Another one of those bands I first discovered early on in their career via the old My Space (when it was relevant), when they hadn't been signed to a label yet, still gigging around and were just getting their act together.

And now, some four years later, they have become huge. It thrills me no end when good people make it, and I have always had this gut-level feeling Mumford & Sons were destined for big stuff. Clearly, they are in that direction.

I love hunches, especially when they pay off - which I can't say all the time.

This weekend it's Mumford Sons, live at the Haldern Pop Festival in Germany, recorded on August 13, 2010 and featuring an enthusiastic crowd going along for the ride.

Enjoy the weekend - it's just getting started.

Update: Coming into the final stretch and, thanks to a flood of donations the past few hours, we're almost at our goal. It's been incredible, the support and encouragement that's come this way. I can't begin to express my humble gratitude to all of you for your kindness, your generosity and your support of Newstalgia. Sometimes it's difficult, posting day after day, not knowing if anyone besides me is actually listening to any of this stuff or really cares about its existence. Clearly, the past several days have proven you are out there reading and listening and enjoying what Newstalgia has to offer, and that is gratifying, to say the least. It has certainly given me renewed enthusiasm to bring as much interesting, rare and essential material as I can drag out of the Archive. For the moment, we're right at the home stretch, within a few hundred dollars of our goal. If you haven't considered making a donation, please do - no matter how much you are willing to donate. No amount of money is too small that it won't make a huge difference. - it all does. We're getting there - we've almost done it!

Taking a break from sessions this week and diving into no genre in particular. Tonight it's 60's Folk-Pop-Psych icon Donovan and one of the Jazzier selections from his Mellow Yellow album of 1967, The Observation. With the exception of his debut, most of his earlier projects of the 60's were a combination of Folk, Pop, Psychedelia and a nod in the direction of Cool-School Jazz. Usually making for an interesting and somewhat eclectic listening experience, it also tried to deflect from the stereotype that Donovan was presented to mainstream music as a sort of Bob Dylan-Lite, which just wasn't true. But in the world of pigeon-holes, he had to be put in one, and as we all know, Jazz isn't big commercially.

So here's Donovan's nod to Beat-Poetry and Word Jazz from 1967.

Something a bit different tonight, and maybe a marked contrast to the 90's and PJ Harvey. Sandy Denny was probably the most influential singer/singer-songwriter to bring the concept of Folk-Rock to the UK. From her memorable association with the ground-breaking Fairport Convention in the 1960's, Denny moved away into a more broad-based sound with her next band Fotheringay in 1970 and continued a string of successes and milestone albums all the way until her untimely death in 1978.

Here are the first and second sessions the newly formed Fotheringay recorded for the BBC and the Top Of The Pops program, hosted by Brian Matthew.

Here is what's on the player:

BBC Radio Top Of The Pops, host Brian Matthew recorded April 13, 1970:

The Way I Feel (4:36)
Interview (1:31)
The Sea (4:52)

Top Of The Pops with Brian Matthew - recorded November 12, 1970, broadcast November 21, 1970:

Eppy Moray (3:55)
The Lowlands of Holland (2:40)
Interview / Gypsy Davey (4:13)

Seldom heard tracks from a memorable band and an unforgettable singer.

Probably one of the most gifted and baffling singer-songwriters of the 1960's. Fred Neil made a huge impact on the Folk scene in the late 1950's and early 1960's. As a songwriter he was responsible for such acknowledged classics as "Everybody's Talkin'", which became a massive hit for Harry Nilsson and figured prominently in the iconic film Midnight Cowboy. So much of his material was covered by other artists that his own versions of his songs were often overlooked by the mainstream audience. But by his peers, his was a unique and indelible voice in the music world. And just as he was hitting the crest of a popularity wave, he turned his back and quietly faded from view, only resurfacing briefly until his untimely death in 2001 robbed the music world of one its most distinctive and unique voices.

Tonight it's a track off the Everybody's Talkin' album he recorded for Capitol Records in 1967. That's The Bag I'm In is very much in the mold of Neil's style - a somewhat cynical and dark view of the world, filled with irony and excess. It was a world Fred Neil knew quite a bit about.

If you aren't familiar with him, but may be familiar with some of his material, here's a good chance to hear it from the Man himself, as only Fred Neil could do it.

During those halcyon days of AM Top-40 radio, it was possible to have a song that crossed over into many different genres because Top-40 Radio could do that. It didn't discriminate and it wasn't narrow in its vision. If you tossed it out there and the audience liked it, who cared? I will admit that, if it wasn't for Top-40 radio I probably never would have heard Buck Owens.

But as music began to change and audiences tastes were being gradually weaned away from Top-40 and into the extended-solo laden territory of FM Underground, it became harder for groups that didn't exactly fit snugly into one musical style or another to get airplay. Especially if your group had something of an identity crisis.

Case in point, The Sandpipers. Believe it or not, they were initially trying to go after the Folk-Rock market (a-la The Association, hence the snappy suits in the photo above) and out of the starting gate had their first (and biggest) hit Guantanamera which drove a lot of people crazy because it had something to do with Castro and the Cuban Revolution. But the fact of the matter was, The Sandpipers just weren't edgy enough. And in 1966 things were starting to change. A lot of bands lost their way and either broke up or went strictly commercial (like The Association, who went from Bob Dylan's One Too Many Mornings to the syrupy Never My Love in less than a year). With The Sandpipers, it was attempting to keep the momentum of the first hit going while trying to morph into something else that would have audience appeal for a second hit.

