Touch was one of the incarnations of the Progressions / A Taste / Light / Flow. Members included Walt Bailey (guitar), Bob Grimm (guitar), Sam Towers (bass), Bill Davis (keyboards ex-Good Grief, Please), Ricky Peters (drums, vocals), and Trudy Cooper (drums, vocals ex-Sun Country). Sandy Towers (keyboards) replaced Davis in summer 1973. Other members included Jeff Lutzi (bass ex-Maypole), Duke Gore (bass), Roger Pace (sax)… They could be seen at Mother Lode’s Wild Cherry, the Frigate, and as a house band at the Latin Casino for three years … The group also toured the Virgin Islands.
Davis went on to join City Star. Cooper left the group in 1974 and joined Daybreak (D.C.group), Blanche… She later moved to Hawaii where she joined an all-girl traveling show band called Sugar. Later she returned to Baltimore and played in Bad Bitches of the Blues. She could be seen in the ‘00s in a duo with Walt Bailey at the Full Moon Saloon.
The group continued to play with Peters on drums, and Bob Grimm (bass). Lightning struck the group for a second time as their equipment perished in the fire that destroyed the Latin Casino. Their previous group Flow had a similar incident at the Mardi Gras.
Peters went on to play in Kaos, Sentries. Bailey went to D.C. and played in a group called Another Pretty Face. Lutzi later played for the New Diablos. Pace joined Both Worlds, Special Edition, Rosco, Backstreets…
Record release by Touch:
1973 Space 3797 You Can Come Along / Material Man
From Sam Towers: My time with Touch, June 1973 – March, 1974
In the spring of 1973, I was playing on the road with a comedy/soul review and met Sandy at a Dallas nightclub. Sandy was blind at the time. She sat in with us and we all were very impressed with her singing and keyboard playing. In June of 1973, Walt Bailey tracked me down in Texas and got me off the road to replace Jeff Lutzi, who had quit his band, named Touch.
Touch played the summer of 1973 in Ocean City at the Beach Club on 9th Street and at the the Dungeon on 4th Street. At the end of the summer, our keyboard play and singer “Bungalow” Bill Davis quit the band, and I made contact with Sandy at her home in Battle Creek, Michigan and brought her to Baltimore to replace him. At the same time that happened, the well-known “Judge’s’” nightclub on Greenmount Avenue near 33rd Street was sold, and the new owners re-named it “Mother Lode’s Wild cherry. Our band, Touch, was hired as the first band to play there under its new name and ownership.
While playing at Mother Lode’s, Sandy and I were married. We played there until March of 1974, and then found that we would have to leave Maryland and move to Michigan. Here’s why: Sandy was still blind at the time. She had a state-paid corneal transplant surgical procedure set up in Michigan to fix her blindness, but to our dismay, we found that the procedure couldn’t be transferred to Maryland! We had no choice but to leave Touch and move to Michigan. We thought that Baltimore was a nice town to live and gig in, but living here wasn’t worth staying blind! so, in March of 1974, we said goodbye to Walt, Ricky and Trudy, and moved to Sandy’s home town of Battle Creek.
