Butch Engle & The Styx

Butch Engle & The Styx were a very minor mid-'60s San Francisco Bay Area band that issued just three singles (the first, in 1964, under the name The Showmen). They played moody garage-folk-rock with a similarity to The Beau Brummels that was not coincidence: all of their material, except for The Showmen single, was written or co-written by Ron Elliott of The Beau Brummels. The Beau Brummels were a fine group, and Elliott was an excellent songwriter. But the compositions Butch Engle & The Styx were granted access to were weak by Elliott's own high standards and in fact were basically leftovers that were not deemed strong enough for The Beau Brummels to record. As Engle himself recalled in the liner notes to The Best of Butch Engle & the Styx: No Matter What You Say, "Ron, Sly Stewart, [and Autumn record executives] Tom Donahue and Bobby Mitchell would choose which songs would go on [a Beau Brummels] album, and then we could take what we wanted from whatever was left."

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