That's where tonight's track comes in. Glass came out in 1967, right about the time the music went Paisley. And rather than go back to their folk-rock roots, The Sandpipers' label A&M decided they would do best to briefly embrace the Sunshine/Pop-Psych genre made popular by groups like Sagittarius ("My World Fell Down"), and if you're familiar with that song, you will notice they borrowed from it liberally, and try their chances with that.

The end result was a track that, like Raymond Lefevre from last night, was played a lot, not identified very much and stuck firmly in your head on a purely unconscious level until the middle of most nights.

Glass was popular but it didn't chart and The Sandpipers scrapped the Sunshine/Psych format in favor of what became Middle Of The Road. And stayed like that until they finally called it a day in 1975.

It's been considered a "best of" by A&M since then and was reissued on CD in 2002. But tonight it's the 45 mono mix of Glass, and sounds considerably different than the stereo one. As was often the case with pop music in the Top-40 era, hours and days were spent making the mono mix perfect for AM radio and the Stereo mix was often an afterthought, slapped together in less than 15 minutes.

And that's today's lesson for "Why music gets that way".

Stay tuned - we're not even at the mid point yet.

I first featured Wolf People on The Roundtable last October and said things were looking up for them and they were gigging a lot. Well, it seems to have paid off as now they are getting recognition from the Press and other blogs all over the world - from Band of the Day to Best New Band of 2011. All good stuff and all further evidence the slog is often worth it.

Tonight it's Dorney Beach, another track from their MySpace page - a bit more hardcore and fuzz-drenched and more proof this band is good at what they do.

The latest is they've signed to a U.S. label and they are hitting the road again.

Doin' all the right stuff and making friends, one blown mind at a time.

When The Beau Brummels first single "Laugh Laugh" came on the radio, everyone swore up and down it was another band from Britain since it seemed like every other week a new band from "over there" was appearing on the charts. In reality, The Beau Brummels were from the Bay Area in California and they were part of a growing contingent of West Coast bands cultivating a quasi-folk rock approach and they were instantly enjoyable.

That they only had three hit singles over a span of four years makes them something of a footnote in the world of top-40 hit makers, they nonetheless were widely influential during those formative years of the West Coast Sound and many groups followed their innovations and wound up taking the credit for it.

But thankfully, they left a good sized legacy of great material which has been rediscovered over the years and, even though they've never really gotten the credit they deserve for their distinctive sound, they have come to be discovered by a whole new generation of musicians and so their contribution lives on.

Tonight it's one of the follow up singles to Laugh Laugh. Don't Talk To Strangers did not fare all that well as a single, but as a song it's a two minute classic.

If you aren't familiar with them - here's a good starting point.

As Folk and Rock were becoming intertwined in the mid 1960's, a number of groups appeared on the scene in the hopes of furthering the cause. One was the San Diego based group The Deep Six. They had originated as a Folk trio and took it a notch further. Between late 1965 and early 1966 Deep Six were riding the crest of a wave and when their first single came out, Rising Sun, it was a huge hit - but it was a hit in Southern California and almost nowhere else. They toured relentlessly and got lots of good press and good crowds. But when their first (and only) album came out, it failed to show up anywhere on the charts and The Deep Six, badly bruised by the lack of enthusiasm, soldiered on a bit more before calling it a day and splintering into different careers.

Tonight's track is their solitary hit Rising Sun. Music was changing and it was changing fast and sometimes bands just got lost in the shuffle.

Had they gotten together a few years earlier they would have been just retro enough to cause a stir. Had they gotten together a few years later they may have capitalized on the Post-Madchester era left empty by the loss of Stone Roses.

But no, The Stairs were together from 1990 to 1994 - issued only one album, a handful of ep's and went their separate ways.

Formed in 1990 by bassist Edgar (Summertyme) Jones, who wanted to put together a band with a retro flavor of such 60's groups as The 13th Floor Elevators and The Seeds. The Stairs adopted a certain early Rolling Stones approach, cutting all their material in Mono.

The result was one album and four ep's, of which tonight's track Flying Machine, is off their first ep Weed Bus, originally issued on Imaginary Records and then issued on Go! Records after signing with the label.

After the first album failed to click, they had several attempts at cutting a second album, which never materialized before calling it a day in 1994 with Jones pursuing a solo career.

As I've said so often, timing is everything. And in The Stairs case, it certainly wasn't for trying.

(P.F. Sloan -aka: The Grass Roots - confusing, not really)

When the Grass Roots gained attention with their first single, Where Were You When I Needed You, there was one catch - there actually was no Grass Roots - just two songwriters who wrote songs and cut a bunch of demos with some session folks of which tonight's track was one of them and it hit #28 on the charts.

P.F. Sloan and Steve Barri were house writers for Dunhill Records, an L.A. label very big in the mid-1960's when folk-rock was just about hitting its peak. The had written songs for a number of artists at the time and had gained an insiders notoriety as a talented and edgy songwriting team.

So when the first single was a hit, the problem became what to do about putting a band together. Eventually one was assembled, but after this single and the subsequent album that followed, the band that became the actual Grass Roots had very little in common with that first incarnation. Certainly what made the early non-Grass Roots Grass Roots so appealing was the edge and bite to their songs. And even though they went on to become huge as a pop group, they abandoned their initial protest stance and opted for a more commercial sound and that lost their early fan base.

Certainly not the first time that's ever happened and certainly won't be the last.

But tonight it's the early, edgy Grass Roots - rather timeless.