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So, I get this phone call one day in 1967 from an old friend and musician Paul Hornsby who was playing with a band called The Hour Glass. Paul had just come back from Los Angeles where they had just landed a recording contract with a big label. | The Hour Glass was comprised of a couple of guys I had met during our beach club days,Gregg and Duane Allman along with Johnny Sandlin , Paul and a bass player named Bob Keller. Sandlin and Hornsby became music producers later on and produced a lot of the successful Southern Rock acts. Gregg and Duane.... well you know the story. | I declined the offer to go to L.A. with Paul but decided to put a band of my own together and hit the road west some months later. I had enlisted the help of some friends from Montgomery, Alabama who had been part of a group called The Rockin Gibraltars and were also old beach club acquaintances. We gave ourselves the name Heart (This band, of course, predated the group Heart from the 70s and 80s) |
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| When I arrived in Hollywood, I knew that this was for me. And true to form, for those days, we got a record deal in no time. We had several single releases with some regional success. I guess the highlight of that band was touring as an opening act for Jimi Hendrix. I'll never forget that tour. Jimi was a class guy and never had the slightest attitude about his stardom.. |
 | After the band Heart faded into the rock & roll abyss, I ran into some guys that were later to become successful as part of the back up band for Loggins and Messina. We played around and wrote some songs and made some demos and went out to do a club gig for a couple of weeks in nearby San Bernadino. | >As we were driving back into L.A. one night we turned on the radio to KHJ, which was the #1 Top 40 station in Southern California and possibly the Western U.S. After a commercial break, we damn nearly ran off the freeway when we heard one of our demos playing out over the airwaves. |
 | That band was called Feather. We were originally on White Whale Records but jumped ship when CBS Records offered us a lot more money. The top 20 hit we had was called Friends. |
Listen to: | Feather had a nice run and made us a little money but I never was completely happy with the overall musical style of the band. I did learn a lot about vocal harmonies from those guys but I always thought we were a bit "light" musically. So, after some parting pleasantries, I was once again bandless in Los Angeles. |
| I spent about a year doing odd jobs and whatever and just when I'm thinking I'd run my course, I ran into my old friend from Montgomery, Ed Sanford who I played with in the group Heart. We spent about a year writing songs whenever we could and after a while decided it was time to hit the streets | and see if we could land us a songwriter deal somewhere but we needed to make some demos of our new songs. In timely, cosmic fashion our friend and drummer Merel Bregante who I had played with in the group Feather was now with Loggins and Messina and making a big splash with their music. |
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Merel hooked me and Sanford up with this great recording engineer named Alex Kazanegras. Alex had a mobile recording truck with which he had recorded all the Loggins and Messina records. He took a liking to us and let us do demos for free in his studio. |
 | These demos eventually landed us a songwriter deal with Chappel Music and from there we were able to saturate all the record companies with our songs until somebody started to pay attention. Those somebodys were Warner Brothers Records and Jerry Wexler.
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Sanford and I went to Muscle Shoals with our band and Jerry Wexler as our producer. Working with Jerry was a rare privilege that I will always remember as great learning experience. Jerry brought Barry Beckett on board as a combination 7th band member and musical director.
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| All the guys in the band had a great respect for Barry and I consider him to be a close friend to this day. Anyway, what came out of those sessions was the record that was the most successful of any that I've been involved with to date. |
Listen to: | Smoke From A Distant Fire is still paying the bills, some of them anyway, 25 years later. The Sanford/Townsend Band toured successfully for about 8 years. We went all over the world and shared the stage with a lot of premier acts of that time. |
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train robbers, camping out at Mt. Ranier during a Pacific Northwest survival tour.
- Left to Right -
Seated: Johnny T. and Mike Collings
Standing: Steve Woodard, Roger White, Dan Greer, Thom Walls and Ed Sanford
Folks talk about the good old days. THESE were the fuckin' good old days !!
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