Richard, Cam & Bert

Event: RECORD STORE DAY 2024
Release Date: 4/20/2024
Format: LP
Label: Delmore Recording Society
Quantity: 1200
Release type: RSD Exclusive Transparent Cherry Colored Vinyl LP Pressing

*includes the original recording of RICHARD TUCKER'S song, Are you Leaving For The Country, which was covered by KAREN DALTON on her 1971 LP, In My Own Time
*includes the only song RICHARD TUCKER and KAREN DALTON wrote together; "Sleeping In The Garden"

"For a few years in the late sixties and early seventies Richard Cam & Bert ruled MacDougal St. walking a fine line between the increasingly commercialized demands created by groups like Crosby Stills and Nash and the fierce integrity of earlier folk performers, the generation to which Richard belonged. They managed this with great aplomb, producing original tunes of great integrity and obvious folkloric origins, as well as those which expressed the anarchic omnipresent psychedelia of the moment. They also never abandoned the idea of including some traditional material in their performances. But for the usual random application of luck they could have been very big." --Grungie O’Muck / Artist, Bluesman, Cover artist for their first album and contributor to this one.

Richard Tucker, Campbell Bruce, and Bert Lee coalesced as a trio in the spring of 1968, and by the end of that year had become regular performers at fabled Greenwich Village nightspots - The Gaslight, The Bag I’m In, Cafe Feenjon, The Underground, and The Olive Tree, among others.  But mostly they were street singers, busking regularly in Central Park. Their only LP, Limited Edition, was released in 1970, and sold only at gigs and on the street. Original copies of the album are now rare collectibles (the LP was reissued digitally in 2014).  

Somewhere in The Stars compiles some of the band’s earlier, previously unreleased recordings, when all three members were signed with Peer-Southern Music Publishers as writers and began using their recording studio to make demos and experiment musically.  Beautifully recorded by house engineer Charlie Mack, and supervised by Jimmy Ienner, who’d signed them to Peer-Southern, the demos capture a back-room casualness and rustic, homespun quality that is as welcoming as it is timeless.  Some of the songs were re-recorded the following year for Limited Edition, but many are heard here for the first time.  Among them is the original demo for Richard Tucker's song, “Are You Leaving For The Country,” which Karen Dalton covered on her seminal 1971 release, In My Own Time.  Richard and Karen were husband and wife for much of the 1960s, performing as a duo (initially as a trio with Tim Hardin), and navigating their time on the Village scene while alternating living in a small gold mining town outside Boulder, Co. before splitting up in 1967. 

Also making its debut is the only song Richard and Karen ever wrote together, the haunting “Sleeping In The Garden.” Although Karen Dalton wrote poetry and prose, she did not consider herself a songwriter, but the lyric, “If you keep sleeping until the end, you'll have to dream it all over again" evokes pure Karen.  Somewhere In The Stars also contains two songs by Cam (“One Of These First Nights” and “Stockholm”) that weren't included on their album, but were staples of their live performances, as noted in a gig review by The New York Times, and in a column by future A&R hero Karin Berg, who was an early champion.  Another rarity on this album is the only cover of “Sweet Mama” by Fred Neil we’ve ever heard. 

Campbell Bruce came to New York in 1967 as lead singer with a band from Washington, DC, The Natty Bumpo.  They’d recently signed a record deal with Phillips, but were falling apart.  Cam landed in the Village with an acoustic guitar and first started playing and singing in the basket houses, and shortly thereafter at The Gaslight, as the "Cam Bruce Trio” (which included Collin Walcott).  After opening for Mose Allison, Cam's hero, the trio went their separate ways, and Cam returned to regular solo gigs at The Flamenco, and the basket houses on Bleecker.  Richard and Cam met up on that scene and quickly found a musical kinship as well as becoming best pals.  

Bert Lee arrived in New York as a runaway the following winter, and began playing and sleeping wherever he could.  His sometime accompanist, Ron Price, introduced Bert to Richard and Cam just as Bert’s own songs were garnering attention from publishers.  According to Bert, “I arrived on the New York scene during a time of great change, and it was the notion of change that influenced me.  All around me I saw there were two sorts of songwriters, on the one hand dedicated to the traditions that had inspired them, folk, jazz, the American songbook.  On the other hand were songwriters influenced by the wave of experimentation that The Beatles were the perfect example of.  Mixing genres, writing lyrics that weren't just about ordinary love and loss.

Richard Tucker was a country blues player, with a relaxed and melodic approach to the craft.  Cam wrote something more akin to soul songs, with a hint of jazz in the changes.  I was writing tunes that sometimes drew on classical structures with a tendency toward what I suppose would be known as prog-rock.  But I was rather adamant about not being pinned down stylistically, and so I would write, for example, a song based on some complex classical chord structure, and then go right ahead and write a simple folk song, like “Evelyn”. Our band was popular locally, and it was this variety that made it distinct.”

One of the group’s biggest fans was the late Kate McGarrigle, who in 2009 shared a hilarious story with Delmore about playing their LP incessantly in the mid / late 1970s, often until a very young Martha and Rufus pleaded with her in unison to “play anything but Richard Cam and Bert!”

1. Sitting In The Kitchen
2. Are You Leaving For The Country
3. Sweet Mama
4. Somewhere In The Stars
5. MMMZZZ
6. My Health Is Failing Me Baby
7. If You Knew
8. Sleeping In The Garden
9. One Of These First Nights
10. The Ship
11. Evelyn
12. Aint It A Shame
13. Stockholm