In early 1964, following a string of appearances as a singer on local television, Valentino received an offer to play a regular gig at El Cid, a San Francisco club. Needing a band, he called childhood friend and songwriter/guitarist Ron Elliott, who recruited drummer John Petersen, rhythm guitarist/singer Declan Mulligan, and bassist Ron Meagher. Victor Savant, later to achieve fame in Europe as musical director for schlager singer Roberto Blanco, was in the band for a brief period as a pianist, but never recorded with the band. The gig led to a more lucrative deal at the Morocco Room, a club in nearby San Mateo, California. Meanwhile, San Francisco disc jockeys Tom Donahue and Bobby Mitchell were looking for new acts to bring to their fledgling Autumn Records label. Donahue and Mitchell wanted to capitalize on the Beatlemania craze that originated the previous year in the UK and was spreading across the U.S. by this time. Rich Romanello, owner of the Morocco Room and the Brummels' first manager, asked Donahue and Mitchell to see the band perform at the club. Romanello recalled, "There were maybe four people in the place, and they set up and started playing, and that old hair on my arm goes up. And when the hair on your arm goes up, you got something. It was a big change, to go from saxophones and black singers to a white guitar sound, but I hired 'em." The Beau Brummels signed with Autumn, where house producer Sylvester Stewart—later known as Sly Stone, of Sly and the Family Stone fame—produced the group's early recording sessions. The Beau Brummels took their name from the Regency era English dandy Beau Brummell. The group liked having a British-sounding name, and the legend has been, since it so closely followed The Beatles in the alphabet, the group also knew their records would likely be placed immediately behind those of The Beatles in record-store bins. Valentino dismissed this notion in a 2008 interview with Goldmine magazine. "That's a total myth", he said. "We just needed a name, and that sounded good. We didn't even know how to spell it. Everybody now has a notion of what people were thinking back then, but we never thought of those kinds of things." Al Hazan, who produced the band's demo recording, noted, "I never thought of the Brummels in terms of the Beatles—it was Ron Elliott's talent