About once every year I remember that my various credit cards have reward programs and I go check to see how many points I’ve got accrued and what they can be redeemed for. The last time around I got a $50 gift card at Amazon, so I looked at my wish list there and said “Aha! Take me back to the 1960s!”

I used some of the gift card balance for this CD:

The band had a peculiar history, in that it started with a couple of song writers, Steve Barri and P.F. Sloan, who performed demos (as Carole King did) with session musicians but needed a band to tour the records which resulted. They recruited a band, alright, but it chafed under the record label’s restriction that it had to perform what the label’s salaried songwriters produced. So that band quit. They cast about for another one and found it in a group called The 13th Floor, which included Creed Bratton (later a star of The Office), Rick Coonce, Warren Entner and Rob Grill. That incarnation stuck around for the most successful part of the group’s career.

It broke up in 1969 (“creative differences” with Dunhill, the record label), and it had about 30 members off and on over the next 40 years. It kept trying to recreate its success through the 1970s and midway through the 1980s until it found the 1960s nostalgia tour business, which it stuck to quite successfully through 2011, when Grill died.