The Au Go-Go Singers

Chances are the Au Go-Go Singers wouldn't rate this entry, or the reissue of their one and only completed album on CD in the 1990s, if not for the fact that it was as members of that short-lived group that Stephen Stills and Richie Furay first formally hooked up together. Additionally, the Au Go-Go Singers provided the indirect basis upon which Stills was first seen and heard by Neil Young. The nine-member group's existence came about almost by accident, by way of a failed attempt at producing an Off-Off-Broadway show. Texas-born Stephen Stills and Ohio-born Richie Furay had begun playing around Greenwich Village in early 1964, a period when their rivals and colleagues included the likes of Zal Yanovsky, John Sebastian, Fred Neil, Tom Paxton, Cass Elliot, and Denny Doherty. All of those others, to one degree or another, seemed to have, or be close to having, some serious irons in the fire as far as their possible careers, while Stills and Furay were still playing coffeehouses without any special direction, along with Furay's college classmates Bob Harmelink and Nels Gustafson. By sheer chance, they were spotted by a songwriter and would-be impressario named Ed E. Miller, who'd previously enjoyed considerable success with a song of his called "Don't Let the Rain Come Down," which had become a major hit in the hands of the Serendipity Singers. It was Miller who put Stills, Furay, Harmelink, and Gustafson together with the four members of another, more established group, the Bay Singers -- consisting of Mike Scott, Roy Michaels, Fred Geiger, and Jean Gurney -- and added Michaels' girlfriend Kathy King, to create a nonet. The group didn't have a name, but it had a gig in July of 1964, in a revue devised by Miller called America Sings, which attempted to chronicle the...