Fred Steele’s “Ventures in Space” Album Cover T-Bucket

In 1964, the best selling instrumental rock group of all time (with over 110 million albums sold worldwide and now inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame) introduced their 14th and possibly most influential album, “The Ventures in Space”. The best-selling album’s alluring cover featured a romantic young couple in a striking white T-Bucket parked high on Mulholland Drive overlooking the lights of the vast L.A. Basin. It was the prototype Southern California image — but who could have guessed that cool T-Bucket roadster had been constructed a few years earlier across the country near frosty Boston, Massachusetts!

That iconic, bobtail T-Bucket was built by Massachusetts hot rod builder Fred Steele who, coincidentally, had been inspired by Norm Grabowski’s Southern California constructed “Kookie” T-Bucket.
Shortly after building the car, Fred moved to California and stayed just about long enough to join the exclusive L.A. Roadsters car club and have some photos taken of his bucket by hot rod journalist Tex Smith before returning to New England.

It’s likely that Fred’s car on the Ventures album cover exposed more of the world’s youth to the coolness of T-Buckets than any magazine feature would have garnered in the day. What’s even more interesting is that in an era when surf music and songs about cars were being driven by the success of the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean, that such albums were being released to record stores in rapid fashion and evidently the record companies didn’t mind scrimping where they could on album cover images. Fred’s bucket appears on the cover below from Hal Blaine’s appropriately named, “Deuces, ‘Ts’, Roadsters and Drums” album.

And, if you look closely in the upper left corner of the Tokens album below you’ll see Fred’s white “T” again and notice that it’s an image from the Hal Blaine cover’s same photo shoot.

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