Happy Pride month everybody! To celebrate I thought I would
relate the story of one of the oddest – and queerest - record companies of all
time, Camp Records. If you have read
the World's Worst Records Volume One or
David Bowie Made Me Gay then much of what follows will be old hat to you: but bear with... or simply scroll on down to the two tracks at the foot of the post!
In the dark days before the Stonewall riots and the
Wolfenden report you would never see LGBT people portrayed in a positive way in
the media. Certain gay stereotypes (especially that of the effeminate man) were
routinely exploited as source material for comedians, and camp characters often
appeared in movies and on TV. LGBT people were used to being ridiculed, but
away from prying eyes, a gay subculture sprang up: an underground social network
where men and women conducted their lives away from the public and the police. LGBT
people had their own places to go, their own language to use and their own
entertainment to enjoy – from the politically subversive to the outrageously
arch.
In 1959 the American men’s magazine Adam began a
series of stag party albums. There appear to have been about a dozen, put out
by the Fax Record Company – a company that specialised in sex in its many
forms. These discs, by mostly-anonymous performers, usually featured a mix of
ribald songs interspersed with slices of blue humour, although they also issued
a series of documentary-style albums, including Nights of Love on Lesbos, which
was subtitled a Frankly Intimate description of a Sensuous Young Girl’s
Lesbian Desires. Sold under the counter in specialist shops and through
adverts in men’s magazines, these albums spawned many imitators, including those
issued by the British company No Holds Barred, with many companies eager to
jump on the bandwagon. It’s here, in the land of slightly risqué mail order,
that the Camp label was born.
Although in the strictest sense the modern-day use of the
word camp derives from the French se camper (to pose in an exaggerated
fashion) this flighty, limp-wristed aesthetic got its name from the acronym
KAMP, an effeminate man who was Known As a Male Prostitute. The actor
and comedian Kenneth Williams wrote that ‘To some, it means that which is
fundamentally frivolous, to others the baroque as opposed to the puritanical
and to others – a load of poofs’ (The Kenneth Williams Diaries, edited by
Russell Davies, Harper Collins 1993) and he should have known: the closeted
Williams and his out companion in comedy Hugh Paddick (who spent the last 30
years of his life with his partner, Francis) made a bona little living, thank
you very much, as the über- camp Julian and Sandy, stalwarts of the hit Brit
radio show Round the Horne.
Originating from a company called Different Products
Unlimited in Hollywood, California, Camp Records (run by the elusive E.
Richman) specialised in producing gay-themed novelty records which they
advertised, under the banner ‘racy . . . ribald . . . madly
gay . . . way out!’ in the back pages of publications such as Drum: Sex
in Perspective (a revolutionary magazine from the Janus Society with a
national circulation of around 15,000), One and Vagabond, a
mid-’60s catalogue aimed exclusively at gay men. Mail-order businesses that
specialised in gay and lesbian books, such as Washington DC’s Guild Book
Service (run by gay publishing pioneer H. Lynn Womack), San Francisco’s Dorian
Book Service and Philadelphia’s Lark Publications also carried stock of the
discs. The releases were, naturally, ‘shipped postage paid, in sealed plain
package’. Described by their own press releases as ‘wilder, madder (and) gayer
than a Beatle’s hairdo,’ Camp Records issued ten 45s. None are dated, but
according to correspondence on the company’s headed notepaper, the first two
releases (the single Leather Jacket Lovers and album The Queen Is In
The Closet) were issued around July 1964. What is certain is that no new
releases appeared from the company after late 1965. The material typically
consisted of parodies of well-known songs with their lyrics rewritten to
reflect a camp sensibility – I’m So Wet (the Shower Song) is a rewrite
of the French folk song Alouette; London Derriere is a rewrite of Danny
Boy (or Londonderry Air, geddit?) – or new songs in various styles including
rock ‘n’ roll (I’d Rather Fight Than Swish and Leather Jacket Lovers),
Sinatra-style crooner-pop and Latin jazz.
Depending on how you view these things these records are
charming period pieces, badly dated Carry On-style comic cuts or complete
anachronisms of a thankfully-bygone age.
