From 1968 and their sole (eponymous) album, please enjoy The Travel Agency and "Old Man."
I first wrote about those guys here back in 2010(!), immediately after discovering the album at the long-departed download site Redtelephone66, but I hadn't thought about them since until last weekend, when a another one of their songs got posted on Facebook by a friend of mine.
In any case, the group was from Houston and member Frank Davis was later involved with the Texas pop-psych band Fever Tree, whose minor 1969 hit "San Francisco Girls" was much beloved of the late WNEW-FM deejay Alison Steele (a/k/a "The Nightbird"). The album was produced by Jimmy Griffin, of Bread fame -- and as you can hear, he did a pretty spiffy job. To my ears, it anticipates pretty much everything Dave Edmunds did a few years later in his "I Hear You Knockin'" period (pleasantly nasal, lots of compression, guitars that sound like they were recorded directly into the board, etc). As for the song itself, "Old Man" adapts the Buddy Holly/"Peggy Sue" guitar riff to some interesting ends; this, I think, is power pop before its time, plowing the same field as Bobby Fuller, at least to my ears.
Bottom line: While I remain convinced that most obscure 60s pop and rock albums deserve their obscurity, The Travel Agency is an exception. You can order or stream a copy of the remastered album over at Amazon HERE; if you're a cheap bastard you can also find the entire shebang on YouTube.
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3 comments:
I don't usually go for what Gunther Schuller calls "vertical" rhythm - all those stops in the drums - but the song itself is so good I surrendered to my enjoyment. Thanks!
Love it! Puts me in mind of The Who.
I remember years ago digging into the history of this group and finding out they morphed into Shanti, whose Indian-flavored 1971 album on Atlantic is a nice surprise. I can't recall the exact details, but I think three of the Travel Agency played on the album, and a fourth wrote songs.
There was also a single by what I think is an unconnected group called Travel Agency, which sometimes appears on comps.
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