100 Records

Hank Champion is known as “The Chronicler.” Born of Terlinguan mining stock to a tyrannical father and dead mother, Champion began writing at an early age to escape the otherwise inevitable date with the chili trade. A small skin accident kept him out of school during his junior year, and he began the mimeographed, one pageTerlinguan Times. In May of 1969, its first and only issue ran a story about a nameless, corrupt sheriff who had just the week previously beaten his drunken father into the hospital. According to legend, promoted by Champion himself, he escaped in a stolen police car and landed, after a year or so, in Orange County, CA.  There he began his writing and recording career. For the next ten years he wrote for the tiny mimeographed, one-page Orange County Times. He also began his gargantuan spoken-word recording career beginning with RCA’s spoken-word branch Speakeasy Records, then the small Cucumber Label, later Pickle. His singles include, “From Dud to Stud, From Zero to Hero,” “Broke Artist at Turn of Century,” “I Walk the Streets, Richest Man Who Ever Lived,” “History is a Lie & Time is a Whore,” and he shared publishing creds with John Fante and Charles Bukowski with the Black Sparrow collections, “I’m Trying to Sleep Here,” and “Wickets.”

Hits, Rock, Spoken Word, Uncategorized

Cover for "Cheap Extensions"

Who isn’t totally fascinated by pop musicians whose personal lives catch your attention almost as much as their music?

The Fabulous Romantic Tony Zullo, also known as Mr. Magnificent, Mr. Fabulous, The Mighty Magnificent & Absolutely Unstoppable Tony Zullo, The Lovely T. Z., and in the ’80s simply as XTZ, crashed out of the Youngstown funk scene in the early ’70s with a blistering jam entitled “Open Letter to Tricky Dick.” A slew of recordings followed, as well as a wake of bad business deals, faulty contracts and failed marriages. The marriages with their subsequent (and almost immediate) divorces typically coincided with a hit single and thus provided an emerging pattern that endured for the next fifteen years.

In the mid-’80s, he faded briefly before re-appearing in 1989 with the tremendous hit “The Cadillac (That Took My Lady Away).”

Here’s the back for of the cover for “Cheap Extensions,” one of his first and funkiest singles. The bassline alone is one of the most recognized, having been used in several blacksploitation movies in the ’70s. Despite his record company putting up a fight, Zullo insisted on the leather-and-thread case for this single, which is now quite rare to find intact.

Side B

Hits, Just Weird, Pop

This 7″ sounds like it comes straight from the Woody Guthrie catalogue, but it’s actually a relatively contemporary record. Simple, earnest, thoughtful songwriting about injustice and governmental responsibility, “White House Soup Kitchen Blues” seems like it could be a Depression-era tune until you see that the B side is called “Amy Goodman” after the host of the liberal radio show Democracy Now!

SIDE A

Noppie Clarke is a fictional character created by Lydia DeShultz, a sociology professor living in London who was arrested in a protest against the Tony Blair administration shortly after the U.S. and U.K. led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

              From Belmarsh prison Deshultz wrote a political tract decrying the corporate agenda of her government and urging citizens to camp outside parliament gates and outside private arms companies like BAE, and other like companies in England and whom’s addresses were conveniently listed at the end of the pamphlet. The small pamphlet was printed up in the thousands and brought DeShultz a small measure of national recognition.

              Within prison she wrote two or three political songs: simple, sparse instrumentals on guitar with occasional whistling. The songs were released onto the internet freely and DeShultz enjoyed a second wave of public notoriety. Despite her cult success as a recording artist, DeSchultz regards herself primarily as a political activist, working against British companies like the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit (NETCU)  and the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), both of which “spy on, target, brutalize and imprison ‘domestic extremists’ – a clever title for protesters.”

Due to the peculiar nature of DeSchultz’s recording career, it’s unclear if we’ll be getting any more records from Noppie Clarke and the Protesters, but DeSchultz will occasionally play at protests and marches around the country.

Folk, Hits, News

How about that new Joanna Newsom record, huh? Pretty great. But enough people are writing about her. Sonny Smith recently turned me onto this really incredible singer that I can’t stop listening to. “Earth Girl Helen Brown,” is her monkier. She had an sad, strange life, which explains the weirdo, fascinating music.

Earth Girl Helen Brown "Hit After Hit" (Side A); El Rincon Record Palace 002

Helen Brown was born in Vancouver, Canada, but raised in an Athens, Georgia-based religious cult, and was blinded in one eye from a childhood baseball injury. As an adult, she dropped out of Evergreen and traveled the country for a while as a nomadic psychedelic folksinger, before forming her first band One Eyed Tramps. For years, she lived alone in a mountaintop in southern Alaska, where she befriended a Cherokee Shaman (later revealed as a fake) who encouraged her to pursue a frustrating academic career. Rampant drug use, frequent fainting on stage, and occasional self-inflicted knife wounds on stage led to more interest in her stage antics than her music. However, a few sides did emerge in the late ’90s (recording dates unknown), which feature a unique mix of country, girl group, R&B, and ghoulishness. Crude and amateurish at best, these recordings are appreciated for their sincerity and intensity of feeling.

 The record I’ve been listening to a lot lately is a 7″ (Shown above, great cover): “Hit After Hit,” on Side A and “So Long, Jerk” on Side B. The label is “El Rincon record Palace 002″ which I can’t find anything else about–maybe it was a home recording that was released after they were found in the ’90s. The recordings are barely audible but her anger and pain come through. The song titles break my heart a little bit. There’s something ironic in the title “Hit after Hit”: It’s like she is struggling with fame or acheivement–having “Hits”– but there’s this vulgarity and hardness to them that speaks of violence as well. Obviously, “So Long, Jerk” is about ending a romantic relationship, and it’s in this ’60s psych-folk style, but there’s something almost punk about it. It’s hard to think of this woman ever sitting behind a desk as an academic. There’s something truly wild in her voice.  

Albums, Folk, Hits, Just Weird

Here’s a beauty of a record.

Dreama Newborn

Dreama Newborn (1930-1991) was born in Delaney, AR. Her 1962 recording of “Brilliance Blues” is often considered the first recording to bridge the gap between the popular bubblegum girl-group sound and the village folk revival. Devastated by the suicide of her first husband, a promising young writer, “Brilliance Blues” was a tribute to her dead lover. The song had at once the rustic guitar strum and autoharp accompaniment of the folk movement layered with lively doo-wop vocal stylings from her band ‘The Dreamies’. It was a hit and created an outraged stir amongst folk fanatics. When the British invasion hit a few years later, she mysteriously retired from the music business. She spent the rest of her life in Amarillo, TX with her husband, a saffron farmer and local ferrier. She died of pleurisy in 1991.

Like Bobbie Hawkins, Dreama Newborn cut her career off short, although not quite as short as he. Her sound was so unique and frankly, it’s strange that it didn’t catch on more than it did. Newport Festival met Motown in this record, so few copies exist that it’s practically impossible to hear “Brilliance Blues,” but its influence musically can be heard everywhere. Carole King’s “Tapestry” is a good example (although very watered down) of Dreama Newborn’s influence. The song reminds me of Richard Farina…he was also a young writer and musician who died young (although his was not a suicide) a fan of using the autoharp.

As often happens, Dreama Newborn was barely out of her teens when this record came out. Her band, The Dreamies, were mainly young session musicians who went on to join various 60s psychedelic rock bands.

Hits "Brilliance Blues", "The Dreamies", Dreama Newborn

Here’s a classic Hank Champion hit set to a cartoon by Teppei Ando.

Hits Hank Champion