{"id":7610,"date":"2026-05-06T16:29:43","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T15:29:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/shindig-magazine.com\/?p=7610"},"modified":"2026-05-06T16:29:43","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T15:29:43","slug":"shindig-175-new-colony-six","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shindig-magazine.com\/?p=7610","title":{"rendered":"Shindig! #175 – New Colony Six"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s homegrown rock revolution. <\/strong><\/p>\n

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 \u201960s 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

KLEMEN BREZNIKAR heads to the river\u2019s edge<\/strong><\/p>\n

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The New Colony Six\u2019s first breakthrough came in precisely that context. Passed over by Columbia and Dick Clark, they were rescued by family initiative. Graffia\u2019s father, with support from other parents, financed early studio work and helped establish the group\u2019s 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, \u2018I Confess\u2019, became a major local hit in Chicago and cracked the national Hot 100 in \u201966. Its success fed into the first LP,\u00a0Breakthrough<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n

Richie Unterberger\u2019s description of their early sound as \u201ca poppier American Them\u201d is useful so long as it does not flatten the band\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n