73-Year-Old American Rock 'n' Roll Retread Travis Edward Pike Gaining Traction in the U.K.

August 11, 2017 - Travis Pike's first professional credit was the title song for 1964's Demo Derby, a crash action featurette that played on thousands of screens across the USA with the Beatles Hard Day's Night. Now, two long-lost songs from his 1966 feature film debut Feelin' Good have been released to the record collecting public for the first time. If you're one of the nearly 5,000 visitors who discovered them on YouTube, you'll have to act fast. UK-based State Records' Limited Edition, vinyl 45 rpm release of Travis Pike and the Brattle Street East's soundtrack recording of "Watch Out Woman" and "The Way That I Need You," is featured in a two-page spread in the August issue of Shindig! magazine.

In the Shindig article, Things Just Aren't the Way They Seem, Lenny Helsing writes, " 'Watch Out Woman', alongside its newly-issued State label flipside 'The Way That I Need You', are astonishing period pieces that have catapulted fans of that particular vintage and, more specifically, those for whom thrilling '60s garage and beat/punk sounds are the equivalent of a musical nirvana, into paroxysms of unadulterated joy since their revelatory appearance online." If you're not one of Shindig's 78,000 or so readers, the article's been posted at otherworldcottage.com/Shindig_2_Page_Spread.pdf.

The 1967 Summer of Love, Alma Records release of Travis Pike's Tea Party's "If I Didn't Love You Girl" is on UK Deejay Rob Bailey's latest compilation album le beate bespoké 7, marking the third time that rare classic has appeared in a compilation, and we're told a limited edition vinyl reproduction of the original 45 rpm "If I Didn't Love You Girl" complete with its flipside, "The Likes of You" will be released later this year.

Meanwhile, Otherworld Cottage is prepping a late October release of Travis Edward Pike's Grumpuss LIVE! A 20th anniversary DVD edition of his 99-minute, 1997 Blenheim Palace Benefit Performance for the Save the Children's Fund. The 1998 VHS release of that performance of his epic narrative rhyme won an INTERCOM Silver Plaque Special Achievement Award for Writing at the 1999 Chicago Film Festival, and the July, 1999 Newsletter for the Council of the Literature of the Fantastic at the University of Rhode Island reported, "This is classic British fantasy at its best. Reminiscent of Lewis Carroll, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R.Tolkien, Pike's Grumpuss is poignantly true of both the foibles and triumphs of humankind … quality family entertainment." In all fairness to the reviewer, although Pike is a native of Boston, Massachusetts, the tale is about a knight sent by his king to capture or slay a huge cat scourging the realm.

And this April, Otherworld Cottage published Travis Edward Pike's Changeling's Return, the screenplay for his musical about an American rock star's out-of-body experience in the otherworldly realm of Morningstone, while on tour in England's Midlands. The book contains a special 48-page section titled His Secrets All Revealed in which Pike explores his musical fantasy-adventure's historic, folkloric, mythological, and occult roots in detail. With a full page in author and pop culture historian Harvey Kubernik's 1967, A Complete Rock Music History of the Summer of Love, (Sterling Publishing), it seems only natural that Kubernik was called upon to pen the introductory interview, in which he and Pike discuss the history of the property from its earliest inception in 1974, to its progressive rock score originally recorded in 1987, and the 2017 release of the Mystical Encounter, Songs from Changeling's Return CD.

Rockers and auto sports fans alike know where the rubber meets the road, and while it may have all started with Demo Derby, with four music albums recorded and released since 2013, Travis Edward Pike is definitely one rock 'n' roll retread who isn't just spinning his wheels!