Ray Campi was a star attraction at the first ever rock’n’roll weekender at Caister in 1979, and a much-loved figure on the European rockabilly circuit for years after…

When punk exploded onto the scene in the mid-1970s, the key ingredient making it such appetising fare for youngsters boiled down to one thing: energy. Press hacks were up in arms about the swearing, the safety pins and the terrible hair, but for the teens of the day, this was simple music, delivered with devil-may-care impudence. Sick to the back teeth of insipid-looking musicians stringing out solos on guitars or keyboards that seemed to go nowhere, here was music that got straight down to business, with no worries about complicated lyrics or smart chord changes.

But this cut-to-the-quick approach was also what made rockabilly, less cynical than punk but just as direct and unpretentious, appealing to another group of young British music fans at the time. Given that fact, it’s unsurprising that they latched onto Ray Campi & His Rockabilly Rebels, whose live shows were the last word in energy.

The middle-aged Campi liked nothing better than to climb aboard his string bass while continuing to slap away furiously. Sometimes he’d put the bass under his arm and play it like it was a guitar. Another move was to hoist the instrument above his head and circle it around as if wielding an axe. Acrobatic guitarist “Jumpin” Jerry Sikorski traded in backflips, sometimes even into the audience. Colin Winski, who played rhythm guitar, swivelled his hips a la Elvis Presley and pulled crazy faces.

All The Young Punks

Campi was hailed as a Rockabilly Rebel by his enthusiastic European following. At a show at the Lyceum in London in March 1979, with Campi on the bill with Bo Diddley and young British rockabilly band Whirlwind, Joe Strummer of leading punk band The Clash was seen in the audience. He was obviously impressed.

When The Clash toured the States later that year, Campi & His Rockabilly Rebels supported them for dates in the western states. Having already built up a local live reputation in the southern California area, Campi seemed set to build a wider homeland fanbase. “Almost all our American following is New Wave kids,” he told the Fort Lauderdale News during the tour. “They want music that’s wild and animated and that’s exactly what rockabilly’s about.”

Yet Campi was not exactly a 50s legend. He was a classic example of the 1970s revival’s knack of making heroes out of performers who’d barely made a dent on the American music industry when they’d originally launched their careers. In fact, Campi’s career went back to the 1940s and he’d never had a national hit either in the US or Britain. He never would.

Country Rock

Born in New York in 1934, his family had moved to Austin, Texas, before he was 10. He became steeped in the county greats, including Ernest Tubb, Hank Snow, The Delmore Brothers, Bill Carlisle and the Maddox Brothers And Rose. His love of traditional country and bluegrass would be frequently referenced in his later song lyrics. Campi was singing on Austin radio as “Rambling Ray” before the 1940s was out. Although he unsuccessfully auditioned for the Louisiana Hayride and for Capitol Records, he was a bright lad and secured a BA in Drama at the University of Texas, all the while writing songs and making demo recordings for various small labels.

In 1957, with the mad scramble by record owners everywhere to uncover their own Elvis, Campi got his first record release. Two sides of elementary rockabilly, or what Campi called “country rock,” Catapillar and Play It Cool, had been recorded the previous year in San Antonio for TNT Records.

The disc didn’t sell great, but did well enough to lead to a session back in his native New York, recording It Ain’t Me for Dot Records. Campi even performed the song on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand TV show, but any further progress quickly stalled, and he returned to make a series of records for other small southern records labels. Notable sides he recorded in this period include the wild rocker My Screamin’ Screamin’ Mimi! (for Domino), which deserved to do much better than it did, and Ballad Of Donna And Peggy Sue (for D), which he later claimed was the first tribute to the recently deceased Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens.

What it certainly was, alongside Mike Berry’s later Tribute To Buddy Holly, was one of the best tribute songs to that tragic moment. On the flipside was The Man I Met, a salute to The Big Bopper, who perished alongside them in the aircrash. The Big Bopper’s band accompanied Campi on the record.

Frantic Feelings

Disillusioned with his lack of success, Campi headed west to California, dipping into teen pop fare with French Fries/Hear What I Wanna Hear for Colpix, but by the mid-1960s he was working as junior high school English teacher. Any records he cut during the decade were for fun.

Campi remained in obscurity until 1971, when he ran into Ronny Weiser, a rock’n’roll-mad émigré from Italy now living in Los Angeles. He’d set up the Rollin’ Rock company, initially as a reissue label specialising in releasing rare or previously unheard 50s rockabilly. The pair got on so well that in 1973 Weiser released the label’s first LP, Rockabilly, made up of Campi’s unissued Austin demos from 1956 to 1958. On the cover, the ever-enthusiastic Weiser described Campi’s material as having “a wild-crazy-sexy-earthy-juicy and frantic feel.”

But Weiser also got Campi to record new material in a four-track studio set up in his living room. First up was Eager Boy, on which Campi was overdubbed playing every instrument, but with the immediate feel of a live recording. While Campi’s later image would be that of the bass-playing showman, it was actually Weiser who persuaded the artist, whose first instrument was a guitar, to take up the instrument.

It’s also interesting to note that, even though Campi’s songs would come to be regarded as the epitome of rockabilly, at this point the artist considered himself as a rock’n’roller. It was the fan Weiser who told him his music was rockabilly, an example of the way music listeners like to pigeonhole music, while the artists themselves often reject categories. In fact, in the many records Campi made for Rollin’ Rock and elsewhere for the rest of his career, he dipped into rockaballads, straight country weepers, bluegrass, western, western swing, Cajun and R&B.

Rockabilly Man

Campi’s vocals lacked some of the mystique of other rediscovered 50s rockabillies like Charlie Feathers. But he was a genuine original, adept at writing varied new material carrying a classic stamp. Rockabilly Rebel namechecked numerous bright lights of country and also contained a few bars of Maybelline. Tore Up and Rockin’ At The Ritz were also notable originals. There were also choice revivals of songs by Campi favourites such as Jimmie’s Skinner’s How Low Can You Feel. Rockabilly Man was supplied by friend and fellow Rollin’ Rock artist Rip Masters. Campi liked it so much he frequently opened his show with it. Always recording on a shoestring, Campi’s productions were sparse, but he filled out the sound with pianos, steel guitars, harmonicas and sometimes a sax. Rockin’ At The Ritz featured him on a mandolin.

Yet it was as a live entertainer that he made his greatest impression, cutting a striking figure in brightly covered western costumes, topped off with a cravat and multicoloured cowboy boots. He was able to unleash his frantic sets in Britain for the first time in December 1977, as part of the Rollin’ Rock Roadshow on a joint bill with another of Weiser’s rockabilly “rediscoveries”, Mac Curtis. The shows were sufficiently successful for Campi to return in early 1979 as a headliner for what was the first of the now fabled rock’n’roll weekenders, at Caister. He would still be a starring attraction at European weekenders into the second decade of this century.

On top of this Campi was a music scholar and also had deep knowledge of old Hollywood movies, conducting interviews with singers and actors such as George Raft, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. The extent of his interest was demonstrated when he managed to get Mae West to record Caterpillar in the 1970s, the overdubbed track eventually appearing on his 1988 album Ray Campi With Friends In Texas.

Campi was regarded by all as an immense character: talkative, yet gentle and welcoming. His death in 2021, aged 86, saw the passing of one of the great standard bearers of the vintage scene.

Deke Dickerson remembers Campi here

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