The Buffum Tool Co. (Champaign-Urbana)

The Buffum Tool Co. were a 1960's folk-rock group made up of students from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.  

Band members included Phillip Ross, Frank Pytko, Frederick Thady, Donald McCrea Kennedy and Gerry Smith.  An early lineup of the band reportedly included a drummer named Snake Larsen.  

Influenced by groups such as the Byrds, Arthur Lee & Love and Buffalo Springfield, the Buffum Tool Co played mostly original music with the majority of the songs being written by Gerry Smith.  

The group performed primarily in bars and small venues throughout Illinois and Wisconsin.  During the "Summer of Love" however the group travelled to San Francisco and spent three weeks performing at the Matrix while crashing in Steve Miller's attic.  There they met bands such as Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape and Quicksilver Messenger Service before heading back to Illinois.

Formed in 1964 or early 1965, the group was originally known as the Barbarians.  In the beginning, they performed primarily at dances and frat parties on the campus of the University of Illinois.  For a time the group was booked by G & G Enterprises, a talent agency in Champaign.  Eventually the group seems to have been picked up by promoter Ken Adamany and his Wisconsin-based agency.

Around that same time the band decided to change their name.  For a period they were known as Our Mothers Children before settling on the Buffum Tool Company.  

Under new management, the group began to perform more in Chicago, Northern Illinois and Wisconsin.  In December of 1966 and early 1967, the group played a number of shows at the Cellar in Arlington Heights.  They also performed at other Chicagoland teen clubs such as the Crimson Cougar.

In late June of 1967, the band opened for the Five Americans on a few dates including Sterling, Illinois and Janesville, Wisconsin.  In July, the band continued to perform in Wisconsin.   

By early August, the group left for a gig in Colorado.  (Ken Adamany's agency maintained a satellite office in Aspen). From there the band headed straight to San Francisco.

For several weeks in August of 1967, the Buffum Tool Co were booked at the Matrix, a Haight-Ashbury nightclub owned in part by Jefferson Airplane's Marty Balin.  The group opened for the Sons of Champlin on several occasions.

While in San Francisco, Adamany likely helped arrange for the group to stay at Steve Miller's house.  Miller and Adamany had been in a band together in Wisconsin in the early 1960s.

Miller, who was renting an old Victorian mansion in Haight-Ashbury, had multiple beds set up in the attic and the house served as a gathering point for musicians and friends.  Others living there at the time included Albert King and Boz Scaggs (another former bandmate of Adamany).

The Buffum boys however were eventually asked to leave the house when the group's road manager got involved with someone else's girlfriend.  After that the band slept on the stage of the Matrix before making their way back to the Midwest.

Despite the fact that they wrote a lot of their own material, the Buffum Tool Co never officially released any music.  However they did make some informal recordings.   Phillip Ross, in a 2020 interview with the internet radio show Acid Flashback, shared two of their songs.  According to Ross, they were recorded live in a barn in Janesville, Wisconsin in 1967.  Both songs were written by Gerry Smith.

  

"Hiding In Your Mind" & "Yesterday's Dreams"

  

Sometime after returning from California, Phillip Ross left the band.  He was replaced by singer Brian Cook and bassist Larry Minton.  Both had been members of the Champaign group, Somebody Groovy.

According to comments left by Frank Pytko on the website Hollywood Hangover, the Buffum Tool Co. were the replacement act for Otis Redding after his plane crashed over Lake Monona in Madison, WI on December 10, 1967.   The Madison club where Redding and the Bar-Kays were scheduled to play was the Factory, which was owned by Ken Adamany.  The other group on the original bill was another Adamany group, Rockford's Grim Reapers (which included a young Rick Nielsen).

The Buffum Tool Co continued to perform around the U of I campus into 1968.   In February, they were listed in the Blytham Ltd. roster of bands which suggests they may have parted ways with Adamany at some point.

It is unclear when exactly the band called it quits but it was likely sometime before the end of 1968.

The Hollyood Hangover site includes a comment from Donald McCrea Kennedy which describes the bands last few gigs:  "after four years of gigging, and having decided to hang it up, we played a packed farewell gig at the McKinley YMCA gym {in Champaign], to our throng of adoring fans, and then foolishly played one more gig - a high school dance in Dixon, Illinois, where, afterwards, we had to defend ourselves with mace while fending off an attack from some 30 or so drunken redneck factory workers of that fine town."