The Aerovons

Loads of bands imitated <a href="spotify:artist:3WrFJ7ztbogyGnTHbHJFl2">the Beatles</a> in the 1960's; relatively few of them lived out their dreams by recording an album at Abbey Road. St. Louis teenagers The Aerovons got that chance when in 1967 they signed a deal with <a href="spotify:search:label%3A%22EMI+Records%22">EMI Records</a> and flew to England. After cutting a batch of very <a href="spotify:artist:3WrFJ7ztbogyGnTHbHJFl2">Beatle</a>-esque songs full of harmonies and hooks, they were cut loose by the label and broke up soon after. A couple of singles were released in 1969 but it took until 2003 for the album -- titled Resurrection -- to be officially released. The group's story was brought up to date on 2024's World of You: The Complete Recordings, a collection that gathered all recordings made in the '60s, plus many made by the band's leader Tom Hartman in the following decades.

The band were formed in 1966 in St. Louis, and in late 1967, guitarist/pianist Tom Hartman recorded a demo of his composition "A World of You" at the instigation of his mother. The demo was heard by a representative of <a href="spotify:search:label%3A%22Capitol+Records%22">Capitol Records</a>, and though he offered the group a session in Los Angeles, Hartman's mother told him the band wanted to record in London. In early 1968, the still-young Aerovons -- Hartman was 16 -- flew to London to play their demo for EMI. EMI was impressed enough to sign them when Hartman and his mother returned to London in August 1968. The whole band came back to London in March 1969 to record.

Over the next few months the group cut about an album's worth of material at Abbey Road. Unsurprisingly considering the surroundings, and considering that <a href="spotify:artist:3WrFJ7ztbogyGnTHbHJFl2">the Beatles</a> were the group's heroes anyway, the material sounded much like <a href="spotify:artist:3WrFJ7ztbogyGnTHbHJFl2">the Beatles</a> did circa 1967-1969, though on the lighter side of what <a href="spotify:artist:3WrFJ7ztbogyGnTHbHJFl2">the Beatles</a> themselves came up with. More surprisingly, the album was produced by Hartman himself, who also wrote most of the songs laid down in the studio. The sessions were quite well-produced and well-arranged, with some of the settings also reminiscent of the late-'60s <a href="spotify:artist:1LZEQNv7sE11VDY3SdxQeN">Bee Gees</a> or (more distantly) <a href="spotify:artist:6waa8mKu91GjzD4NlONlNJ">Hollies</a>.

Before an album could even be released, fate intervened to end the Aerovons' brief career. The sessions had themselves been done as a three-piece, although they'd come over to London as a quartet, when guitarist Phil Edholm left before recording began. Shortly after returning to St. Louis in mid-1969, drummer Mike Lombardo left as well. EMI, concerned about the personnel shifts, canceled the album, and the band split up shortly afterward, though a couple of rare singles were issued on Parlophone in 1969. Hartman did a single for Bell in 1970 -- "Sunshine Woman"/"A Little More" --before abandoning the record business to go to college, though he later got into writing music for television, radio, and film. He also recorded tracks, by himself and for other artists, in a home studio all through the '80s and into the next few decades. The Aerovons' canceled album was issued on CD by <a href="spotify:search:label%3A%22RPM%22">RPM</a> in 2003, with both tracks from a non-LP single, a demo, and an unreleased song added as bonus cuts. That collection established the band as one of the great lost bands of the era; 2024's World of You: The Complete Recordings reinforced that belief and let fans in on the secret that Hartman continued to make good music after the band spilt. It includes all the tracks from the initial reissue, plus three previously unreleased versions of album tracks, Hartman's 1971 "Sunshine Woman" single, eight songs recorded at home by Hartman between 1980 and 2020 -- and released in 2021 as A Little More -- and six songs recorded by Hartman between 2020 and 2024. ~ Richie Unterberger & Tim Sendra, Rovi