The Sounds and Words of United Travel Services & The Redondos: Ben Hoff

I can’t imagine a worse name for a band than United Travel Service. Yes, even for a group that came out of Portland in 1967, it is no excuse. On the other hand, I did pick up this album at Record Safari due to the group’s name. I experience that sometimes a band with a horrific name can be of significant interest music-wise. In that sense, United Travel Service didn’t disappoint me.

Wind and Stone is barely an album. There are 12 cuts, and four of them are demos made in someone’s living room. I was expecting something more garage rock; in a sense, the singer would be full of angst and frustration, but instead, I get the songwriter and singer Ben Hoff’s sense of disappointment (yes, garage rock does share those sentiments). Still, there is almost a Johnnie Ray sense of wonderment of emotional pain with the natural world, but acceptance of such feelings is very much part of United Travel Service. What surprised me was the sophistication of the songs by Hoff. Musically it’s two electric guitars, one a 12-string electric, bass, and drums. I hear touches of the band Television, with a side dish of Big Star, with a Gene Clark/Byrds sensibility. And also the uniqueness of the first Modern Lovers album. The presence of spirituality comes through the lyrics as it conveys the breakdown of a romantic relationship or the singer’s surroundings. It’s a young person’s view, but it also has the wrappings of believing that something is much bigger than what is happening.

Ben Hoff is also Benjamin Hoff, the author of The Tao of Pooh, a mega-bestseller in the 1980s. The book was permanently shelved in either the bookstore's New Age or Eastern Philosophy section. In a garage rock manner, one can hear Hoff’s interest in a world beyond teenage angst. Break-a-Way Records put together this compilation of United Travel Service music, and it is the most intriguing music I heard from a two-guitar, bass, and drums combo. Even the four poorly recorded demos are excellent, especially Plastic Paradise. It has been done before, but United Travel Service has to be one of the early groups to have a song completely backward, Ytilibissop Tsethgils Eht (The Slightest Possibility)

Break-a-Way Records also put together a collection of demos from The Redondos - Full Circle With The Redondos. A surf garage band started by Hoff and United Travel Service’s guitarist John Carter and bassist Ray Doern. These recordings came before United Travel Service, but even then, Hoff had the potential to look within himself with such original compositions as Why Do I. This is real garage rock, where the band also covers songs that have been part of that genre’s history. But Hoff and the band offer an almost sensitive approach to these oldies/hits. Both Full Circle With The Redondos and Wind and Stone fell through the cracks, and now one wonders how many other pop geniuses are there who are lurking in the shadows of history.

For further reading, here is Hoff’s book:

And here are two examples of United Travel Service: