In 1965, Mickey & the Invaders released a second single, "Love Is a Wonderful Thing" and "You'll Never Know" on Yardbird Records. Both songs were written by Mickey. Outside the East L.A. "circuit," Mickey & the Invaders played the Pasadena Civic Auditorium on the bill with an up and coming band, the Association. They also played shows at Disneyland. In 1967, Mickey & the Invaders won the prestigious Battle of the Bands at the Teen Age Fair at the Hollywood Palladium. This was a major annual event which always had stiff competition from bands all over Southern California.
The next break for the band was meeting KRLA disk jockey Dick Biondi. Mickey was giving guitar lessons to a kid who "moved on up" from the Eastside to Beverly Hills. There the boy befriended child actor Jon Provost, best known as the kid on the "Lassie" television show. Mickey became Provost's guitar teacher, which led to Mickey meeting Biondi through Provost's agent. (The universe works in mysterious ways.) Dick Biondi, impressed with Mickey & the Invaders, began to book the band on the Dick Biondi KRLA Road Shows. On these and other shows, Mickey & the Invaders backed artists such as the Righteous Brothers, Sonny & Cher, Brenda Holloway, Johnny Burnette, Brenton Wood, Paul and Paula, April and Nino Tempo, and the Blossoms.
The Blossoms were a great black female vocal group, who provided background vocals for countless major artists of the time. The legendary Darlene Love was one of the Blossoms. Darlene Love was the lead vocalist on the Phil Spector produced recordings by the Crystals. There's a movie out now in 2013, "20 Feet From Stardom," featuring Darlene Love and other great black female background singers of the 60s and 70s, Merry Clayton, Lisa Fischer, Claudia Lennear, Tata Vega, and others. These were world-class singers who were literally and figuratively twenty feet from stardom. Well, Mickey & the Invaders and the Blossoms hit it off because they backed the vocal group often, including stints at the Chi Chi Club in Palm Springs and the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. When Mickey & the Invaders went to rehearse with the Blossoms for the first time, they met the Blossoms young musical director, the now legendary guitarist Larry Carlton.