Jimmy Campbell

This obscure folk-rock artist from the late '60s left a track record of a few albums and a handful of obscure single releases, including the languid "Lyanna" and the demanding "Don't Leave Me Now." Campbell first came to prominence as a singer/songwriter on the folk club scene. He signed a contract with the interesting Fontana label, which released much cutting edge folk-rock and psychedelic music. He recorded one album and three singles for them before switching dizzily to the Vertigo label. The resulting album took a proud place in this label's catalog, right between the largely forgotten Dr. Strangely Strange and the grandly remembered Paranoid by Black Sabbath. It was definitely Campbell's most famous album, entitled Half Baked with just a note of derision. The album's title track is in turn the most well-known cut by this artist. The label had high hopes for the song, which was also included on The Vertigo Annual compilation, one of the first wave of promotional collections featuring new artists. There must have been optimism that the song's success would carry the album as well, since the latter was pressed in enormous quantities considering the relatively unknown status of the artist. When the single never took off, the label and the world in general was left with many, many Half Baked albums, carrying the artist's commercial failure forward into the misty world of record collecting, where the album has never become particularly collectable because of the large number of copies originally pressed. His next move was to form the group Rockin' Horse, whose 1971 album for Philips is in contrast something collectors look for, but hardly ever find. The band continued without him, making another self-titled LP for RCA. Campbell did one further solo album before calling it quits.
© Eugene Chadbourne /TiVo