaa, the Beach Boys. Far out. Surf music is cool. Hang 10.” Well, in 2006, the reputations of “Good Vibrations” and Pet Sounds far eclipse that of the once cutting-edge music of Selvin’s “rock revolution.” (Who the hell still listens to Country Joe & the Fish?) So maybe modern San Francisco should make up for all those Haight-Ashbury heads who, during their heyday, behaved like that elitist, deluded record store clerk and finally invite the Beau Brummels to the Festival, because they are, without question, one of this city’s greatest and most forgotten musical treasures.