Touch (60s band)

Touch was a 1960s progressive rock band who recorded one album, 1968's eponymous and extremely rare Touch. They consisted of John Bordonaro (drums, percussion, vocals), Don Gallucci (keyboards, vocals), Bruce Hauser (bass, vocals), Jeff Hawks (vocals), and Joey Newman AKA Vern Kjellberg (guitar, vocals).

Gallucci will probably always be best known as the kid who played the keyboard riff on the Kingsmen's classic recording of the song "Louie Louie," but it was this hit that forced him to leave the group. At the age of 15 he was not old enough to tour with them and thus it was that he later founded Don and the Goodtimes with drummer Bob Holden. (An early version of the band included Jack Ely, the vocalist on "Louie Louie.") They had a No. 20 pop hit in the US with "I Could Be So Good to You," produced and arranged by the legendary Jack Nitzsche. By this time earlier Goodtimes members had been replaced by vocalist Jeff Hawks, guitarist Joey Newman and bassist/vocalist Ron "Buzz" Overman.

In his as-yet-unpublished biography, Gallucci recalls that by the end of 1967, following the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Goodtimes were beginning to feel like they were "just " and felt the need to move on. Accordingly he wrote what the sleevenotes to the Eclectic Discs CD reissue of the album calls the "Lysergic soaked" epic "Seventyfive," and Touch was born. Gallucci, Hawks and Newman teamed up with Hauser and Bordonaro and they set themselves up in a Moorish-style castle in the Hollywood Hills where they set to work on writing the songs for the album.

After signing with Coliseum Records, but before recording the Touch LP, the group recorded the music tracks for the Elyse Weinberg LP using the name "The Band of Thieves" after Elyse's song of the same name. Gene Shiveley engineered the sessions at Sunset Sound Recorders and the transition from those sessions to the sessions for the Touch LP was nearly seamless.

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