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| The forgotten album, perfect framing. |
Because I saw it kicking around the internet a few years back, it feels fitting to start with the video for Ram Jam’s “Black Betty.” Most of the feedback I read trafficked in the “can you believe this shit?” vein - and the “star” of the video, Bill Bartlett, would very likely nod along to the commentary. As he noted in an absolutely delightful 2021 interview over the phone with a (striving) musician/(mostly) guy from Indiana named Ted Wray on a site called Steve Hoffman Music Forums, Bartlett was in New York working on Ram Jam’s debut album when he got a call directing him to show up at the studio in the morning, from whence they’d go to Hicksville, Long Island, NY, for a video shoot for “an English client.” Bartlett never saw so much as a play-back of the video until decades later, when the hygienists at a dentist’s office in Oxford, Ohio pulled it up and played it for him.
As Bartlett noted in the same video, the “Ram Jam” in the video wasn’t even the Ram Jam that played it - and I’ll get to that. First, more about the song.
I think most people know (or, like me, think they know) that Lead Belly recorded “Black Betty” back in 1939. According to research done by the interviewer for a 2017 audio interview on a site called RockTalkUSA with another Ram Jam member, Rick Santoro, the roots of the song dip back into the 18th century; it was a marching cadence back then and, fun twist, possibly about a flintlock rifle. Wikipedia’s entry on the song notes (the fairly obvious) that Lead Belly’s wasn’t even the first recorded blues version; musicologist/folklorist, Alan Lomax, first recorded a version by James “Iron Head” Baker at a Texas penitentiary in 1933: more to the point, both of those guys (think of the act they could have formed, but for prison) played a blues songs that knocked around for decades before the 1930s, with one player passing it on to another over all those years. Lead Belly (covered in a separate post/project) was just the first guy to copyright it. Back to the late 1970s…
Bartlett, who has a busy backstory all on his own, got hooked into a version of “Black Betty” played by the folk trio, Kerner, Ray and Glover (who covered Lead Belly's original 1:00 cut). Per a little history site hosted by Miami University called (per the url?) Project Oxford, he liked the song, but “thought there wasn’t enough to it.” So, he added some hand-claps larded it with guitar riffs, and, and generally worked it up with the members of his college-bar-band at the time, Starstruck (or Star Struck). The band released the song on their own label (TruckStar; clever) and started playing it at their shows. The reception reached a point where the crowd would call for “Black Betty” every time they played. Before long, it became a regional hit. Shortly thereafter, calls came in from industry people in New York…
The Rest of the Story
To carry a note from above forward, Ram Jam wasn’t some band the label found and signed; to borrow some useful phrasing from Wikipedia’s entry on Ram Jam, the label “formed a group around Bartlett called Ram Jam.” Based on what I’ve read, the construction of Ram Jam came in two stages. The first line-up - the one that recorded “Black Betty” - included Bartlett (guitar/lead vocals), Tom Kurtz (rhythm guitar/backing vocals, David Goldflies (bass) and David Fleeman (drums); reading between the lines, everyone apart from Bartlett was a session player. The second line-up, i.e., the line-up that actually toured, featured Bartlett, Howie Arthur Blauvelt (bass), Pete Charles (drums), and Myke Scavone on lead vocals - who was later replaced by Santoro. To peel back another layer…
Bartlett was no stranger to either the music business or high-profile fame. He started with another Oxford, OH band, The Lemon Pipers - the band…sort of behind “Green Tambourine” (the ellipses are explained in an early chapter in this series) - which introduced him to manipulation (or outright control) by a label. After two albums and some (embittered) success, the Lemon Pipers folded and Bartlett returned to Oxford’s bar-band scene, where he started a new band, Starstruck. Keyboardist Bob Nave and bassist Steve Walmsley came over from the Lemon Pipers, though the latter was replaced by Goldflies (how he comes in), but the relevant part of Starstruck’s role in this was covered above - i.e., the kids loved “Black Betty.” The part I left out: when the labels came calling, they only came for Bartlett. Put a pin in that detail…
After the label (not trying to be squirrelly, it's not clear, but think it was Atlantic) got the studio group together, they re-arranged the Starstruck version, recorded it and put it out into the world. And they bet right: the regional hit turned out to have national-audience legs. The single peaked at No. 18 in the U.S. market (the album broke into the Top 40), but audiences in the UK and Australia pushed it higher up their charts and it went as high as No. 4 in The Netherlands (Canada stranded it at No. 46, but it is pretty aggressive). Ram Jam had arrived…the question is, how long they stayed.
