The Mystery Trend

The Mystery Trend's name has proved appropriate in defining their fate. They were a band that lots of rock music scholars have heard of -- mentioned in lots of essays about San Francisco in the mid-'60s -- but never heard. Even the Charlatans, another Bay Area band that barely made it out of the starting gate where records were concerned, are better known, by virtue of their music having bounced in and out of print from various sources over the past 34 years. The Mystery Trend never recorded much professionally, and a lot of what they did was in the realm of works-in-progress, rather than finished pieces of music. The group's other big problem was that their sound wasn't too much in sync with the music most people associate with mid-'60s San Francisco. They started out doing R&B based dance music, then gravitated toward the Beatles, the Kinks, the Zombies, and Bob Dylan, but they never really sounded like any other band. In contrast to the Charlatans, the Grateful Dead, and the Jefferson Airplane, they preferred tight song structures. For all of their associations with San Francisco in the '60s, the Mystery Trend had their roots in old-style rock & roll, R&B, and dance music. Ron Nagle hailed from the city by the bay and was a serious R&B enthusiast, especially where Ray Charles was concerned -- he played the piano and was heavily influenced by everything that he heard in Charles' early-'60s sound. While studying at San Francisco State College in the early '60s, he hooked up with Larry Bennett, who shared the same interests. Nagle -- who'd majored in art -- was teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute when the British Invasion hit America, and while he was serious enough about R&B to keep the Beatles at arm's length, he did see an opportunity. The British rock &...