Shindig! #175 – New Colony Six
Ray Graffia Jr grew up one street north of Elmwood Park, sang Beatles songs to screaming schoolgirls, shared a California two-flat with Paul Revere & The Raiders before either band had made it, and helped launch Chicago’s homegrown rock revolution.
THE NEW COLONY SIX were never quite punk enough for the garage purists nor soft enough for the easy-listening crowd, but across the second half of the ’60s they built one of the strangest and most revealing catalogues in Midwestern pop: part teen-club rave-up, part church-hall harmony, part baroque heartbreak.
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The New Colony Six’s first breakthrough came in precisely that context. Passed over by Columbia and Dick Clark, they were rescued by family initiative. Graffia’s father, with support from other parents, financed early studio work and helped establish the group’s own label, Centaur, later respelled Sentar. This kind of parental micro-capital is one of the hidden engines of American garage-rock: not moguls but dads who believed, or at least hoped, enough to underwrite an acetate. Their debut single, ‘I Confess’, became a major local hit in Chicago and cracked the national Hot 100 in ’66. Its success fed into the first LP, Breakthrough, and gave the group exactly the kind of local legitimacy that could make a regional band feel, for a moment, as significant as any national act.
Richie Unterberger’s description of their early sound as “a poppier American Them” is useful so long as it does not flatten the band’s own peculiarities. Yes, there was prominent organ, rave-up energy and the usual garage-band abrasion. But the interview with Graffia keeps pulling the story somewhere more distinctive. Unlike some of their tougher contemporaries, The New Colony Six were built on harmony thinking as much as attack. Graffia cites The Everly Brothers, doo-wop and pre-Beatles vocal groups as major influences; the band’s arrangements, he says, often used more sophisticated chords and a stronger group presentation than many early peers, with fewer grandstanding solos. That helps explain why even their rougher records often feel curiously mannered, as if church-basement choral instincts were tugging against fuzz-box rowdiness. They were a garage band, yes, but a garage band with grammar-school discipline and a family-singalong memory bank.
That duality runs through the early albums. Breakthrough and Colonization are usually filed under Chicago garage, and not incorrectly. They contain the teenage ache, bright organ colours and nervous momentum the term promises. But they also display a band already half-tempted away from brute-force rave-ups toward more intricate, melodically generous forms. Graffia says there was “no real story” behind the albums beyond having enough material to fill them, which is revealing in itself. These were not self-conscious capital-A Album statements. They were accumulations: singles, stage-tested songs, imagined and real-life stories, most of them about girls. As Graffia puts it bluntly, “Truly, mainly girls…” Yet because the group was recording at a moment when pop was changing month by month, those practical compilations became accidental maps of transition. A song like ‘I Confess’ belongs to one America; ‘Love You So Much’, which reached the Hot 100 in ’67 already points toward another, softer and more inward.
They recorded at Sound Studios and Chess, the latter of course the storied South Michigan address immortalised by The Rolling Stones. Graffia remembers at least one occasion when the Stones were recording there too, though New Colony Six were forbidden from wandering over to visit. It is a beautifully frustrating image: a young Chicago band in the same building as one of the era’s defining acts, separated not by miles or status but by a corridor and a prohibition. Money was tight. Sessions were budget-limited, and compromises were constant. As Graffia recalls, “A common phrase used often was ‘We’ll bury it in the mix’ for anything we might otherwise have redone if $$ were available.” Once again, the romance of the period gives way to reality: regional bands worked fast, cheap, and with whatever support they could find.
The line-up change that mattered most was Ronnie Rice’s arrival in ’66. With him, and with a move to Mercury, the group’s centre of gravity shifted. Nationally, New Colony Six are often remembered less for the scrappier Centaur/Sentar sides than for the elegant, sighing Mercury singles that followed: ‘I Will Always Think About You’, ‘Things I’d Like to Say’ and ‘I Could Never Lie To You’. Those records made the Hot 100, with ‘Things I’d Like to Say’ reaching #16 in the US and #6 in Canada, and they effectively rewrote the band’s public identity from garage hopefuls to soft-rock craftsmen.
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