Lost Tribe - Walk One Way

United Artists 50465 - Baltimore MD USA 1968. I love this melancholic folk beast and I don't even mind the horns. The flip is rather dull though, but the one who got the record company hooked apparently.
Their story is told in the Teenbeat Mayhem book:

"Perhaps the best example of a do-it-yourself, never-give-up attitude can be found in the recollections of one member of a Baltimore, Maryland combo known as the Lost Tribe. The group traveled by bus to New York City, where they met up with producer Marty Wexler. He liked the sound of their original demos, but having just lost their lead singer, Marty felt none of the four remaining guys had a strong enough lead voice to carry the tunes. Undaunted, the guys returned to Baltimore and approached the singer of a rival local band, who agreed to add his vocals to the tracks already recorded by the Lost Tribe. If the songs ended up being successful, the singer agreed to join them... but that didn't happen:

"With acetates in hand, my brother and I went back to New York City to shop the master tape. We arrived by Greyhound bus at 2AM Monday morning, and spent the night at the YMCA. Our first stop was to see Marty again but he was out for the day, so we pushed on to other record companies. From Capitol, to Columbia, to London, and the rest, we kept hitting the same roadblock, 'The Receptionist'. One after another - we were getting nowhere. By about 4PM we were tired and hungry so we stopped for food. "When we left the restaurant at 4:45PM, I noticed United Artists was on our list and (they) just happened to be across the street. So we wandered over and exited the elevator into a 10' x 30' reception area with no pictures on the walls, one door on each side of a desk sitting in the middle of the room in front of the dreaded 'receptionist'. We begged and pleaded for someone to listen to our disc but to no avail. Finally she told us the office was now closed and she was leaving. I told her we were not going until someone listened to our recording! With that, she picked up the phone and called someone. A few minutes later, a man named Henry Jerome opened the door at the right end of the room and we walked over to talk to him as he held the door open in a slightly cracked position.

"Henry told us the office was closed and that we were 'going about this whole thing all wrong. ' When he told us to check back in the morning and began to close the door, I suddenly found myself putting my foot in the opening to block the door from closing. Henry looked down to see what was blocking the door, paused for a moment, then said, Alright. Come in, ' and we followed him back to the only other office where there was a light. He put our acetate on his record player and went back to reading the documents on his desk. At that point it was obvious to me that he was just patronizing us. As I was just about to tell him off and leave, Henry looked up in amazement, took off his reading glasses and asked if we had any more songs for him to listen to. I gave him two other acetates.

"When he got about halfway through 'Fools Live Alone', Henry took the acetate off the record player and went down the darkened hallway to another office with a desk light on. He was gone about 20 minutes when he walked back in and said, 'Your dream has come true. We want to sign you."
Steve Roudebush
Band: Steve Roudebush, Reed Martin, Tom Roudebush, Walt Strycharz, Steve Momii, Darryl Mataroza