Sandy Salisbury is a singer and songwriter whose main claim to fame is being one of the integral members of sunshine pop guru Curt Boettcher's cast of singers and players, appearing on records by the Ballroom and the Millennium in the late-60s. He also recorded solo during that time, though most of his work, like the 1969 album Sandy, remained unreleased until they were discovered and issued decades later.
Salisbury was born and raised in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, but moved to Santa Barbara, California to pursue his musical dreams. After playing with a group called the Chances for a year, touring the state and cutting an album that was never released, he moved to Los Angeles. Once there, he met songwriter and producer Boettcher, who was riding high off his work on the Association's "Along Comes Mary." The two found that their musical sensibilities and high, angelic voices were a good match and decided to pair up in a new group Boettcher was starting called the Ballroom. The group blended vocal harmonies and baroque melodies to come up with a singular sound, but their existence proved shortlived and soon Salisbury and Boettcher formed the very similar-sounding Millennium. Salisbury wrote songs as well as sang, and along with the other members of Millennium, he did work on Sagitarrius's classic 1967 album Present Tense as well as other Boettcher projects. The Millennium released only one album before the members went their separate ways. Salisbury went solo and tracked a record for producer Gary Usher's Tomorrow label that featured most of the members of the Millennium. It was to be called Sandy, but it was never released due to problems at the label. Also consigned to the vault were numerous songs written and performed by Salisbury over the years. He thought that Boettcher was sharing them with his music publisher, or that he might be able to record them himself, but instead the songs were kept under wraps to be used on future Boettcher-helmed projects. These imagined projects never happened, mainly because the producer lost favor with the music business and pretty much disappeared as the decade ended.
Salisbury, too, put his musical career on the back burner. After reverting to his given name of Graham, he began writing well-received children's and young adult books. A wave of interest in Boettcher, the Millennium, and Salisbury led to Sandy finally seeing the light of day in 2000 thanks to a reissue by the Poptones label. A set of demos, including tracks intended for a possible 1968 album, was issued under the title Falling to Pieces in 2002 and was followed by two more collections of demos -- both confusingly titled Everything For You -- in 2004, then in 2005 Sandy was reissued again by Rev-Ola with the added attraction of 13 bonus tracks, five of which were previously unreleased. Another collection of '60s demos titled Catchy came out in 2006, then for decades, there were no signs of any more treasures to be unearthed. That changed in 2023 when a previously unheard batch of demos -- some cut solo and some with Boettcher -- plus a handful of unreleased Millennium tracks were released by Sundazed as Try for the Sun. The label followed up in 2024 with Mellow as Sunshine, another batch of songwriting demos recorded solo in Salisbury's bedroom between 1966 and 1968~Tim Sendra
