The Company They Kept

Chris Farlowe always seemed destined for great things as a singer – and based on the company he kept on-stage and the people he worked with in the mid-'60s, he did succeed, at least on that level. Born John Henry Deighton in Islington, North London, in 1940, he reached his early teens just as the skiffle boom was breaking in England, and was inspired by Lonnie Donegan to enter music. His first band was his own John Henry Skiffle Group, where he played guitar as well as sang, but he gave up playing to concentrate on his voice, as he made the switch to rock & roll. He eventually took the name Chris Farlowe, the surname appropriated from American jazz guitarist Tal Farlow, and was fronting a group called the Thunderbirds, as Chris Farlowe & the Thunderbirds. They built their reputation as a live act in England and Germany, and slowly switched from rock & roll to R&B during the early years of the '60s. Their debut single, "Air Travel," released in 1962, failed to chart, but the following year, Chris Farlowe & the Thunderbirds (whose ranks included future star guitarist Albert Lee) were signed to EMI's Columbia imprint, through which they issued a series of five singles thru 1966, all of which got enthusiastic critical receptions while generating poor sales.

The Sunshine Company's very name summons the spirit of the mini-genre of 1960s pop-rock that, long after its heyday, was named sunshine pop. So does their music, with the requisite exquisite multi-part male-female harmonies, buoyant optimism, and luxuriant late-1960s L.A. studio production. Look a little under the surface, though, and you find tinges of eccentric melancholy that set them apart from many of the frothy Mamas and the Papas-like groups of the period. Just as their music was more multi-dimensional than you might be led to believe by their trio of Top 100 hits, so was their story more complex than many would imagine. Could there have been any other band whose brief career whisked them through the orbits of the Carpenters, the Fifth Dimension, Jackson Browne, the Jefferson Airplane, Mary McCaslin, and John Davidson, ending at the even unlikelier destination of a pre-stardom Gregg Allman?

Commercial motion pictures were invented at the Edison Laboratory between 1888 and 1893. They were actually a system of inventions: a camera, a viewing machine (the peep-hole kinetoscope), and equipment for printing, sprocket punching, and the developing of long strands of film.