Lispy, wispy and fey, and about as sophisticated as a hammer blow to the
head the humour, such as it is, is broader than the backside of the average
McDonald’s customer. The lyrics comically portrayed homosexual subculture using
broad stereotypes, gay slang and
double entendres. Where artists are
credited their names are jokey: Byrd E. Bath & the Gay Blades, Sandy Beech,
The Gentle Men. The name Rodney Dangerfield crops up on several releases, he’s
even credited as performing the tap-dancing solo on
Homer The Happy Little
Homo (‘a daring, madcap romp right from the pansy patch,’ went the
advertising blurb for that particular oddity), but this is a pseudonym that had
been in popular use for at least three decades prior to its appearance in the
Camp catalogue, not the late Jewish comedian who found mainstream fame in frat
house flicks in the 80s. Jack Benny had used the same name for a character on
his 40s radio show.
It’s no surprise that the performers and producers of these
discs were happy to go about their work uncredited. In fact, it was important
that the entire operation was kept as anonymous as possible in order to avoid
trouble: the company was operating in a time when the production of recordings
like these could lead to arrest for possession and distribution of obscene
material. Different Products were only contactable via a PO Box number: Richman
kept an office on Hazeltine Avenue, Van Nuys, but no address or telephone
number appeared on the company’s letterhead.
Camp Records also released two full-length LPs: The Queen
Is In The Closet, which consisted of ten songs culled from the singles, and
Mad About The Boy, a collection of ten popular torch songs which would
usually be sung by a woman but recorded instead by a male vocalist without
changing the song's gender. This produced what the album’s sleeve notes called
‘a wonderful potpourri of love songs done in a most unique way’ and, unlike the
rest of the releases on the label, this album eschewed the campness for a much
more ‘straight’ approach.
‘The primary reason for doing this album,’ the anonymous
author of the sleeve notes wrote ‘was to prove that good songs could and should
be sung by everyone. Gender should not be the determining factor as to who
should sing what.’ A bold statement for the time. Two years before Mad About
The Boy was issued, a similar album, Love Is A Drag, had appeared on
the Lace Records label, featuring 12 songs including The Boy Next Door, Can’t
Help Lovin’ That Man and, of course, Mad About The Boy. The cool,
sophisticated torch song singer on Love Is A Drag (subtitled For
Adult Listeners Only: Sultry Stylings By A Most Unusual Vocalist) was
finally revealed (by LGBT archivist JD Doyle) as Gene Howard (born Howard
Eugene Johnson in Nashville, Tennessee), a straight, married professional
singer who had worked with a number of big jazz names including Gene Krupa and
Stan Kenton.
No performers are credited on the two Camp albums, although
the sleeve notes to Mad About The Boy – and flyers issued by the company
- allude to some pretty big names being involved in what, for them, would have
had to have been a covert project: ‘Unfortunately, we are not at liberty to
give credit to the arranger and the many gifted artists involved in this
production. However, to those with a discerning ear, you will recognise the
stylings of some very fine and well-known personalities. Our male soloist is a
delightfully gifted young man, whose name unfortunately must be withheld at
this time. The vocal group used in this production is make up (sic) of four of
the better known Hollywood T.V. and screen personalities. Here again, we are
not at liberty to reveal true names.’ The front cover of Mad About The Boy
features illustrations from another Different Products item, a desk calendar
called Roy’s Boys: E. Richman and his co-conspirators seem to have felt
that using these images would made the album appeal to an audience already
familiar with Julie London’s 1956 album Calendar Girl.
Very few copies of these records were pressed: even fewer
have survived the past half-century. Luckily JD Doyle,
curator of the Queer Music Heritage website
(
www.queermusicheritage.com), has collected all of these recordings together
and made them available once again.
Here are a couple of Camp classics – Stanley the Manly
Transvestite and Florence of Arabia. Enjoy!
So, who was Thomas Douglas, the man credited for recording
this, his only 45? Well, like me you will probably struggle to find much information
about Mr Douglas elsewhere, because he doesn’t exist. Thomas Douglas was in
fact two people, Tom Willett and Doug Rockwell and, although uncredited, the
added spoken word passages must have come from the febrile minds of Tom and Doug
themselves. Backed with their unique cover of the gospel standard He’s Got The Whole World
(In His Hands), unsurprisingly this too failed to chart although, as
Willett says, ‘We received a lot of airplay in Las Vegas and in some Texas
markets’.
