Four More Columbine 'Hits'

Another bunch of cuts from Columbine for you today, another four song-poems for you to ‘enjoy’… if that’s possible.

 

I had intended to give you all four tracks from one EP, but on playback I realised that two of the cuts had flaws, so instead here are four tracks from two different EPs, ripped from my own collection.

 

First up is a brace of cuts from EP-176. This particular EP is undated, but the subject matter of at least one of the tracks makes it clear that it cannot have been released before 1981. It also features one of the later Columbine vocalists, Kate Markowitz on three tracks, with Sonny Cash – the veteran singer who also recorded as Buddy Ray and, for MSR, under the names of Dick Castle and Dick Kent, but whose real name was Elmer Plinger – on the opener.

 

And it is Sonny who kicks off side one of the disc with Why Should You Care, a question that collectors have been asking of song-poem lyricists for decades. It’s a dull little song with Sonny’s vocal accompanied by a trio featuring bass guitar, a plodding piano, and a clearly bored drummer. The lyric was written by Prince O. Williams, born in 1929 in the colourfully-sounding Prosperity, South Carolina, and who passed away in New Jersey in November 2014.

 

Peter Sirbopoulos’s tribute to the recently murdered John Lennon was penned, according to the author, shortly after the former Beatle’s death, and copyright registered in May 1981. Of Greek heredity, his great Grandfather (also called Peter, or Petros) emigrated to the United States in November 1902 but it seems as if, in later life, our Peter moved back to Athens: he was certainly living there between 2001 and 2003, but has dropped off the radar since then. Performed by Kate Markowitz, John Lennon could be viewed as a companion piece to Sonny’s To Yoko, which I featured on this very blog last September: https://worldsworstrecords.blogspot.com/2020/09/sonny-buddy-elmer-and-dick.html

 

Talking about Sonny brings us nicely to the next track. As well as working under the names mentioned above, Sonny Cash has also been credited, erroneously, as Ralph Lowe, leading several writers – including me – to assume Sonny/Elmer and Ralph were one and the same, but the ‘real’ Ralph Lowe (if indeed there was a ‘real’ Ralph) has a deeper, more stentorian voice. And, as if to prove my point, next up is the ‘real’ Ralph Lowe with Kenneth Skasick’s C.B. Heartbreak

 

Issued in 1977 on Columbine EP-39, on C.B. Heartbreak Ralph is accompanied by the same piano/bass/drums trio that act as sidemen to Sonny Cash on Why Should You Care. Authorship of the lyric is credited to one Kenneth Skasick, and I’ve only ben able to find two men with that name: one was born in Missouri in 1930 and seems to have spent much of his working life in the employ of the US Air Force. He passed away in 2002. The other, born in 1972 (so he would only have been 25 when this disc was issued), was once arrested for stealing a cooker from an abandoned house and several years later needed hospital treatment after being attacked by a pair of pit bulls while trespassing, and for some reason, to my mind, this makes him a less likely candidate.

 

The final track comes from the same 1977 EP, and is once again performed by Ralph Lowe, with the ubiquitous trio now augmented with an electric guitar player. Nobody Else For You Except Me was written by James Travagline, who I believe may have come from Saskatoon and (if that is the case) passed away in 2015.