Everything I read makes clear that they toured, played some big shows, destroyed Holiday Inns like rockstars - the interview with Santoro linked to above has some good stories getting cramps in his knees when he played his first major show in a Midwest hockey arena - and, despite some things he’d rather not go into, Scavone also has good memories from that time; in a 2017 interview with Blues GR, he recalled he, Blauvelt and Charles as “3 peas in a pod.” Ram Jam even recorded a second album, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Ram Jam, only the follow-up laid an egg. And, after a total of two years, the band folded. And, according to Scavone, not gently:
“The worst was when I realized that after all the work and effort that went into Ram Jam and all the records we sold I was still not going to see one thin dime in royalties because we had been screwed by multiple people affiliated with the band, including one of the band members. That’s all I will say about that.”
Based on one sentence in that (frankly charming) Project Oxford article on Bartlett, it’s pretty clear Scavone sees Bartlett as the band member doing the screwing:
“Bartlett receives royalties from the song 'Black Betty,' including those from a version of the song in the movie Blow starring Johnny Depp and Penelope Cruz.”
To litigate that a bit, if anyone should feel aggrieved about what Bartlett earns off “Black Betty” it should be the members of Starstruck, who worked up the version that sold the label on the song. One can see Scavone’s point as a member of the touring band and, were I in Bartlett’s position, I’d like to think I’d share the royalties, but I’m not, I don’t live his life, and I’ll leave it there.
In the interest of holding together a snappy narrative, I’ve left out a lot of details - e.g., Blauvelt played with Billy Joel in several acts (e.g., the Lost Souls (later the Commandos), The Hassles and El Primo (original, awesome name: “Creekside Killshack”); Goldflies went on to play with Dicky Betts and Great Southern, then The Allman Brothers; the NAACP and the Congress for Racial Equality tried to boycott Ram Jam’s “Black Betty,” allegedly for the lyrics (I'm going with appropriation, fwiw), but Bartlett insists the famous pin-up Bettie Page inspired his version, Tom Jones recorded a(n unfortunate) cover of “Black Betty” for 2002’s Mr. Jones (as did more than a few others), etc. - but suffice to say, Ram Jam had more comings and goings than your average one-hit wonder. And gods know I’ve learned about a few…
The tragic, too early deaths of Blauvelt and Charles acknowledged (both in their 40s; heart attack and “unknown causes,” respectively), a couple members of Ram Jam continued to make music. Bartlett returned to Oxford, where he retired to “a country home” and returned to an early favorite genre by becoming a boogie-woogie pianist (what the hell? Here’s an early history of the genre from the other project). He was still bringing the boogie-woogie gospel to Oxford venues until very recently, in part to distract him from memories of his wife, Dedee, who passed from cancer in 1999. Scavone has probably had the biggest, if late go of the bunch: after checking out of the music business for a while, he reformed his original band from his teenage years, The Doughboys, in 2007 and they started putting out material (old stuff, from the looks of it); that opened doors for him to tour with his “heroes” The Yardbirds, playing harp, percussion and kicking in backing vocals. Not to give Santoro short shrift, because he’s still playing in New York (“with various bands”), but it’s hard to do much with that absent names for reference…
…my last note on all the above, music and money have always made for complicated bed-mates.
About the Sampler
The thing that will go up with this post is The Very Best of Ram Jam, a 1990s German import that included both of Ram Jam’s albums, with the order slightly scrambled. I’m mostly thankful Spotify gave me access to the band’s entire oeuvre.
In a departure from past tradition, I didn’t take the usual stab at describing the hit single in the opening “The Hit” segment, but it really is a hell of a thing. The kick-drum pulse that opens it clearly borrows from heavy metal, as do the dueling guitar riffs that follow seconds later, even if the sound comes closer to hard/70s rock, but the fact it has a couple different passages on the back-end that, 1) sound like the kind of throws one sees in jazz, and 2) I’m pretty confident, live in the active memories of very few, strikes me as the song’s singular point of interest.
On a broader level, you mostly get the 70s hard rock sound/vibe from the (literal) rest of Ram Jam’s material. I’m only going to flag a few for this post - the Spotify thing I post to twitter will have the wider selection for once - and I hope they fill in the picture. To give their second album it’s due, I believe “Gone Wild” and “Pretty Poison” were Ram Jam’s attempted singles for that one - and, a hyper-aggressive bridge aside, “Pretty Poison” shares the 70s/cringey/rapey tone of “Wanna Find Love” (which literally includes the line, “force myself upon you”). What I’d call Ram Jam’s “bad side” (aka, corny rockstar) material mines the same vein - e.g., “All for the Love of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” “Too Bad on Your Birthday” (a whiff of the Rolling Stones on this one), and “404.”
On the positive side of the ledger, Ram Jam strutted its musical chops on “High Steppin’,” a pure instrumental, and a couple other songs landed in my personal sweet-spot - e.g., and the narrative-driven “Turnpike,” and the guitar-driven, “Hurricane Ride.” Fans of old-school/hard rock have a fair shot at finding something they like in Ram Jam. And I’ve definitely done worse in this series.
Till the next one…which will be, hold on…a return to what’s come before this (e.g., the hit sounds singer/songwriter… a bit like Billy Joel, honestly).
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