Travis Pike's Tea Party - Original Band, All Original Songs

An Original Band Flyer from 1967

From the beginning, "Travis Pike's Tea Party" was a concert oriented group, built around a solid repertoire that eventually included some 200 of Travis' original songs. They did best in concert venues and on college campuses, where they could showcase their talent and material. Although the "Tea Party" never claimed to be a dance band, their driving rhythms and wailing guitars were more than enough to keep their fans rockin,' and when they performed The Red-backed, Scaly, Black-bellied, Tusked, Bat-winged Dragon, they even brought back the Charleston.

The unifying goal of the group was to perform and record their original songs. When New York publisher George Pincus tracked Travis down on Cape Cod to offer him a then unheard of $35,000 advance for the rights to record End of Summer with a German pop star, Travis turned him down, saving the song for his own band. Travis explains, Without the Tea Party demo, George Pincus would never have heard the song. It was a matter of both loyalty and fairness. No one was paid to play the demo. We were a group, dependent on each other for survival.

On few occassions before had the Sala de Puerto Rico of the MIT Student Center witnessed such a crowd.em>

The success of this mixer, one of the most successful ever on the MIT campus, was in great part due to Travis Pike's group, who with their original music kept a captive crowd of well over 1600 college students from MIT, BU and other schools in the Boston area. The continuous music throughout the evening, alternating between Travis Pike's originals and Horn's Forest current rock proved particularly appealing.

Jorge A. Romero
Vice-president
Burton House Committee

The reason the MIT clipping, above, looks so much better than most of the others, is that it had always been kept with pictures from Travis's older brother's wedding. Travis had to leave the wedding reception early to do the show, but to his surprise, half-way through the evening, his brother Jimmy with his new bride, Sandy, made this college mixer the first stop on their honeymoon!