“That’s the Way Uh-huh Uh-huh Bob Likes It” – Travis & Shook, recorded live at the Roxy, Hollywood, CA., late seventies (love to know the dates, if anyone out there has a clue!) From “Memoirs of an Opening Act” available May 16, 2020.)
God, what an odd band we were. This one starts with 45 seconds or so of moody instrumental chamber music, before going into a bunch of two man approximated and bastardized forties big band stuff. God knows what were after; we smoked a lot of pot back then.
It’s perhaps worth mentioning that this was sort of a big deal for us, opening for five days or so for our buddie George Carlin in Hollywood, intensified somewhat by the fact that George’s label, Little David, had a sound truck, mainly to record us (though I’m sure they recorded George, too) with an eye toward a possible record deal. We took this as an invitation to bring our musical cohort Keith Spring (aka Mahavishnu John Casual) to sit on a few songs, and to play almost our entire repertoire of the time, in hopes of getting at least ok demo versions of all our stuff, regardless of whether said material happened to be human-friendly or not. (It’s not that we were at all experimental- we weren’t! – but to judge from the wide range of reactions we got over the years, for some folks, we might as well have been.
The recording that resulted yielded seriously mixed results, both in terms of our performances (inspired, idiotic, languid, frenzied, inscrutable), and the recordings themselves (the cassette rough mixes, which is all we ever got, were very rough indeed; needless to say, we scared off the record company handily.
On the other hand, we got to meet Groucho Marx, which was thrilling- what a world! Later, George told us that during our opening set, Groucho had leaned over at some point and said to George, “these guys have been on way too long!”, which, of course, we right away wanted to use as a blurb in our press kit, though I don’t think we ever got around to it…
A hint of how you sound on newer tunes
Rebecca J Mendible